This article interrogates the Creole plantation as a site and sight of memory. It presents a unique case study of Destrehan Plantation, a Creole plantation in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, which, it argues, represents a crypt replete with occluded Afro-Creole histories. These histories speak not only to experiences of subjection and depredation, however, but to rebellious countercultures (represented by syncretic cultural practices), and to acts of collective insurgency (borne out, most potently, in the 1811 German Coast slave uprising). In its analytic enquiry, it engages in a process of what Derek Alderman and Rachel Campbell call “symbolic excavation” in order to penetrate the silences of the Creole plantation, and rehabilitate occluded unruly Afro-Creole voices. It nevertheless strives to go further by promoting interdisciplinary solutions for what it calls “affective memorialization” through what memory studies scholar Karen Till calls “artistic and activist memory-work.” It looks to the work of Hahnsville folk artist Lorraine Gendron and to Beyoncé Knowles Carter's 2016 visual album Lemonade as exemplars of such praxis. In so doing, it invites conversations about how slaveholding histories might be affectively reimagined, and how Afro-Creole histories can be made to service the needs of their descendants.

Inspired by Martin Luther King's “Drum Major Instinct” sermon, President Bill Clinton signed the King Holiday and Service Act of 1994 and transformed the King holiday into a day of service. By linking the holiday to his community service initiatives, Clinton, and Coretta Scott King, encouraged Americans to continue King's work by helping America's poor through racially integrated service activities. Since the inaugural 1986 holiday, scholars have claimed that King Day abets amnesia more than it encourages remembrance; however, this reform illustrates that the holiday is an evolving and dynamic form of history that can be used to continue the work of the civil rights movement.

This article argues that Nina Berman's Homeland (2008) is a rearticulation of the US domestic landscape following 9/11. The book excavates and shapes cultural memory through image and text by examining how parts of the country responded to the 2001 events. Considering how Homeland captures what I call queer topographics of US culture, I suggest that the spaces of the everyday are mediated by Berman's framing and use of “narrative” essays, disrupting the heteronormativity of a populist rhetoric that seeks to exclude difference. Homeland ultimately offers viewers the opportunity to further redefine the US landscape through queerness.

As scholarly work on race in Shakespeare studies continues to develop, this article examines how important insights from critical Indigenous studies can help us to refine and enhance this work to more fully see historical moments at which Shakespeare's works have been appropriated in response to the oppression of settler colonialism. Taking an 1893 political cartoon from a New York newspaper as a representation of settler violence against Queen Lili‘uokalani of Hawai‘i, this essay traces the uses of Banquo's ghost in Hawaiian newspapers as a figure that haunts the racializing elimination of Native rule.

This essay offers close readings of films by the independent US directors Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant with a particular focus on their slow-paced representation of everyday life. Building on the work of Henri Lefebvre, the author proposes that so-called “slow cinema” can be read not simply as an aesthetic choice, but as an alternative and potentially oppositional rhythm in the era of fast capitalism.

This essay considers the impossibility faced by The Merchant of Venice’s Shylock in seeking redress for his suffering and how dismissal of his complaints parallels criticism of protests against racial injustice in the twenty-first century, with particular attention to Colin Kaepernick's 2016 protest against police brutality. Venice's idealization of Christ-like passivity and our own age's veneration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence create impossible standards for those attempting to call attention to injustice, leading to condemnation of protesters’ actions and misinterpretation of their motives.

This article explores Sally Mann's memoir Hold Still (2015) as a complex photo-text that excavates, mediates and shapes memories, both of her family and of the US South more broadly. Theorizing photo-text topographics, the article argues that various landscapes (regional, memorative, aesthetic) are mediated by the interrelation between word and image. Mann's depictions of her children, southern location, and – most explicitly – black–white relations in the United States will be shown to reveal how the past can never be “held still.”

