Legacy of Slavery and Indentured Labour

Linking the Past with the FutureConference on Slavery, Indentured Labour, Migration, Diaspora

and Identity Formation.June 18th – 23th, 2018, Paramaribo, Suriname

Org. IGSR & Faculty of Humanities and IMWO, in collaboration with Nat. Arch. Sur.

CONTESTED HERITAGE HIDDEN IN PLAIN VIEW:PRESERVING THE CULTURAL MEMORY OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

PAULA D. ROYSTERTHE CENTER FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH, INC.

AbstractCultural memory is a binary function of individual and collective memories preserved through various mechanisms and institutions such as language, education, museums, governments, symbolisms, beliefs and ritualistic practices. The absence of an African Diasporan counter-narrative in the annals of Western history have the intended psycho-social consequences of displacement, the economic consequences of inequity and the civil and political consequences of inequality. With the generous financial support of the U.S. Embassy, Suriname, this study examines defining the African Diaspora, identifying the characteristics of distribution systems that delegitimize the presence of Africans as cultural, political and economic producers and the methods by which reclaiming African heritage through narrative inquiry seeks to revise the canon as a matter of social justice.Keywords: African Diaspora, cultural heritage, cultural studies, public policy, memory studies, African history, race and racism.

Citation: Royster, Paula D. "Contested Heritage Hidden in Plain View: Preserving the Cultural Memory of the African Diaspora." Paper presented at the Legacy of Slavery & Indentured Labour, Migration & Diaspora Conference, Paramaribo, Suriname, June, 2018. ?

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IntroductionWhat we think we know about humanity is subjectively scribed into the canon of theoretical knowledge, those exclusive cultural appropriations and expropriations invented by the gatekeepers of Western knowledge; however, "if more than five sixths of the peoples who developed the new societies of the Western Hemisphere have not been included in the telling of its history, then we do not know very much about this history" (Dodson, 2001). The intent of this paper is to reaffirm the intercourse between everyday forms of symbolic resistance and the way in which they articulate with every day acts of material resistance (2001). The human consequences of ignoring ritualistic inequities and inequalities in nations where Western philosophies of democracy and governance are dominant cannot be understated. There are consequences. Because no one can change the pain of the recent or distant past, marginalized people adopt attitudes of tolerance to make life livable life under its dominant shadows (Williams, 1980). I have examined the intricacies of the African Diaspora with respect to placement, identities, memory and preservation and the importance of reclaiming a history hidden in plain view. The history of all civilizations are important, not just the select few. It is unconscionable to think that more than two hundred years have passed since the end of chattel slavery but the voices of the enslaved and their descendants have yet to be heard through the rewritings of history, through the reclamations of historical sites and collective national memories. It is both morally and socially unjust to ignore the knowledge claims of the people for whom the industrialized world owes a debt of gratitude. My position, in the collection and evaluation of evidence is from an Afrocentric deconstructionist paradigm, which acknowledges that "[i]mperialism and colonialism brought complete disorder to colonized peoples, disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages, their social relations and their ways of thinking, feeling and interacting with the world" (Smith, 1999). Africans who were violently taken from otherwise self-sufficient communities experienced loss of memory, cultural continuity, language, wealth, freedom and sovereignty. Cultural memory, then, must be contested as a binary function of individual and collective memories preserved through various systems of learning such as language, education, governments, symbolisms, and ritualistic practices. The process of identifying, preserving and redistributing the historical memory of Africans, in general, but Africans in the Diaspora, specifically, without the point of view of the subject, is an inauthentic act of knowledge exacerbated by the privileges of the dominant group. "This has been the case especially with respect to black vernacular culture and its appropriation by individuals who are not black, or by black folks who are from materially privileged backgrounds" (hooks, 1995). The absence of an African Diasporan counter-narrative in the annals of Western history have the intended psycho-social consequences of generational trauma and displacement, the economic consequences of inequity and the civil and political consequences of inequality in every Western society where the Diaspora is present. The challenge becomes implementing appropriate methodologies capable of identifying contributions to New Societies for the purposes of inserting a voice into the canon where silence exists and then (re)articulating the experience through creative preservation efforts. I define in this paper the term African Diaspora from the

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Afrocentric point of view as well as discuss the interdisciplinary research methods necessary to rediscover the semioptics of African heritage hidden in plain view and why it is important to reclaim the affirmative narrative of place. I will also discuss the conditions of Blackness as seen through Western lenses to get a better sense of how we came to be and disambiguate the socio-economic, political, and transgenerational consequences of failure to reclaim said history.?

