Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery

Sites of Slavery has a fascinating chapter on how West Africa's "slave castles" have been depicted by African American visual artists.  There is in fact a growing and rich scholarship on how places like Cape Coast Castle in Ghana or Goree Island in Senegal have assumed a large role in diaspora tourism.




I am particularly impressed by how Tillet identifies such sites as key points in how post-Civil Rights black Americans have established a sort of alternative American identity.  Tillet argues that the black experience of slavery and alienation is so threatening to white American mythology that black Americans must look outside that mythology to recapture a sense of their own history and heritage and to incorporate that history into the American experience.  Unlike black Americans such as W. E. B. and Shirley DuBois, Maya Angelou, Kwame Toure who moved to West Africa in the late 1950s and the 1960s hoping to stay, the great majority of modern arrivals are coming to capture a sense of their heritage and then return home, to the U.S.




The risk in using places like Cape Coast for this purpose, though, is that it can erase other, especially West African, histories.  Photographs such as Chester Higgins's stark, iconic image of a young black woman silhouetted against the "Door of No Return," with the Atlantic Ocean on the horizon, seeks to "recover the traumatic experiences of enslaved Africans . . . by removing any signs of life or contemporaneity," as Tillet puts it.  West Africa is commonly reduced to its role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. 




But this desire to claim slavery as at the heart of the American and African-American experience must occur overseas in part because American historical sites and mythology exclude it.