DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.3| WILLIAMS-FORSON: SEEKING THE ABSENT POTENTIAL_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 43 analysis, misreading the data, and simply getting things wrong.[But] it can also open up essential new terrain in the study of how racialized thinking has shaped technological innovation and influenced our engagement with its objects in the United States”. 9 It is a risk that we must take because exhibitions should engage and use a plethora of voices, including those whose lives are interlocked by gender, race, class, sexuality, and even age but are also routed in oppression and systemic degradation. Consequently, by using that one diary page, I wanted us to view the historical record through the lens of Black people, not to fill in what is missing but to push the evidence to move beyond the absences that were created to hear what is being said when we read the sources for Black lives, cultures, and histories. Only then, I knew, would we be engaging the absent potential. ted the historic Mount Vernon. As we waited to go to the storage facility, I walked around the home that sat overlooking Virginia’s Potomac River. Though I had been to the site many times before, this time, I was struck by an overwhelming sadness because as I looked at the river, I realised that my early ancestors were surrounded by bodies of water that ushered in both the horrors of bondage and the possibilities of freedom. The water made it possible for early Africans to be driven into the brutal mouth of enslavement, and for some, it was a way of escaping those same atrocities either because they jumped overboard during the Middle Passage, died during the journey, or escaped once they reached new shores and realised their fate. It was also a barrier to those who wanted to escape Mount Vernon but could not because they were surrounded by water and had no means of leaving. Still, for others, it was a means of escape. At that moment, I knew that I had to talk about freedom as central to this narrative because of the multiple meanings that the water represented. Creating the Exhibition Script and Choosing the Objects: The Water Over the next several weeks, the title of the project changed from Meals Tell Stories/Martha Washington + Food to Meals Tell Stories+ A Cook’s Day. Arrangements were made with Mount Vernon’s Loan Collection Program to view assets that would be available to us for use in our exhibition, and a visit to the historic site was set up to survey these objects. We were told in advance that out of concern for safety and preservation, we would be given“no more than eight Washington original objects” but that an additional fifteen or so representational objects would be available to us(email correspondence 2015). On a hot, muggy day during the first week of June, the project manager, exhibition registrar, and I visiThe river was a source of food that provisioned the household—fish and other water edibles as well as coffee beans. African foods and livestock made their way to the Americas during the Middle Passage when Europeans stocked and restocked slave ships. Africans came to the Americas not only with intimate memories of traditional culinary practices and cuisines but also with particular regionally based agricultural knowledge. These, and other, skills were called upon to benefit New World markets, especially the tending of new kinds of crops. African women, in particular, prepared foods both during transport and once they arrived using their customary methods and borrowing from Native Americans and Europeans. They introduced plants and herbs such as tamarind, hibiscus flowers, and the kola nut to improve tastes and fight diseases resulting from vitamin deficiency. 9 Ibid., 926.
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Seeking the Absent Potential: When Food and Intersectionality Meetup in the Museum
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