Examines how African American artists and intellectuals turn to the subject of slavery to understand and challenge the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from the founding narratives of the United States

More than forty years after the major victories of the civil rights movement, African Americans have a vexed relation to the civic myth of the United States as the land of equal opportunity and justice for all. In Sites of Slavery Salamishah Tillet examines how contemporary African American artists and intellectuals—including Annette Gordon-Reed, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Bill T. Jones, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kara Walker—turn to the subject of slavery in order to understand and challenge the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from the founding narratives of the United States. She explains how they reconstruct "sites of slavery"—contested figures, events, memories, locations, and experiences related to chattel slavery—such as the allegations of a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the characters Uncle Tom and Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, African American tourism to slave forts in Ghana and Senegal, and the legal challenges posed by reparations movements. By claiming and recasting these sites of slavery, contemporary artists and intellectuals provide slaves with an interiority and subjectivity denied them in American history, register the civic estrangement experienced by African Americans in the post–civil rights era, and envision a more fully realized American democracy.

"“. . . . 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).”" - 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.”" - Spectrum

"“Tillet’s work is valuable to scholars because of its careful illumination of diverse conceptions of slavery, freedom, and citizenship.  Sites of Slavery is a useful book that contributes to our understanding of the challenges of contemporary neo-slave 'narratives' across several genres.”" - Black Scholar

"“Ultimately, Tillet’s book has broad relevance to Americanists in historical periods stretching from the nineteenth century to the present, with archives crossing boundaries from the photographic to the juridical and methodological approaches from spatial theory to psychoanalysis. It is an impressive accomplishment.” " - Journal of American Culture

"“The greatest attribute of Sites of Slavery is its analytical framework in which the author employs a wide range of sources, including novels, photographs, installations, plays, films, pictures, official discourses, lawsuits, and scholarly monographs. The book offers a provocative snapshot to examine the problem of representations of slavery and the relations between history and fiction. . . . [T]he book is highly readable and a prospective addition to syllabi of graduate and undergraduate courses on African American and African diaspora studies.”" - Journal of American Ethnic History

"“Sites of Slavery is a meticulously researched, compelling addition to a growing body of literature concerning race and the post-Civil Rights moment. Salamishah Tillet effortlessly analyzes a range of interdisciplinary materials, positing riveting examinations of how writers, artists, and intellectuals critique America’s hypocrisies and impact conversations about the possibilities for Black social life and a true racial democracy in the United States.”" - Callaloo

"Salamishah Tillet’s Sites of Slavery brilliantly explores aesthetic and political appropriations of chattel slavery by 'African American writers, artists, and intellectuals' in 'the post–civil rights' era." - Novel