The 2021 Stephanie M.H. Camp Endowed Lecture

“A Tattered Dress”: Materiality and Memory in the Lives of Enslaved Women

This talk will highlight artifacts of Black women’s material culture to consider ways that objects can help us recover experiential aspects of the gendered Black past. Together, we will unpack Ashley’s Sack, the gift of an enslaved mother to her daughter in antebellum Charleston, in an effort to gain special access to Black women’s cultures of care and strategies of memory keeping. The sack contained several objects, including a hand-me-down dress. By applying the trailblazing findings of the historian Stephanie M. H. Camp, we will explore the meanings of adornment, dignity, and survival.

Sponsored by the UW Department of History and the UW Libraries