This essay examines the letters and diaries of elite South Carolina women from September 1860 to February 1861, during which the state seceded and eventually helped found the Confederacy. Women used emotional and religious language to express their own political consciousness without transgressing their proper societal roles. Examining their fears and anguish as Abraham Lincoln's election, and then secession, approached, I argue that women astutely anticipated war and violence in ways often more prescient than their male counterparts as they were unfettered by masculine ideals of honor. This emotions history shines necessary light on women during secession, a topic often overlooked by scholars of secession.

In 2016, racist, patriarchal rhetoric dominated the political landscape of the United States. As a response, activist artist Richard Lou of Memphis, Tennessee created a video piece as part of his series ReCovering Memphis titled ReContexting Bodies. In the artwork, Lou performs whiteness by re-creating photographs and reciting words of historic Civil War leaders Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest and President of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis. With his racialized body, Lou confronts the foundations of white supremacy in the United States American South. ReContexting Bodies examines how two historic identities of southern masculinity shape contemporary biases.

This essay examines the political significance of the career of Atlanta-based Shakespearean Adrienne McNeil Herndon in the early twentieth century. It contextualizes Herndon's writing in the activist journal Voice of the Negro and elucidates the radicalism of Herndon's Shakespeare work at Atlanta University and beyond. More broadly, the essay shows how Herndon's performances and pedagogy – especially her focus on elocution work, bodily expressivity, domestic spaces, and visual culture – repeatedly challenged the white supremacist culture of the Jim Crow South, offering black Americans a way to resist racial terrorism and endure racial trauma.

This article looks at the landscape photographer Richard Misrach's collaboration with the architect Kate Orff in Petrochemical America (2012), a prizewinning examination of the effects of the oil industry in the Mississippi delta. Whilst situating its critique of the oil industry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Petrochemical America nonetheless uses a variety of aesthetic devices from previous centuries and traditions, in particular the use of the picturesque in landscapes of the nineteenth century. Through this and other mechanisms, the images in Petrochemical America become potential allegories for the paradoxical coexistence of a picturesque nature visibly affected by industrial transformation.

This paper examines the work and lives of black female activist intellectuals in the years before the formation of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC) in 1896. Looking deeper at arguments originally made by Maria Stewart concerning the denial of black women's ambitions and limiting potential in their working lives, the analysis employs the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, in particular his notion of the intellectual, to help reflect on the centrality of these black women in the development of an early counterhegemonic movement.

Daniel Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire, recently published to much fanfare, takes as its starting point what Immerwahr calls a “conceptual filing error.” Born from his surprise at visiting the Philippines and encountering streets “named after US colleges” and university students speaking “virtually unaccented English,” the book contends that while most people have heard of the “big wars” the United States has waged, “the actual territory” of US empire “often slips from view.” In response to this alleged invisibility, Immerwahr has produced a new popular history of US empire, one focussed on officially annexed US colonies and military bases, as well as the states that lie beyond the “logo map” whose outlines are the continental United States (14–15). The book's first section quickly sketches the story of US westward expansion, mostly through the story of Daniel Boone, then moves on to more satisfying chapters detailing the annexation of the uninhabited Guano Islands, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, as well as the resistance to annexation in the latter two cases; the section ends by recounting World War II battles over Pacific islands. The second half of the book examines the postwar period, contending that the United States “gave up territory” in this period because it “honed an extraordinary suite of technologies,” from screw threads to synthetic rubber, that allowed it to construct a “pointillist empire” of communication and infrastructural networks (17).

This essay focusses on references to the sixteenth-century black poet and scholar Juan Latino in African American journals in the 1920s–1940s. Although Juan Latino is largely forgotten in the present day, publications such as the Journal of Negro History and the New Negro referred to the poet as an important figure in the intellectual history of the African diaspora. My essay posits Juan Latino (both the historical figure and an early modern play about him) as an alternative exemplar of blackness in early modern Europe to that found in Othello. By turning to Juan Latino instead of to Othello, scholars in the 1920s–1940s were able to suggest a transnational and transhistorical black diasporic identity linked with African American solidarity with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.