Defining the African DiasporaThere are differing schools of thought on how to classify, intellectualize and research the African Diaspora from scholars such as George Shepperson who coined the phrase "African Diaspora…as a way to describe the dislocations and resettlements of the Atlantic slave trade" (Butler, 2010) as a concept without boundaries. Recent scholarship and theories discourse on Diaspora studies have sought to limit Shepperson's broad conceptualization by narrowly focusing on elite intellectuals in the diasporic community. Bret Hayes Edwards, a professor of English and comparative literature, argues the modern framework for diasporic discussions hold to Stuart Hall's Black intellectualism theories which are absent any obsessive notions of African origins as a basis for identity (Edwards, 2009). Where multiplicity seems to overwhelm Edwards, it is certainly not lost on Paul Gilroy, a professor of Professor of American and English Literature. Gilroy acknowledges the tensions of pluralistic identities conceptualized out of African and African Diasporan ontologies. Using Martin Delany as his example of how black intellectual elites framed the notion of national identity from a class perspective, Gilroy's allusions that Delany's dominant ways of knowing were at odds with his deracinated past might have standing if it can be proven that said motifs are true European inventions. I am not at all inclined at all to believe that people who live in close proximity to each other and speak the same language are precluded from engaging in some acculturating practices but acculturation does not assume syncretism, hence Gilroy's invention, the "black Atlantic." My African centered paradigm is the point where I depart from both Edwards and Gilroy's rhetorical approaches to understanding cultural identity. The African centered paradigm makes clear delineations between the history of African people and the imposition of Eurocentric values, interpretations and praxis of knowledge; it vigorously challenges the racialized predilections of Western theories and systems of knowledge as invented schemes created to maintain economic and political control over Others. While Edwards and Gilroy are expert English teachers, their critiques of the historical narrative is limited to ephemeral glances of history rather than examining the extensive systems of hegemony that drive perceived understandings of placement. Others haves sought to define the African Diaspora including the African Union (AU) who believes the following:

The African Diaspora refers to the communities throughout the world that are descended from the historic movement of peoples from Africa; predominantly from the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, among other areas around the globe …[t]he African Diaspora consists of peoples of

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African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent and the building of the African Union (African Union, n.d.).

The choice of language is problematic for the AU but it is symptomatic of persistent imperial precepts of power and placement. The idea that member nations of the African Union, which is not a member of the African Diaspora, has the right to define group membership is an expression of imperialistic acculturation. The invention of a new definition of the African Diaspora, from outside the group, is clearly driven by capitalistic ambitions in contradistinction to traditional African political thought, which is communal, not individualistic. Likewise, it is an instructive example of a learned behavior that reveals the confused power dynamics the AU finds itself in. On the one hand, they are desperately seeking financial support from the African Diaspora, and on the other hand, they are imposing the same Western philosophical views as to who the diaspora can be by pre-determining the role that Diasporans must play in order to be accepted "back home." Seeking to control by imposing their Western views of Others from the position of privilege creates fissures within the global African family. This, while Mauritania continues to enslave African people in full view of the world and the African Union has yet to intervene. It is clear to me that the AU has adopted the power structures of Western philosophy to their own detriment for I could find no data of African Americans (their targeted audience) racing to Africa to acquire an official African Union Passport, one of the perks for agreeing to invest in the continent. Also perplexing about this strategy is the omission of the Caribbeans where cultural retention has endured as a vibrant part of most national island identities. The silence with regard to Caribbean nations speaks volumes about the myopic knowledge of vanguards on the continent. Perspectives of placement are generally cultivated through contacts with others but here, the African Union has had no such contact with the Diaspora, in general, if at all, which makes the conceptual framework for defining the African Diaspora curious. Placement and belonging are the dynamic struggles that people of Color wrestle with to meet the expectations of what it means to be African and Diasporan that ultimately shape our conditions of Blackness and our memories of the past. Diaspora, loosely defined, is the forced dispersal or scattering; unlike transnationalism, (im)migration, refugee or asylum seekers, Diaspora implies violent movement. For the purposes of this study, the African Diaspora is as follows: any person of African descent, in whole or in part, who does not speak their ancestors language and does not live in their ancestral homelands and whose ancestors were forced to leave their ancestral homelands as enslaved people.

