Papers by Erich Kessel Jr
Theatre Journal, 2022
What does a national monument to a forgotten slave cemetery confer upon the history to which it r... more What does a national monument to a forgotten slave cemetery confer upon the history to which it refers? And what does the form of the monument itself do to how we are meant to grasp this history? In a germinal form, these questions occupied me as I approached the African Burial Ground National Monument, a structure that takes up about a quarter of a small block enclosed by Duane and Reade Streets in New York City amid a towering complex of federal administrative buildings. The monument sits atop a larger span of land that, following a 1697 law in the recently established Province of New York, became a burial plot for slaves and free blacks who had been banned from being interred alongside white parishioners. 1 Andrea Frohne's history of the site points to a 1735 map that marked the plot as the "Negro Burying Place," reflecting its situation within the racial geography of Manhattan's sprawling slave estate. 2 After 1794, the burial ground was closed and within a century became a plot that would be occupied successively by a department store, a credit reporting agency, and finally a federal building-each erecting an architectural stage in a process of forgetting that transmuted slave society into a multicultural democratic space. Preparatory excavation for a new federal government structure in 1991 once again unearthed the racial history of the plot. The site's 300-plus year history thus is an archive of this forgetting, and this is the problem that the monument seeks to redress.
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Papers by Erich Kessel Jr