Deconstruction

Everybody’s Slavin’ & Prayin’

In this selection from the American Memory Collection, Passuh Dany examines what gets lost when the racialized hereditary chattel slavery of the Atlantic world is flattened into a generic human history of captivity. Moving through plantation nostalgia, labor and capital, the pseudoscience of Drapetomania, racial memory, Christian formation, and the ongoing struggle over how America remembers itself, she asks what happens when the descendants of the enslaved are expected to “get over” a history the nation has never fully told the truth about.