Decolonizing the Narrative through an Afrocentric ParadigmThe presence of Africans can be found in every industrialized nation in the world. African labor was used to build historic buildings visited by tourists in every Western nation, including universities, roads, pipelines, crops for food exports, and manufactured products. There is no

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Western nation that was exempt from using African labor to build its economic, militaristic, or political strength. To identify the hidden African cultural heritage in Western societies, one must do so from an Afrocentric paradigm that triangulates an interdisciplinary approach which decolonizes the tendency to rely on the canon's hegemonic penchant for definitive answers to important questions. In other words, scholars interested in understanding the contributions to Western societies, must unlearn Western ways of knowing and approach the subject from an Afrocentric perspective. The Afrocentric paradigm is unapologetically subjective. It creates its own theories and approaches that are capable of responding to unique human experiences thus keeping the African point of view at the center of all questions concerning our ways of knowing. The Afrocentric paradigm delegitimizes Eurocentric scholarship as objective as it seeks a vigorous critique of knowledge bases for biases and contradictions. Molefi Kete Asante has written extensively on this concept summarizing that "[a]ll analysis is culturally centered and flows from ideological assumptions" (Asante, 1987). The Afrocentric perspective, then, examines the relationship between what is said to be known, what is not said but is known, what actually happened, and why devices of remembrance should be contested particularly in colonial nation-states. The relics of dominant rule abound with the intent of silencing discontent, to dispel would-be protests to counter the so-called collective memory of a nation. There is power in the silence of the historical narrative inasmuch as there is silence in the communities in which power structures continue to wield control of over the minds of the perceived powerless. Michel-Rolph Trouillot outlines the process on how power of silence in the historical narrative in suggesting that there are four critical moments in which the silencing powers of victors insert their dominance into process of producing history:

1. The moment of fact creation (making sources)2. The moment of fact assembly (making archives)3. The moment of fact retrieval (making narratives)4. The moment of retrospective significance (making history) (Trouillot, 1995)

Trouillot tested his theory by conducting a case studies on the Sans Souci Palace and the Haitian Revolution. Here he demonstrates not only how silence in the historical narrative leads to revolutionary storytelling but also how history functions as a system of knowledge-often times inappropriately or inconspicuously transferred through everyday contacts and communications. Trouillot described his recollection of interacting with a local tour guide on the history of the San Souci Palace in Haiti. In Trouillot's scenario, he gently interrogated the local tour guide on the origins of the palace, home of one of Haiti's most revered heroes, Mandinka King Henri Christophe. While Trouillot agreed with the oral and written history of the palace on substantive points, the actual nomenclature surrounding the palace name was suspect to him in part because Sans-Sousi is of French derivation (meaning "carefree"). Sans Sousi also refers to another historical site, the Milot (European replica of the summer home of the King of Prussia, in Haiti) as well as the Congolese Colonel Jean-Baptiste Sans Souci, who was a military leader during the Haitian Revolution in the late 1700s. Trouillot's research conclusions revealed that while there

