Unsilencing Slavery
Telling Truths About Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica
Title Details
Pages: 274
Illustrations: 21 b&w images
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Formats
Hardcover
Pub Date: 07/01/2022
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6214-4
List Price: $120.95
Web PDF
Pub Date: 07/01/2022
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6213-7
List Price: $30.95
Paperback
Pub Date: 07/01/2022
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6215-1
List Price: $30.95
Web PDF
Pub Date: 07/01/2022
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6845-0
List Price: $30.95
Series
Subsidies and Partnerships
A copublication of Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the University of Georgia Press
Related Subjects
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies
LITERARY CRITICISM / Caribbean & Latin American
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Caribbean & Latin American Studies
Other Links of Interest
Unsilencing Slavery
Telling Truths About Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica
A microhistory of enslaved people’s experiences at Rose Hall and an exploration of the complexities of its past in the present
Skip to
- Description
- Reviews
Popular references to the Rose Hall Great House in Jamaica often focus on the legend of the “White Witch of Rose Hall.” Over one hundred thousand people visit this plantation every year, many hoping to catch a glimpse of Annie Palmer’s ghost. After experiencing this tour with her daughter in 2013 and leaving Jamaica haunted by the silences of the tour, Celia E. Naylor resolved to write a history of Rose Hall about those people who actually had a right to haunt this place of terror and trauma—the enslaved. Naylor deftly guides us through a strikingly different Rose Hall. She introduces readers to the silences of the archives and unearths the names and experiences of the enslaved at Rose Hall in the decades immediately before the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. She then offers a careful reading of Herbert G. de Lisser’s 1929 novel, The White Witch of Rosehall—which gave rise to the myth of the “White Witch”—and a critical analysis of the current tours at Rose Hall Great House.
Naylor’s interdisciplinary examination engages different modes of history making, history telling, and truth telling to excavate the lives of enslaved people, highlighting enslaved women as they navigated the violences of the Jamaican slavocracy and plantationscape. Moving beyond the legend, she examines iterations of the afterlives of slavery in the ongoing construction of slavery museums, memorializations, and movements for Black lives and the enduring case for Black humanity. Alongside her book, she has created a website as another way for readers to explore the truths of Rose Hall: rosehallproject.columbia.edu.
—Tiya Miles, author of the National Book Award winner All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
—Brooke N. Newman, author of A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race and Sex in Colonial Jamaica
—Sasha Turner, author of Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica
—Simon Newman, author of A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic