Event Description:
This forum brings together scholars whose research investigates the relationship between the African diaspora, Afro-descendants, and the built environment of North America and the Caribbean from a variety of lenses that are specific to the scholars’ fields of inquiry. The goal is to begin to expand the field of landscape history by taking into consideration questions that are not always deemed central to the practice of design, if design is understood as an activity that has featured—in the historical narratives—the presence of an author-designer, a client, and a variety of tools the former has used to communicate ideas about form, materials and use, to the latter.
By its very cross-disciplinary nature and topical organization, this forum questions a traditional mode of history writing that is based both on the description of linear developments and on the exclusive use of archival and written sources. Instead it argues for a relational historiography that considers what methods and what traces—written, spoken, or material, and whether found on the land’s surface or below—may allow us to tell the story of the Black North American and Caribbean landscape of enslaved people, maroons and freemen. Without arguing for the obliteration of what is already known about the landscape of plantations and the settlements of early America, essays presented at this symposium will ultimately produce a landscape history that, paraphrasing Èdouard Glissant, is latent, open, multicultural in intention, and directly in contact with everything possible.
Panel Discussion 5, moderated by Sara Zewde
Toward a Black Historical Ecology of the Atlantic World
Justin Dunnavant
Beneath the Surfaces of Historical Landscapes: Archaeology, African and Indigenous Diasporic Communities, and the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina
Daniel Sayers
Living Freedom in the Maroon Landscape: An Ecological Way of Life
Diane Jones Allen
Dr. Justin Dunnavant is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. His current research in the US Virgin Islands investigates the relationship between ecology and enslavement in the former Danish West Indies. In addition to his archaeological research, Justin is co-founder and President of the Society of Black Archaeologists and an AAUS Scientific SCUBA Diver. In 2021, he was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and inducted into The Explorers Club as one of “Fifty People Changing the World that You Need to Know About.” He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation. His research has been featured on Netflix’s “Explained,” Hulu’s “Your Attention Please” and in print in American Archaeology and Science Magazine.
Daniel O. Sayers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington D.C. As a Historical Archaeologist, Sayers has analyzed and interpreted many archaeological sites across the U.S. through landscape perspectives that are informed by his political-economic approach and orientation. He is the author of many academic articles, he has made numerous media appearances, and he has worked with several museums on archaeological exhibits. Sayers is the author of the book, A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp (2014, University Press of Florida) and is completing a book manuscript, “Historical Archaeology of the Homeless and the Home” (also for the University Press of Florida).
Diane Jones Allen, D. Eng., PLA, FASLA is Program Director and Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Texas, Arlington. She is Principal Landscape Architect with DesignJones LLC which received the 2016 American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Community Service Award. She participated on the 2017 ASLA Blue Ribbon Panel on Climate Change. Diane serves on the board of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) as vice president of education for the 2021 year. Diane is author of Lost in the Transit Desert: Race Transit Access and Suburban Form, Routledge Press, 2017, and co-editor of Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity, Island Press, 2017. Diane is part of one of two cross disciplinary teams that won the 2020 SOM Foundation Research Prize focused on examining social justice in urban contexts. She also received an appointment as fellow for Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks for the 2021-2022 academic year.
00:00 Panel Introduction by Sara Zewde
04:37 Presentation by Justin Dunnavant
28:12 Presentation by Daniel Sayers
52:20 Presentation by Diane Jones Allen
1:16:20 Discussion and Q+A
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