In this episode, the protagonists attempt to track down secret knowledge hoarded by Atticus’ white ancestor Titus Braithwaite. They pass through a museum and encounter the Indigenous interpreter who had been kidnapped by Braithwaite and imprisoned in a catacomb for more than a century. Through these encounters, the episode deals with the legacies of the violence experienced by people of color, including Indigenous and colonized people, and how these legacies are often upheld and promoted by institutions.

Reindigenizing Colonialized Spaces by Decolonizing the Museum

This episode reminds viewers that many artworks currently on display in museums were taken from the people who created them. Colonial settlers routinely stole valuable items and knowledge from Indigenous people, and museums routinely ignored that violence, accepting the stolen valuables as donations. The movement to “Decolonize the Museum” names this history and seeks ways to address it, from improving display labels to repatriating objects to changing how they talk about the people who created them. Some nations are also building new museums to house looted treasures on their return. For example, read about a new museum in Nigeria to bring the Benin bronzes home.

This video provides an introduction to the concept of decolonizing the museum with a particular focus on the Brooklyn Museum (New York, New York):

Museums aren’t the only places which have and benefit from these kinds of objects. For example, Harvard University is currently being sued over its profits from photographs of enslaved people, raising questions of the ethics of owning, sharing, and selling reproductions of photographs taken either against the will of the people pictured or of people who were not granted the agency to be willing participants.

In 2020, Princeton hosted a discussion on Decolonizing Knowledges, which was recorded and is available online. From their website, “In Decolonizing Knowledges, a discussion hosted by Princeton’s Archival Silences Working Group, scholars and archivists reflected on knowledge hierarchies and how the exclusion of certain forms of expression from institutional archives has produced gaps in our understanding of the past.”

Indigenous, Transgender, and Two-Spirit People in History and Fiction

Alhough Yahima—a Two-Spirit of the Lokono-Arawak nation enslaved by Titus Braithwaite—appears for only a short while during the events of “A History of Violence,” their lasting impact comes through their role as a reanimated voice from the past reminding us of generational trauma, oppression, and structural violence.

While later fictionalized accounts identify Tituba as Black, primary sources and contemporary scholarship suggest she was Lokono-Arawak. Either way, much like Yahima, Tituba likely lived in Northeast South America or the Caribbean before being enslaved by Samuel Parris. During her time in Salem, Massachusetts, Tituba was forced to confess witchcraft, ultimately becoming the first and most misunderstood person in the 1692 witch trail narrative. Yahima, Hanna, and Tituba’s backstory connects the world of Lovecraft Country to ours through their shared origin as people born free before their knowledge, labor, and skills were stolen by the enslavers, Braithwaite and Parris.¹

     

Although Two-Spirit and transgender people have existed in many ways across history, their stories have rarely been represented from their own perspectives until recently. Our Arthur O. Lewis Utopia Collection includes the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere : science fiction and fantasy from transgender writers. Penn State Libraries’ collections also contain: Love after the end : an anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer speculative fiction; as well as books from the transgender speculative fiction anthology series, Transcendent. In their novella The Deep (based on Clipping’s “The Deep”), non-binary Afrofuturist author Rivers Solomon engages with trauma and the story of an underwater race of beings descended from pregnant enslaved African women thrown overboard by their enslavers. “Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her.”

Denmark Vesey and the AME Church

Denmark Vesey’s Bar, featured in this episode and throughout the series, is named after the real Denmark Vesey, one of the founders of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine people were massacred by a white supremacist in 2015. Vesey and his co-founders rejected the segregation of the Presbyterian Church and the ways in which it upheld slavery. Vesey was executed in 1822 and the church was leveled after he attempted to lead a slave rebellion. As part of its Charles L. Blockson Collection of African Americana and the African Diaspora, Special Collections has a copy of The trial record of Denmark Vesey by Lionel H. Kennedy and Thomas Parker with an introduction by mid-20th century African American author John Oliver Killens.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded by Rt. Rev. Richard Allen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and spread throughout the United States, even before the Civil War. The Special Collections Library has a collection African Methodist Episcopal Church programs and conference publications, 1909-1958, including A brief history of the origin and organization of the AME Church of Bellefonte, Pa. (1909).

Continue reading about Episode 5 : Strange case

Footnotes

1. Writing about slavery or teaching about slavery? Please refer to Writing about slavery? Teaching about slavery? This might help, a community-sourced guide by P. Gabrielle Foreman and senior slavery scholars of color.^{back to text}