Maintaining Boundaries, or ‘Mainstreaming’ Black History in a White Museum

Abstract

In this chapter, I explore ethnographically how enduring notions of racial ‘identity’ continue to make it unlikely that an ongoing attempt by America's largest outdoor living-history museum – Colonial Williamsburg – to tell stories about race relations in the antebellum era will be pedagogically effective. I focus on pedagogic practice among Colonial Williamsburg's ‘frontline’ because, while the professional historians ostensibly set historiographical policy and monitor historiographical product at Colonial Williamsburg, it is ultimately the dozens of guides who tell Williamburg's story to the visiting public. Moreover, I focus on the way guides talk about a particularly revealing topic – miscegenation – because it is a generally accepted argument among historians of antebellum America that the history of laws against miscegenation (which were codified in the eighteenth century), coupled with the history of their systematic violation, is at the root of the invention of distinct racial categories. To tell this story of ‘kinship denied’ at Colonial Williamsburg would have meant that a largely white audience and a mostly white ‘frontline’ would have had to rethink the category of race itself in ways perhaps more threatening to their ‘identities’ than to their ostensibly ‘black’ peers. In this chapter, I suggest that the way miscegenation remained a resisted topic at Colonial Williamsburg, reinforces, at the level of vernacular historiography, the very dichotomizing thinking about racial categories that the topic should have called into question.

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