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was no omission of Kings Christophe or Sans Souci from the written records, the intentional construction of silence on the connection between the two men were physically separated and buried deeply into archival repositories. The backstory is that during the Haitian Revolution, the French military, alone, was incapable of overtaking Jean-Baptiste Sans Souci, a general in Toussaint L 'Overture's army, so they enlisted Souci's sworn enemy to do their bidding, Henri Christophe. Henri Christophe was successful in luring Sans Souci away from his palace where Christophe was able to kill Sans Socui. As the story is told, Christophe built a palace at the site where sans Socui was murdered and named it after his formidable opponent. The French, relieved at Sans Souci's demise, confused the victory of killing Sans Souci with an admission to their systems of governance; they thought that with Sans Souci out of the way, they could control Christophe, but soon discovered that the will to be free is inherent in every human being, and in every king. Christophe resisted their control over him. Trouillot was right: to place an explanatory narrative on the circumstances of how San Souci in one continual narrative, would have signaled weakness in the French colonial apparatus but since there was no one to contest what was written, the plan to obfuscate what actually happened, worked.There are several key points to consider from Trouillot's experiences. The first is that knowledge of history is contestable in its own right, as Asante pointed out the ideologies of power structures determines which stories are told and by whom. Second, it underscores how balance in representation exacerbates feelings of displacement and dislocation to the point that the tour guide viewed the palace as a history not of his own but rather that of his colonizer. Third, the manipulation of the historical text is the conceptual framework that emboldens the physical presence of the conqueror without seeming to do so. What I mean by that is even when locals block out the transgenerational emotional pain that may come with the sight of a slave fort or castle, the reminder of the power exerted over Others is still present. The narrative of the dominant point of view is still present, still being told with the ever-present threat of a return to the days of old. All of these points are driven by intentional, political agendas to create boundaries that protect the perceptions of power, and wherever possible, to divide people of African descent vis-à-vis intercultural disagreements on what should be protected or allowed to deteriorate. As I mentioned previously, that even though the stories of Sana Souci and Christophe were documented, they were stored in separate repositories in separate locations with intended purpose of never being discovered. The motive was to disrupt any continuity between the events and the actors that revealed the significant deficiencies in France's military prowess to kill Souci themselves. Thus, French military generals who memorialized the events took painstaking efforts to mention only Christophe eleven times in their records, and Sans Souci a paltry once (1995). Trouillot called this moment an "unthinkable" (1995), embarrassing admission for French romanticists to admit that they could not kill Souci or control Christophe, the inferior Africans. Therefore, while the French did not hide either king's existence, they did everything they could to forget that either man existed because to do so would also be an admission that colonialism was a failure as was slavery for both were designed to last an eternity. Because neither system of bondage, colonialism or slavery, spanned the time and space envisioned by its creators, thee

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relics of the past remained intact. Reminders of a story to control the narrative such that talk of history and placement of Africans in said history would always begin with "slavery" rather than pre and post enslavement. This system of reminders manifests itself in the academes, public policies and human rights discourse. It is the fingerprint of a colonized nation pretending to be free. The implication then is that the archives, the place where the keepers of a nation's memories are held, becomes contestable heritage whereas the notion that only educated people should have access to the collective history of a nation explicitly assumes that knowing history is a privilege reserved for only those operating from within the systems of power such as government agencies, philanthropists, educators. In addition to the dialectics of positional and situational relationships, Trouillot's example offers another perspective on African culture that had not been explored in Haitian society such that "Christophe may have wanted to perpetuate the memory of his enemy as the most formidable one he had defeated. In other words, silencing of Sans Souci could be read as an engraving of Christophe himself" (1995). That is a plausible theory but I suspect that Christophe followed his African custom to please Sans Souci so that his spirit would not come back to disturb him in the future; however, this theory does have currency when analyzing the power dynamics between colonizers and Africans with respect to local and national heritage. In a sense, by not destroying slave forts and castles, or other powerful symbols post-slavery, Europeans achieved exactly what they intended, to silence their victims by maintaining buildings and systems of education that teach only on European history from a European perspective to convince deracinated Africans that their connections to Africa do not exist. And it works. Convinced that time is too distant and too difficult to transcend the pathology of space, some Africans in the Diaspora have paid "the price of the ticket" (Baldwin and Kenan, 2011) to become anything other than African. Black. To do so would admit belonging to a racialized class system of inferiority that may jeopardize social, political and economic positioning in society. Africans in the Diaspora, seeing no visual symbols of their ontological Africaness, refer to themselves as Muslim or Trinidadian less any hyphenations that might identify them as members of a cultural group who have been objectified and expropriated at will and at whim for several hundred years. To contest the cultural heritage hidden in plain view, one must first understand how we came to be.Unmasking history hidden in plain view requires listening to the silence in the historical narrative from an Afrocentric point of view because the subjective nature of silence is worth listening to. The final points I will make about the Trouillot example are related to education and access. Trouillot was an educated man. He was capable of securing reliable sources of information for critical analysis and he had a solid understanding of how information is collected, interpreted, packaged, and redistributed. Because he was educated, he knew where to find information, and he knew how to insert a counter narrative-he published his findings. Access to information in a language spoken by the people who's lived experiences have be recorded matters. Revolutions have been born from the personal narratives, storytelling, of the oppressed in every major racialized contestation for power. There is no way to contest information if knowledge about what exists is not shared and accessible for examination.

