02014nam a2200205Ia 4500008004100000010001500041020001800056050002300074082002100097100002300118245011700141260003900258300001900297520136300316546001201679648001701691650005201708650002801760651002001788231023s9999    xx            000 0 und d  a2011053371  a9780822352617  aE185.615.T575 2012  a326.0973--bdc23  aTillet, Salamishah 0aSites of Slaveryb: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imaginationc/ Salamishah Tillet  bDuke University Press Books;c2012  a248p;c24x16cm  aMore than forty years after the major victories of the civil rights movement, African Americans have a vexed relation to the civic myth of the United States as the land of equal opportunity and justice for all. In Sites of Slavery Salamishah Tillet examines how contemporary African American artists and intellectuals—including Annette Gordon-Reed, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Bill T. Jones, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kara Walker—turn to the subject of slavery in order to understand and challenge the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from the founding narratives of the United States. She explains how they reconstruct "sites of slavery"—contested figures, events, memories, locations, and experiences related to chattel slavery—such as the allegations of a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the characters Uncle Tom and Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, African American tourism to slave forts in Ghana and Senegal, and the legal challenges posed by reparations movements. By claiming and recasting these sites of slavery, contemporary artists and intellectuals provide slaves with an interiority and subjectivity denied them in American history, register the civic estrangement experienced by African Americans in the post–civil rights era, and envision a more fully realized American democracy.  aEnglish  a21st century  aE151-889 History of the Americas- United States  aRace Relations. Slavery  aUnited States.