Monumental Discord: Savannah's Remembering (and Forgetting) of Its Enslaved

Abstract

A primary port in the slave trade, the city of Savannah, Georgia, has but one public monument to slavery. As a text, therefore, Savannah's cityscape lacks a chapter on enslavement. The lone slavery monument's placement, content, and poetic inscription are the products of what was a bitter, decade-long fight over what to include and exclude, an editing process that activated competing interpretations about how and even whether to commemorate the city's participation in the trans-Atlantic slave economy. This article presents a case study on the ethics of remembering and how dominant authorities and marginalized groups, including Savannah's black community, negotiate even among themselves, for the social construction of local history, collective memory, and its visual representations.