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Historicity of the African Diaspora reveals that most of what is known about the African experience is consolidated into a single category of "folklore" or "general" history. This approach reaffirms an inherent predisposition to frame the existence of Africans as a monolithic people with no intellectual, spiritual, creative, or philosophical histories. To disentangle this consolidated knowledge, more than one discipline is necessary and only disciplines that overlap constitute valid interdisciplinary inquires, which is not to be confused with a multidisciplinary approach. An example of an interdisciplinary approach is history, ethnography, and cultural studies. Each intersect in both methodology and outcome such that an historical event (history) is validated through memory (ethnography) by examining how the memory of the historical event impacts the social, political and economic conditions of the individual or group (cultural studies). It is storytelling and public discourse is framed around the human narrative, the telling of stories. When marginalized voices once silenced by the canon reclaim their stories told in their own words, using their voices, their perspectives, based on their lived experiences, revolutionary movements are born and contestations to history emerge.

Contesting Cultural HeritageCultural heritage is a system of knowledge -our ways of knowing that are traced to the present by way of the past. It is how we engage with the tangible and intangible -our ways of seeing artifacts and objects left behind based on our lived experiences. Contesting cultural heritage is not for the sake of protesting power structures but rather challenging how heritage is presented, valued and interpreted and from whose perspective. Without understanding how we came to be, contestations of how history has been memorialized will never materialize. Contesting cultural heritage demonstrates how hegemonic discourses affect the political realities of cultural groups outside of existing power structures and shows that abuse of power is neither unintentional nor unrepeatable. The exertion of power over Others rests on opportunity and the ability to create distinctions real or imagined and convincing Others that the power is real.People of African descent struggle with the concept of cultural heritage for several reasons. In many Diasporan societies, there is a denial of African ancestry or the acculturation into the new society precludes a realization that the manacles of colonization have left only the body, not the mind. One way to reconnect the African presence is to read what has been written in order to hear the ancestors' stories through the silence of the canon-the proverbial gap in literature. Most important to acknowledging a gap in the literature is the need to examine the longevity of this trading apparatus that spanned seventeen centuries and infected every continent in the world except Antarctica. "[African] Diaspora Studies…is informed by the discipline of history" (Butler, 2010) and is necessary to fully examine the annals of history for the purposes of interpreting how previous generations coped with human problems (e.g. famines, politics, cultural differences, attitudes and behaviors) using first and second sources is intended to prevent humanity from making the same mistakes of the past. But history alone is insufficient for this task because our situational and positional placement in the world defines our perceptions and attitudes, cohesiveness, philosophies and other systems of knowing. The Western canon itself exploits all manner of cultural differences by categorizing and labeling with letters and numbers

