The final events in the Sawyer Seminar series explore critical issues facing coastal communities in Louisiana and Nova Scotia. Featuring guest speakers of Miꞌkmaq descent and from the United Houma Nation as well as a coastal geologist and the director of the South Lafourche Levee District, this seminar (which includes a film screening, discussion, virtual panel, and all-day site visit to the disappearing coastline of Louisiana) invites guests to develop a deeper understanding of how ongoing colonial processes push economic and environmental precarity towards the periphery. It asks us to consider how we might build memories with people who come from places that are being lost to rising waters and intensified storm damage and learn how those experiencing loss of place develop practices of persistence amidst centuries of damage to cultural memory, and practices of presence amidst ongoing recovery.

The first seminar pairs New Orleans’s Congo Square with Valongo Wharf in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In New Orleans, Congo Square is remembered as a gathering place for enslaved Afro-descendent people and free people of color during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the birthplace of jazz, and also as part of Louis Armstrong Park—developed in a conciliatory gesture following urban clearance projects that razed part of the historically African American Tremé neighborhood in the 1960s. Informed by this layered history, in 2019, contemporary artist Dread Scott chose Congo Square as the site for the culmination of his participatory artwork Slave Rebellion Reenactment. This participatory artwork reimagined the 1811 German Coast Uprising of enslaved individuals as a successful revolt ending in celebration with the arrival of the now-self-liberated Black freedom fighters at Congo Square (in contrast to the historical quashing of the revolt).

Parallelled with Congo Square’s layers of historical commemoration will be those of Rio de Janeiro’s Valongo Wharf, located in the predominantly Afro-descendent Little Africa neighborhood—often cited as the birthplace of samba. Perhaps the busiest slave port in the world during the early nineteenth century, Valongo Wharf was, for many years, better remembered as the arrival point of Brazil’s empress in the 1840s, when it was paved over and renamed the Wharf of the Empress [Imperatriz]. The older wharf was partially uncovered—revealing religious objects from the Congo and elsewhere in West Africa—only in the 2010s, during a development project to remake the Little Africa neighborhood into an area of luxury condos and hotels ready for Brazil’s 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.

In both New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro, community activism called attention to disinvestment in Afro-descendent urban neighborhoods and urged remembrance of local histories, raising questions about the tendency for sites important for Afro-descendent history to be subordinated to outward-facing urban “renewal”. Invited scholars, artists, and activists will compare ways that meanings have accrued to sites significant for the histories of Afro-descendent people in New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro. Exploring how sites of public memory with layered meanings are subject to ongoing contestation aids to better understanding historical trajectories. This thick history can, in turn, inform ongoing discussions of contemporary social conflicts.

The second seminar explores innovative approaches to commemorating histories of violence at the Whitney Plantation in upstate Louisiana and the I Am Queen Mary sculpture in Copenhagen, which radically revise the traditional, hegemonic memorial forms of the plantation and the monumental statue, respectively. Focusing on new approaches to the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade in the Americas, we will examine how historian Ibrahima Seck has used artworks, guided tours, and educational memorials to ensure the Whitney Plantation is a memorial to the enslaved rather than a monument to slavery. Similarly, I Am Queen Mary monumentalizes Mary Thomas, leader of the 1878 “Fireburn” revolt by formerly enslaved indentured laborers in the Danish West Indies (today the U.S. Virgin Islands). Afro-descendent Danish artist Jeanette Ehlers and Afro-descendent U.S. Virgin Islands artist LaVaughn Belle composed the I Am Queen Mary monument based on combined 3D scans of their own bodies, since the visage of Mary Thomas is unknown. By intentionally placing I Am Queen Mary before the elegant brick building that formerly housed the Danish West India Company on Copenhagen’s waterfront –and which today houses the plaster casts of canonical Western European sculpture– the artists made the violent history of Danish colonialism in the Caribbean present in the heart of the metropolis.

This seminar considers grassroots activism for –and reactions against– the City of New Orleans’s decision to remove landmark Confederate monuments, and explores continued debates about what to do with the removed statues and the sites where they were once installed. In this session we explore how stakeholders who arrived at the same conclusion did so from radically different conclusions about what needed to happen. For example, while grassroots activist and poet Michael “Quess” Moore of Take ‘Em Down NOLA and Mayor Mitch Landrieu ultimately agreed that the Confederate monuments needed to come down, they arrived at this conviction via drastically different routes. Moore, understanding the statues as symbols of the white supremacy that –persisting beyond the period of slavery and Jim Crow– continue to inform systemic racism that defines relations of power in New Orleans, hardly shared the mayor’s sentiment that the monuments represented “a 4-year brief historical aberration” (i.e., the Civil War) in the city’s history.

Meanwhile, fearing that removing the monuments would also remove the historical fact that New Orleans once had the public will to erect them, some Black studies scholars urged caution before dismantling them. Erasing visible markers of the city’s racist history through statue removal, they argued, was not the same as confronting or challenging it. Their fears seem realized by the current state of the site of the former memorial to P.T. Beauregard, now a flower-covered mound that bears no trace of its former purpose. In contrast, the former monument dedicated to Robert E. Lee retains its former staging, including the towering pedestal meant to allow the general to surveil the entire city, and its placement in a traffic circle around which the famed St. Charles Avenue streetcar turns. The stie remains visually compelling, marked by conspicuous absence and the potential for new historical markers.

The status of Confederate and white supremacist monuments in New Orleans will be analyzed in tandem with the controversies surrounding the 1982 installation of the Monumento al Metizaje in Mexico City, and its alteration two decades later. The statue features a standing Conquistador Hernan Cortes with a seated Malinali (Malintzin, or La Malinche), the Nahua woman who was his lover and interpreter, and the statue originally included a depiction of their child, representing Mexico’s combined indigenous and European heritage. Already from its 1982 inception, the statue spurred fierce debates among the Mexican intellectuals such as Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes and the public, with various commentators understanding the statue as celebrating genocide, or confronting contemporary Mexicans with the violence and power imbalances intrinsic to the nation’s history. The statue was denied its intended dramatic public site in the centrally located Coyoacan and relegated to a smaller, more peripheral park. Sometime in the twenty-first century, the child was removed – an act of vandalism, or unauthorized historical revisionism?