On The Institutional Memory and Memorialization of Enslavement

As an undergraduate at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, I could not escape history. There, the country’s oldest continually active academic building separates the college’s grounds from a reconstructed colonial town complete with cobblestone roads, cannons, and tri-fold hats. Elsewhere on campus, memorializations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe attest to their attendance at the college – over a half century after it was founded. Against this long history, only very recently has the college married its academic efforts to the public work of comprehensively acknowledging its past in which the curated memory of America’s founders is supported by the historical erasure of the college’s enslavement of Africans and African-Americans, as well as Indigenous displacement. One of the main initiatives through which the college pursues this goal is the Lemon Project, an archival, public-facing and academic project that has, since 2009, conducted research, facilitated symposia, and proposed institutional changes aimed toward some modicum of accountability. The Lemon Project is a rigorous, if underfunded, academic initiative that has uncovered a crucial local archive. But it is also irreducibly linked to the College’s larger goals. As many of the project’s initiatives, and especially the college’s use of these initiatives make clear, Lemon’s task of historical recuperation is also a project of liberal humanist recognition that assures the present through descriptions of the past.

This project of historical repair is indicative of larger archival trends in which the enslaved person is rewritten into the archive as a legible object of history: a slave. In “Repair, Reparations, Return: The Condition of Worldliness,” Ariella Azoulay argues that the way we use archival material frequently “proffer[s] assimilation into the colonizing nation as reparation for genocide and theft of lands and nations” (540). This requires a retrospective reading of the enslaved which verifies that condition, erasing the possibility of a life before enslavement to which they might return. Azoulay, in citing Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, elucidates: “The condition of ‘no return’ is generated by unbound archival violence, the cruel cleavage of a person passing through the door of no return, who is declared slave and whose lost world turns into a world that could not have ever existed. The archive is there to attest to its inexistence” (538). Thus, reparation must come in the form of recognition from the very system that creates a condition of worldlessness for so many globally.

The Lemon Project is named for an enslaved man owned by the college around the turn of the 19th Century. In order to maintain a narrative of progress, the college memorializes Lemon as a slave so that it can move away from a history of slavery while pursuing a contemporary agenda inherited from this very legacy. Memorializing Lemon in this manner allows Robert Gates, Deputy Director of the CIA during the Iran-Contra affair and Secretary of Defense during America’s invasion of Iraq, to continue to be chancellor. Such acts of institutional memory assimilate the past into the progressive arc of the present by separating it from contemporary violence. “The body of knowledge and know-how that lies behind the imperial enterprise of administering people,” Azoulay notes, “continues to be studied and elaborated in the best universities, in a variety of departments, by the most ‘cutting-edge’ scholars in economics and political science, in architecture and medicine, specializing in analyzing and planning ‘growth’ in different domains” (564). Colleges and universities are enmeshed in various institutions—political, scientific, and financial—which unevenly dictate life outcomes globally. They produce graduates who, at the cutting edge of politics, humanities, science, and industry, carry on a legacy of institutional mastery over people and the natural world that can be traced back directly to the very history they seek to redress through recuperative historical projects. If they stopped doing this, they would not survive as universities. 

In Unthinking Mastery, Julietta Singh connects institutional knowledge to mastery. Mastery, she claims, entails “a splitting of the object that is mastered from itself, a way of estranging the mastered object from its previous state of being” (10). How can we access these “previous states of being?” And what does it mean to try? Certainly, we can think differently to approximate an epistemology in but not of modernity, in which the dislocating logics and brutal violences enacted by the transatlantic slave trade do not create subjects/objects of history, but in which we instead grapple with the overwhelming (but not totalizing!) epistemological force imposed on enslaved Africans, Indigenous people, and other subjects brutalized by modernity’s terrors. Stephanie Smallwood points out in Saltwater Slavery that “[l]anding on American soil put Africans into a new relationship to time-space, one that was at first a temporal and spatial disconnect. Through a variety of acts and gestures, Africans in the Americas responded to the instinct to heal the disruption that they experienced in time’s circular path” (184). How can we attend to this healing outside of a logic of justice and redemption in the frame of Sylvia Wynter’s totalizing category of the human “encoded in the “descriptive statement” of the human on the model of a natural organism and its related ontology” (208)? 