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strung together in languages and places in which disadvantaged subjects have neither the knowledge nor the access to refute. Built on the supreme knowledge and observations of "travelers' tales and adventures…fixed in the milieu of cultural ideas. Images of the 'cannibal' chief, the 'red' Indian, the 'witch' doctor and primitivism" (Smith, 1999). Moreover, Western pedagogy teaches us to imagine, explore and create from places of privilege, to seize the power of domination through language, art, history, science, technology, sports, money and war. To admit no mistakes. The canon is "underpinned by a cultural system of classification and representation, by views about human nature, human morality and virtue, by conceptions of space and time, by conceptions of gender and race…[that is] intricately and explicitly embedded in racialized discourse" (1999). The Western canon is conspicuously silent on the millions upon millions of Africans forced into systems of bondage such that little is known about their lives after capture. What is written about world civilizations comes from the pious writings of 18th-19th century thinkers such as Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann, Christoph Meiners, Friedrich August Carus and Jacob Brucker. Tennemann, whose 1798 writings, "Geschichte der Philosophie," excluded any account of "Oriental" philosophy. Meiners' 1789 "Gryndriss der Geschichte der Weltweisheit," asserted "Egyptians and Phoenicians handed down little or nothing of cultivating knowledge or skills, except for their gods and rituals of worship…no ancient Greek writer ever attributed his nation's sciences to the barbarians." (Park, 2013). Robert Bersconi's 1998 essay on G.W.F. Hegel's publication of his travels and representations of Africans in his lectures found that Hegel distorted information with systemic intent so as to portray African people as barbaric, and cannibalistic, preoccupied with fetishes, without history, culture or consciousness of freedom" (2013). Jacob Brucker's 1742 "Historia critica philosophe" concludes, "the barbarians (Hebrews, Chaldeans, Persians, Indians, ancient Arabs, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Celts, Etruscans and Roans, Scythians, Thracians and Getes) had a philosophy, but the Greeks had the correct manner of philosophizing. The Egyptians happened to arrive at their knowledge through custom and chance" (2013). The centuries-long training of cultural citizens of the world through the works of a Tennemann or Hegel who postulated that "every great soul the world ever saw was a white man's soul; that every great thought the world ever knew was a white man's thought; that every great deed the world ever did was as a white man's deed; that every great dream the world ever sang was a white man's dream… intentionally designed to remember Napoleon and forget Sonni Ali" (Du Bois, 1920). Their positivist attitudes of hegemonic and androcractic power over Others dominate the present corpus of literature by which our collective memories of history begins with the intentional silencing of divergent cultural groups. The power to insert silence into knowledge bases has always been the ultimate goal of controlling the archeological landscape of progress and thus, African contributions to humanity. "Progress" is a term invented by classical thinkers to validate, racialize and genderize ecno-techological advances in human civilizations. This information is foundational to understanding the systems of colonialism and imperialism over several hundreds of years in order to contest the Eurocentric definitional viewpoints of Africans in new societies and the generational trauma associated with Living While Black (LWB).

