Memorializing the manumission of an enslaved African: tracing the contours of violence and the unknowable in a fragmented colonial archive
Topics: Black Geographies
, Medical and Health Geography
, Indigenous Peoples
Keywords: slavery, indigenous knowledge, memorialization, plantation, epistemic violence, anti-Blackness, Virginia
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 1
Authors:
Kevin Andrew Gould, Dept of Geography, Planning and Environment, Concordia University, Montreal QC, Canada
Edwin Gould, The Community Ecology Institute
LaVonne Allan, The African American Heritage Society of New Kent County, Virginia
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Abstract
After so many years and generations of degradation, white society continues to make remembering and memorializing great accomplishments of enslaved Africans very challenging. Even when it is possible to collect scant archival materials, Saidiya Hartman warns that the very structure of archival knowledge threatens to frame the histories we write, “replicating the grammar of violence” which we aim to unsettle. We draw on Hartman’s insights to consider the im/possibilities of memorializing an enslaved African—Doc James Papan—who won manumission in 1729 when he presented his remedy for syphilis and yaws to colonial authorities. Drawing on records of manumission, plant biogeography, and published accounts of indigenous medical knowledge, as well as visits to Cumberland Estate (New Kent County, Virginia) where Papan was enslaved, we speculate that Papan developed his remedy with indigenous interlocutors. Following Hartman, we also speculate on the unknowable—the nature of the more than human networks that infused Papan’s medical practice but left no mark in the archive; the structure and origins of Papan’s knowledge of plant worlds at once revealed and concealed by the epistemologies of Linnaean botany and salvage anthropology; and Papan’s affective encounters with the wounds and bodies of the afflicted. We conclude by describing plans to memorialize Papan’s un/knowable history.
Memorializing the manumission of an enslaved African: tracing the contours of violence and the unknowable in a fragmented colonial archive
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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