Unsilencing Slavery: A Celebration of Celia E. Naylor’s New Book
Celia E. Naylor (Professor of Africana Studies and History, Barnard College) will be joined by Natasha Lightfoot (Associate Professor of History, Columbia University) to discuss Naylor’s new book, Unsilencing Slavery: Telling Truths about Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica (University of Georgia Press, 2022, Gender and Slavery Series). The conversation will be followed by a reception.
About the Book
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 and a small group of collaborators have created a website as another way for readers to explore the truths of Rose Hall: rosehallproject.columbia.edu or https://unsilencing-slavery.org/
About the Speakers
Celia E. Naylor is a professor in the Africana Studies and History departments at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (University of North Carolina Press, 2008, John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture). A native of Kingston, Jamaica, Naylor currently lives in New York City.
Natasha Lightfoot is an associate professor of History at Columbia University. She specializes in slavery and emancipation studies, and Black identities, politics, and cultures in the fields of Caribbean, Atlantic World, and African Diaspora History. She is the author of Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2015). Her forthcoming book entitled Fugitive Cosmopolitans centers on enslaved people’s mobility, imperial subjecthood and struggles for freedom between empires in the Caribbean.
Accessibility
ASL Interpretation will be provided. For additional accessibility needs please email skreitzb@barnard.edu.
This is an in-person event, free and open to all. Please review our COVID safety guidelines. Registration is preferred.