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People of African descent do not own the history of slavery; neither have we been the inventors of such barbaric practices, in contradistinction to what has been written. What is owned by people of Africans descent is the story of perseverance and that story has yet to be fully imagined in museums, on tourism routes, in history books, on television and cultural artifacts of the past. The embarrassment and humiliation of some modern Africans feel to disassociate themselves with the history of Indo-European contact with Africans, creates a vacuum of empathy and carelessness of the memories that allow buildings to crumble or cemeteries to overgrow with tall grasses and weeds. This is not an unintended consequence of colonization to divide traditionally marginalized peoples by education and incomes that anoint social status, titles or acceptance as if to make distinctions-it is a reflection of the ruling powerful elite invisibly at work. The success of this post-slavery philosophy of control is that marginalized people engage in prolonged intercultural disputes such that no one pays attention to the public policies put in place that can leave even the most advantaged one calamity away from the poverty they worked so hard to escape. There are those occasions when looking away from acts of malevolence for the sake of self-preservation gives the appearance of politeness such that the "the concessions of politeness always contain political concessions" (Scott, 1990). The sources of power which produce the invisible delineation between individual memory (knowledge claims of what happened) and collective memory (historical writings of what is said to have happened) meet at the intersecting point of chronological events for that point is where scholars are introduced to the silent narrative of history (1990). The privilege to carry out such silences are associated with Whiteness because marginalized groups, or Others, did not have access to education and therefore lacked the power to change the narrative giving way to discursive knowledge (subjective information distributed as an absolute truth). This is evidenced pre-Müller to the present day, repackaged in new language (i.e. stereotypes, stigmas, racial profiling) and redistributed through signs and symbols, media, jurisprudence, metacommentary and demagoguery in the name of Manifest Destiny, Divine Providence, The Laws of Nature and of Nature's God. The shibboleths of these 18-19th century thinkers are authenticated by the Trouillot example, but investigating the caste systems of racism that defines White identity is evidenced by cultural productions as ideological modes of discourse continue to receive maintenance and support through scholarship, language, imagery and philosophical thought among others (Said, Bayoumi and Rubin, 2001). Trouillot's research approach to the study of African history is triangulated into three categories historical, heuristic, and phenomenology and while most studies rely on one methodology, this is not true for the African Diaspora if the current body of knowledge is to be contested with vigor. Every colonized nation that has preserved any edifice, a castle/fort, home, or display tools and other artifacts in their museums, can become objects of legitimate investigations of heritage appropriations and expropriations. Reflecting on how memory recalls forts and castles that lines the shores of most colonized nations in the world, historical plaques might read that the colonizing governor was a military officer of great ingenious and valor, who sacrificed leaving his home permanently to establish an attaché nation for the good of his compatriots back home. These plaques of remembrance serve the purpose of assuaging the conscience of its readers to

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convey a sense of benevolence on the midst of heinous crimes against humanity. It reads well but I have yet to see a fort or castle plaque dedicated to the builders of such grand edifices. Indeed, the presence of the fort or castle is evidence that the history of such an object is ripe for contestation. Future scholarship should inventory these plaques to develop working lists on the construction materials used, location choices, use of language (to demonstrate hidden transcripts and meanings on why particular verbiage was used in some nation-states compared to others). In societies where access to waterways are immediate, one will find that business districts near forts and castles have old buildings that once functioned as warehouses to hold Africans until they could be sold, right next to the homes of the city's "elite" community. To a tourist, these archaic sites should cause wonderment about the amount of labor it must have taken to build such huge structures that would withstand the test of time. Tourists travel to these exotic places in the Caribbeans, ironically, as a means of escape to a simpler life without realizing what a simpler life implies to the locals who live among the ruins of time and the struggles they have to meet the demands of curious Whites (Kincaid, [1988], 2000). When locals encounter these same places, there is no distinction between time and place, for it all stand still. The objects become invisible to people like Trouillot's tour guide and that is problematic because when a colonized nation forgets her memory, her heritage, it only takes two generations to destroy the evidence of what it means to be less than human and the endurance of a people not yet overcome. Evidence of endurance are those subjects and objects, which represent a cultural philosophy of enduring under duress, the will to survive. Reclaiming the narrative, re-telling the stories is more than a revision of history, for those who endure the tortuous past, reclaiming the narrative is a matter of social justice.Just as an observational point, the intensive labor it must have taken to work six or seven days per week, without vacation or sick time, deserves some recognition in the annals of history. If history is any example of when these recognitions are to take place, it would be several more hundreds of years before corrections are made, if left to the vices of plausible deniability of Western scholars. But every revolution begins at the grass roots level and grows into an organized movement of demands. Demands for an end to ritualistic humiliation. Demands for an end to economic deprivations that, in turn, criminalize poverty. Demands for an end of a one-sided story. Demands for an end to creating economic crises and then weaponizing economic relief to the detriment of poor and uneducated people. The demand for contesting cultural heritage is to revise the narrative to include the perspective of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Reclaiming a history hidden in plain view requires a plurality of voices. It requires a Foucauldian point of view that demonstrates a keen understanding of how power is created through the articulation of "governmentality" ([1988], 2000) because the African diaspora lives "out of context… beyond the place of physical occupation or affective imagining… [t]here can be no articulation of the diasporic experience without the recognition of the constitutive, supportive, and critically symbiotic and symbolic role that the popular culture … plays in the insufficient process of dis-and re- articulation of the deracinated subject" (Farred, 2010). From the Afrocentric paradigm, the African Diaspora "struggles with, against, in spite of…to stake a claim for the right to "write"-think, speak, imagine in a language that is "outside" the "major"

