Abstract
The article examines walls of names commemorating the victims of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade in US heritage sites and museums. By exploring how, during the twentieth century, memorials of wars and genocides in Europe, Africa, and the Americas have featured walls of names to honor the dead, this article proposes a genealogy of the walls of names, by emphasizing the various contexts in which this device has been employed. Whereas naming has been a long-standing practice to honor the dead since antiquity, naming enslaved individuals in ship manifests or farm books was part of a process of dehumanization. Yet, during the last 30 years, emerging initiatives commemorating slavery incorporated walls of names to recognize the humanity of enslaved men, women, and children. By looking at a few case studies in the United States, the article seeks to understand how effectively this specific kind of memorial has been employed to recognize and pay homage to the victims of slavery.
Highlights
The article examines walls of names commemorating the victims of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade in US heritage sites and museums
This article examines how walls of names have been employed as mnemonic devices in memorials and museums commemorating the victims of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade
I underscore how these initiatives establish intentional and unintentional connections between the commemoration of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and the memorialization of the Holocaust and other genocides, reinforcing dialogues embodying the idea of multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009)
Summary
The article examines walls of names commemorating the victims of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade in US heritage sites and museums. During the last 30 years, emerging initiatives commemorating slavery incorporated walls of names to recognize the humanity of enslaved men, women, and children. This article examines how walls of names have been employed as mnemonic devices in memorials and museums commemorating the victims of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. Relying on the study of various initiatives and the public views of activists, curators, government officials, and other organizations, I examine examples of museums, memorials, and heritage sites that use walls of names as mnemonic devices. Not always successfully, by individualizing the victims of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, the creation of walls of names attempts to humanize enslaved men, women, and children. By naming the victims of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, the creation of “walls of names” can be conceived as a form of symbolic reparations, here understood as “redress of physical, material, or moral damage inflicted on an individual [or] a group of individuals” (Araujo 2017:2)
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