Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction. Peculiar Citizenships  1

1. Freedom in a Bondsmaid's Arms: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and the Persistence of African American Memory  19

2. The Milder and More Amusing Phases of Slavery: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Black Satire  51

3. A Race of Angels: (Trans)Nationalism, African American Tourism, and the Slave Forts  95

4. What Have We Done to Weigh So Little on Their Scale: Mnemonic Restitution and the Aesthetics of Racial Reparations  133

Epilogue. The President's House, Freedom, and Slavery in the Age of Obama  169

Notes  179

Bibliography  195

Index  217

“Sites of Slavery is an innovative synthesis of connecting historical memory, reflected in the cultural productions of African American artists, scholars, and writers who draw on the past to understand the present.” —Robert Anthony Bennett, III, Spectrum

“Yet judged on its own philosophical and analytical terms, Sites of Slavery offers a powerful and strikingly original take on contemporary African American ‘rituals of collective recuperative forms of recognition, and revisionist forms of historiography’( p. 4).”—Scot A. French, Journal of American History

“Sites of Slavery is an innovative synthesis of connecting historical memory, reflected in the cultural productions of African American artists, scholars, and writers who draw on the past to understand the present.” —Robert Anthony Bennett, III, Spectrum

“Yet judged on its own philosophical and analytical terms, Sites of Slavery offers a powerful and strikingly original take on contemporary African American ‘rituals of collective recuperative forms of recognition, and revisionist forms of historiography’( p. 4).”—Scot A. French, Journal of American History

"Sites of Slavery is an original contribution to the scholarship on memory, representation, and New World slavery. With keen insight and dazzling analysis, Salamishah Tillet attends to the implications that contemporary representations of slavery have for our understanding of the history of slavery in the United States and of African American identity. This book crosses disciplines to offer a compelling view of the many ways that slavery lives in the contemporary imagination and colors the way we see our past, our present, and our future."—Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

"Sites of Slavery is a meticulously researched, persuasively argued, beautifully written, and intellectually daring study of contemporary narratives of slavery. Through her dazzling readings of fiction, drama, dance, cinema, visual art, heritage tourism, reparations legal cases, and critical race historiographies, Salamishah Tillet demonstrates how a range of African American artists, writers, and intellectuals respond to the contemporary 'crisis of citizenship' by foregrounding a 'democratic aesthetic' in their representations of slavery. This book will transform the way we think about the place of African American cultural production in relation to 'post–civil rights era' political discourse."—Valerie Smith, author of Toni Morrison: Writing the Moral Imagination

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