On Sunday August 18 the New York Times launched The 1619 Project, an initiative whose purpose, in the words of editor Jake Silverstein, is to “reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 [the date of the first arrival of slaves on the North American continent] as our birth year. Doing so requires us to put the consequences of slavery and the contribution of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”
Although scholarship on slavery and its consequences has not been a singular focus of Representations, we have been publishing on the topic steadily over nearly four decades, and our archives reveal a surprisingly relevant cross section of critical readings on the subject. We highlight a few of them here in endorsement of The 1619 Project (all available free of charge through the end of September):
Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive
by Stephen Best
Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy
Eric Lott
“Democracy and Burnt Cork”: The End of Blackface, the Beginning of Civil Rights
by Michael Rogin
The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black
by Henry Louis Gates Jr
Glenn Ligon and Other Runaway Subjects
by Huey Copeland
The Accursed Share: Genealogy, Temporality, and the Problem of Value in Black Reparations Discourse
by Robert Wesley
Fugitive Justice
by Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman
When Did the Confederate States of America Free the Slaves?
by Catherine Gallagher
Disarmed and Dangerous: The Strange Career of Bras-Coupéé
by Bryan Wagner
Legal Terrors
by Colin Dyan
Plus: the special issues New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual, edited by Huey Copeland, Krista Thompson, and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby and Redress, edited by Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman