Paper short abstract:

Does imagining a future turn upon our relation to the dead? Through recent admission of an unmarked African American burial site to the National Registry of Historic, this paper considers erasure, invisibility, and ground, as modes of thinking the deep time of the dead against dominant histories.

Paper long abstract:

This proposal turns from the present impossibility of ‘a future,’ toward the past—or more specifically, the dead—to think how sustainable visions of the future might turn upon our relation to the dead, and the earth as ‘house’ of the dead. Housing the dead—in ‘graves, coffins, urns’—grounds the living, as Robert Pogue Harrison argues; in the ancestral depths the meaning of time is “retrieved and perpetuated,” the future opened.

Recently, an unmarked Black burial ground in Richmond, Virginia— Shokoe Hill African Burying Ground—where lie an estimated 22,000 enslaved and free African Americans, was admitted to the National Registry of Historic sites. This plot of land, the effect of purposeful destruction and neglect since the mid 19th century, is marked only by absence. Historical registry requires evidence of “integrity,” defined as the presence of historical structures. Instead of arguing for the ‘integrity’ of the site, advocates maintained “while nothing of the burial ground remains above ground, the site’s integrity is that degradation and neglect itself.” It is not the recognizability of the site, but it’s erasure— an erasure of Black life and death— that marks its significance as history in the American landscape. Using the logic of historical preservation against itself, in refusing to make what is ‘integral’ turn on what remains ‘visible’ to monumental history, this case seems to open up a space for futures grounded in the deep time of the (invisible) dead—the stutter in the plot—of dominant histories within a privatizing/extractive capitalism.