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language (2010) hence, the polemical epistemologies of knowledge where the deep-seated challenges of studying cultures "outside the box" of dominant cultures reside. Moreover, the Afrocentric point of view from within the academes, from within the domains "always has the narrative of the insufficient, that which in itself is never enough to, for, and in and of itself…protect itself from itself...there is always the task of political measuring…of being historically fallible" (2010). The awareness that there are concurrent fights within and outside the domain adds no shock value. It only serves as a reminder that the fight to bring to bear the political, economic and socially just grievances of those who have been systemically silenced from the public sphere is not over with the advent of a new theory of study or the swag of popular culture.

ConclusionThe importance of this work is to begin the process of unlearning what it is we think we know about history. The constructions of race and racism which are discriminately imposed upon all humanity as concretized ways of knowing causing various ontological transnational and transgenerational detriments. The traumas of detriment manifests itself in current social, political and economic lifeways from the perspective of White gazes of power, position and place. Resisting the false narrative of dominance begins with unlearning the semioptics of human difference. Using the Afrocentric pedagogy, the Africa Diaspora must approach their objects from the position of righting the ship-gone off-course. It means empowering ordinary people with the knowledge of an extraordinary history. An expansive taxonomy of systemic social, political and economic injustices sanctioned by and for a handful of elites who, for no valid reason other than they could, worked over centuries to advance a universal agenda of privilege. Heads of State and the well to do coordinated sustained systems of institutional bias to invent the cultural product of Whiteness. Through the writing of history and language domination, the production of imagery was packaged as ways of knowing and disseminated to all cultural groups as bonafide knowledge, and with it, the perception of human dominance of one group over all others using skin color as the criteria. Indeed, no one group outside of the fraternal White gaze was exempt from objectification defined as difference, nor is there one group within the subjected group, more vulnerable to the moral and ethical indecencies over time and space than people of African descent. Cultural memory is not an exclusive, autochthonous property of Whiteness though a review of racialized historicity portends it to be; cultural heritage, therefore, must be contested to restore balance and to give voice to the voiceless with their subjective points of view, using their own words.

Social justice demands that people of African descent be empowered with the spirit of self-determination--free to regulate and invent; to contemplate the socialized enculturation of language used to create imagined cultural identities over time and space juxtaposed to human rights and political economies. There is a mandate to cultivate emerging epistemological theorems that seek to deconstruct the discourse of cultural realities controlled by the hegemonic, androcractic objectification of Others through language and imagery both of which are achievable and realistic using the same medium of communications used by colonizing agents use: words; and not always our own but those who came before us. It may be theoretically

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accurate to believe words are "purely arbitrary…maintained by convention only" (Barry, 2009) but in praxis, not so much for it is our lived experiences that inform us. As the so-called formerly colonized nations seek to continue building, capitalist development does not come without a cost. It requires a continued violation of previous social contracts which in most cases it had earlier helped to create and sustain; leaving behind every manner of social and technical debris, disrupting human continuities and settlements, moving on with brash confidence to its always novel enterprises (Royster, 2017) Creating socialized classes of people; sowing cultural and intercultural divisions to give the appearance of peacemaker while using rhetorical violence (i.e. sanctions) to justify the invasive practices and exploitative representations (2017) in the name of progress. It is the art of domination.

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