Slave Sites on Display: Reflecting Slavery's Legacy through Contemporary "Flash" Moments by Helena Woodard (review)

In the mid-1990s, as a freshly minted PhD with a specialization in Black literature, I visited Monticello with my partner, a specialist in nineteenth-century American literature, as part of a literary tour of Virginia. Having heard a "shiny" version of Poe's history in Richmond the day before, where a docent insisted to us that the author did not have a substance problem, I was more than a little curious about what we would hear on Jefferson's mountaintop about enslavement. Standing near the spot where preservationists were excavating a slave dwelling, our tour guide spoke at length about how the "servants" at Monticello ate the same food and got the same medical care as "Mr. Jefferson himself." To be fair, Monticello cannot stand for all historical sites treating the history of enslavement; furthermore, much has changed there since the 1990s. Still, in the course of my career teaching about enslavement, I have told that story many times, trying to help students grasp how history is perpetually made and remade. With Helena Woodard's excellent new book in hand, I now can bring that experience into the classroom with more nuance, depth, and clarity than I have heretofore been able to achieve.

In Slave Sites on Display, Woodard taps into the contemporary racial zeitgeist and provides scholars and teachers with the necessary tools for navigating some of the most pressing issues we and our students must currently face. Living as we do in a moment when attention to sites associated with enslavement is on the rise, as more and more Americans wake up to the absolute necessity of engaging with our national past, as the ripple effects from the influential 1619 Project continue to spread, we need not only to acknowledge the past but also connect it to events unfolding in our increasingly fraught society. Woodard is spot-on in this regard, as she notes in her Introduction: "in this study I ponder how a slave site that symbolizes the past can also express itself opportunistically as [an] unforgiving mirror … of ongoing, present-day racial dilemmas" (6).

Simultaneously theoretically sophisticated and accessible in her prose, Woodard joins scholars like Steven Katz by grounding her assessment of modern slave sites in concepts from Holocaust studies. While this comparison is not uncontroversial, it works well for Woodard. Referring to Walter Benjamin's "recalibrations of a past/present dialectical constellation through 'flash' moments," Woodard argues that these tensions, when mapped onto the experience of visiting sites memorializing enslavement in the context of "seminal events or specific circumstances … have the potential to redefine the slave past, which still infringes upon the lives of diaspora slave descendants" (7). Put another way, Woodard enables readers to think about how their ways of seeing enslavement memorials are shaped by the moments in which people visit them. This functions both on the level of an individual's experience and as a shaper of broader cultural understandings of enslavement. By way of illustration, she contrasts President Obama's visits to slave forts in Senegal and Ghana with visits to Gorée Island's House of Slaves by former presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, arguing that for some the picture of a Black American leader standing at a site where the middle passage originated suggests a different view of how enslavement has circumscribed the possibilities of Black lives.

In addition to treating slave fort sites on the African continent, Woodard also explores a range of sites in the United States, which gives her argument both transnational breadth and an American depth that heightens its effectiveness. The book contains chapters on the African Burial Ground in New York City; the treatment of enslavement at presidential estates like Monticello, Washington's Mount Vernon, and Jackson's Hermitage; traveling slave ship exhibitions at anchor in London, Charleston, South Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida; and the first Bench by the Road memorial in Sullivan's Island...