Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

Susan Burns Garza, Visual Materiality and Silent Memories: Searching for the Enslaved Victims in Plantation Spaces (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2027), 158 pages, ISBN: 979-8216480341, $100. Also available as an ebook.

Visual representations can memorialize, marginalize, or ignore victims of cultural oppression. By refocusing the history of plantations on the enslaved, with the visual disjoint between the resurrected plantation glory and the downplaying of the enslaved experience in plantation spaces, Susan Burns Garza uncovers how the victimization of the enslaved has previously been absent from the conversation. The visual research in this text aims to look differently at spaces we may encounter every day and seek out what we are unaware is happening as a result of the design of visual spaces. Garza explores how visual rhetoric in Southern US plantation spaces often obscures the violence and victimization of the enslaved, thereby shaping a public memory that reinforces the racialized gaze rather than fostering social justice. As victimization has been basically written out of history through the visual focus in these spaces, the author argues awareness of the silence of the victimization and how it can affect visitors is one way to build racial awareness and counter the deception through manipulation of events that occurs in memorial plantations.

Susan Burns Garza is a visual rhetorician and retired professor of writing, based in the USA. Her current research focuses on visualization of victimization in memorial spaces.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgements

Introduction
1  Come With Me and See What We May Find at a Plantation
2  Look, the Slave Cabins Were Right Behind You the Whole Time: Sequence
3  The New ‘Whitewashed’ Cabins: A Safe Story? Depth
4  You’ll Have to Go to the Swamp to Find the Victims: Distance
5  Rice in a Baby Food Jar? Perception
6  Counter Narratives/Counter Memories

Appendix A: Memorial Plantation Sites Visited and Research Conducted
Appendix B: Holocaust Concentration and Extermination Camps, and Memorials Visited

Bibliography
Index