Paper short abstract:

I explore the transformative power of artistic acts of decolonization in the U.S. South. Using Million's (2009) feminist indigenous theory of felt knowledge, I highlight Black performance set in a 200 year-old mansion that recalls the experience and agency of the black diaspora.

Paper long abstract:

I explore the transformative power of artistic acts of decolonization in the U.S. South. Using Million's (2009) feminist indigenous theory of felt knowledge, I highlight Black performance set in a 200 year-old mansion that recalls the experience and agency of the black diaspora.

The study is part of a larger ethnographic project that analyzes the process of decolonizing public history, in the U.S. South and beyond, through an interactional and linguistic anthropological lens. Participant observation, informal interviews, and other data collection at historic preservation organizations and historic sites in two South Carolina cities, as well as a review of popular media at the national and global level documents the quickening pace of this shift over the past three years. Within and beyond historical houses, increasingly multi-vocalic narratives surround, and, sometimes, fill up houses and other spaces that have traditionally been defined by a single, dominant discourse.

While discourses outside of museums have increasingly contested a supposed "post-racial" normalization of white supremacy, so, too, have historic house museums been questioning an unproblematic, whitewashed portrayal of antebellum (and colonial) opulence. As Black voices and Black bodies have been increasingly claiming space—in the streets, on the airwaves, in social media—Black subjectivities occupied public and private historic spaces in ways they had not previously.