Kinships and Intimacies

The palimpsests in this room grapple with different modes of visualizing affect in slaveholding societies. This perverse kind of affect effaces Blackness either by obscuring the coercion of enslaved labor or by imposing whiteness at the center of Black family formation. However, despite these acts of symbolic violence and the constant threat of physical violence, Black subjects have always found room for homemaking and refuge, even in spaces rife with violence and dehumanization, such as the plantation.