A Brief Statement on the Exhibit
Rebellions Abroad! Is a digital exhibit which curates a 19th century African American newspaper’s presentation of coterminous international rebellions and insurrections. The National Era frequently included a highly compressed feature entitled “Foreign Summary” in which, more often than not, the focus was placed upon international events of conflict, rebellion, and insurrection. In keeping with our community’s thematic interest in “Fragmented rebellions,” it is my hope that this exhibit can serve as a productive contribution: a collection of spare but persistent depictions of global rebellions from an anti-slavery newspaper on the eve of the Civil War.
Through efforts to map and analyze this periodical’s treatment of rebellions abroad, it was my intention to construct this exhibit with Stephen Best in mind: “to encourage a frank reprisal of the critical assumptions that undergirds many of [this history’s] claims” (1). That is to say, more than I hope this exhibit fosters the kind of engagement that merely teaches (that anti-slavery newspapers were outward-looking, that this newspaper may likely have had a certain kind of readership, that analyzing editor’s reading practices of other rebellions reveal something about their own rebellious goals and values…) I hope that it fosters engagement itself, engagement that continues.
Best interprets the work of Ian Baucom to suggest that “any melancholy act of witnessing” – quite like the viewing of death and struggle and oppression and victory and defeat represented on this website as but dots on a map or within conglomerated word puzzles – “weds ‘an inability to forget what cannot be remembered’ to an ‘obligation to see what has not been seen’” (Best 16). This charge is, no doubt, a challenging one: somewhere between the oppressive practices of knowing that come naturally to us as scholars, and the Freudian melancholia we sheepishly attempt to lock away in our past lives that ended once academic life began is this “inability” and this “obligation,” this hope that past traumas which we cannot really name or experience can somehow guide our search towards what we really ought to be looking for. This exhibit does not claim to be that which ought to be looked for, but a tool that can be potentially useful in that search.