Take a description of Lemon’s life from the homepage of The Lemon Project: “Even from scant evidence, we can tell that Lemon was an actor on the stage of history, using ingenuity to help mitigate the circumstances of his enslavement.” This description attests to Lemon’s humanity by rendering it in the terms of power and action made legible through the very violence wrought on Lemon. What are the consequences of this “narrative continuity between past and present – an epistemological means of connecting the dots between there and here, then and now, to craft a coherent story out of an incoherent experience[?]” (Smallwood, 191). Lemon’s experience was not a coherent one of unassailable human singularity. Making Lemon an object of history means reading with colonial forms of knowing that privilege the individual and cannot account for other networks of relationality, kin-based, ancestral, or spiritual, as a heuristic for human experience.

Katherine McKittrick discursively undoes the colonial modes of knowing that attend to subjects by mastering them, thus not attending to them at all, and thrusting them into institutional attention. There is an interesting tension between the terms attend and attention here. It might be said that attention is the form through which liberal humanism orients itself towards justice, often posed as representation which ultimately “translates the world through an economy of affirmations and forgetting within a regime of desiring freedom” (Lowe, 39). McKittrick’s discursive “storytelling” attends to the methods of knowing Black life. Indeed, for Black people, as Kevin Quashie points out in The Trouble with Publicness: Towards a Theory of Black Quiet, publicness (attending as attention) “is at least as much trouble as it is useful” (339). Quashie urges us to attend to Black quiet and withholding rather than privileging explicit assertions of resistance which thrust black life into liberal humanist attention. Liberal humanist attention aggregates Black life as biological data within the narrative of Enlightenment freedom. McKittrick proposes ways we might think against this archival violence with “diasporic literacy” through which “[t]he story opens the door to curiosity; the reams of evidence dissipate as we tell the world differently, with a creative precision” (7). Curiosity and wonder might then produce a different view of justice.

Stephanie Smallwood speaks to the ways enslaved people knew themselves neither solely nor primarily as subjects of violence and oppression. That is not to say the experience of capture, transport, and enslavement did not circumscribe their epistemological frameworks. This condition marked a departure from rather than a simple continuation or erasure of the past. This departure underscores the way collective memory informed a collective consciousness. Smallwood notes that “The cultures [enslaved Africans] produced do not reflect the simple transfer and continuation of Africa in the Americas but rather reflect the elaboration of specific cultural content and its transformation to meet the particular needs of slave life in the Atlantic system: their need to reassert some kind of healthy relationship to ancestors; to manage death; to produce social networks, communities and relations of kinship; to address the imbalance of power between black and white; to stake a claim to their bodies to counter the plantation economy’s claim to ownership” (190). Smallwood centers relationality as the frame for knowing the world which enslaved Africans in America negotiated amidst a plantocracy that stripped them of such relationality and a modern episteme which insisted on the place of the individual as that from which natural rights and reason sprung. Relationality is lost in making subjects of modernity from whom internal integrity constitutes being. The full circle of reason; the unassailable truth of identity; the paradoxical singularity of humanism which must, nevertheless, confront difference.

Together, Smallwood, McKittrick, and Wynter demonstrate how rupture, quiet, and discontinuity can frame our memory of enslaved people without suggesting representative solutions that portend to remember fully-formed liberal humanist subjects. But these techniques of re-narration cannot be inscribed in stone monuments or institutional treatises. In the context of elite universities reckoning with their past, the Lemon Project represents the ways institutions offer recognition as redress. And while memory without memorialization, engagement without arrest, and attending outside of institutional attention might not advance the economic and political goals of universities and museums, they just might present new ways of understanding a present formed by dissonance and dislocation.