MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In 2010, historical preservationist Joseph McGill began the Slave Dwelling Project (SDP http://slavedwellingproject.org/) to identify and preserve structures that once served as the homes of enslaved people. Using McGill’s accounts of his overnight stays in such spaces—from cabins to runaway hideouts,in the north and the south—this paper investigates the use of private space in the creation of a history that runs counter to the traditional narrative of slavery in North America.

While many plantation “big houses” have been preserved, it’s not unusual for the slave quarters, barns, or sheds to be demolished. McGill’s efforts to preserve the spaces where enslaved people lived brings the lives of slaves and runaways into the narrative of traditional historic museums and into the larger narrative of American history. The spaces of the slave dwellings McGill visits serve as a very specific type of historic house museum. While such spaces traditionally communicate domestic and private history, the slave dwellings serve as a possible site for the anti-hegemonic bricolage Michel de Certeau describes, where marginalized people use the available materials of the ruling class for their own purposes. In a sense, the SDP makes a similar move, positing the slave spaces as sites from which new understandings of American history emerge, and which enable more people to see themselves and their ancestors reflected in that history. Using the traditions of the historic house, SDP uses these spaces to produce oppositional history. This paper examines the Slave Dwelling Project as a new narrative of history in which slaves and runaways used the domestic materials of their owners to find a way to thrive within the system they found themselves.