Retrieval, Recovery, Repair

In addition to recording the mundane brutality of slavery, plantation archives document the extraction of value from land and from the enslaved Africans whose labor made such consolidation of value possible. However, a white gaze envelops these archives. It positions enslaved workers solely as objects of value and locates that value purely within the capacity of Black bodies to engage in brute physical labor. This gaze obscures the extent to which the highly skilled technical labor of enslaved Africans—which included both manual labor and intellectual labor—shaped the built environments of the plantation. This reparative history traces the technical work of skilled Black builders on rice plantations in the American South while also offering a method for exposing the racializing shroud of the archive.