Team Member Names, Titles, and Institutions:

• Isaac Cohen, Assistant Professor, Auburn University, Landscape Architecture

• Teri Edwards-Hewitt, Adjunct Professor, Montgomery College, Anthropology

• Kiana Murphy, Assistant Professor, Brown University, American Studies

• Nicholas Serrano, Assistant Professor, University of Florida, Landscape Architecture

• Stina Soderling, Assistant Professor, Texas Woman's University, Women’s/Gender Studies

OVERVIEW

Module Abstract: Place and frame of inquiry:

Shockoe Bottom is haunted by a multifaceted history. One of the oldest neighborhoods in Richmond, Virginia, this land was originally inhabited by the Pamunkey people before it was dispossessed by European colonists. Its location as the furthest inland navigable port saw it become a center of commerce in the 18th century. Dispossession led to the exploitation of enslaved labor as Shockoe Bottom served as a hub for slave trade in the Upper South, the largest slave market outside of New Orleans. But Shockoe Bottom was also a site of resistance, as witnessed in Gabriel’s Conspiracy, and a site of repression in Gabriel’s ultimate demise. Traces of these histories haunt the present: the remnants of Lumpkin’s Jail, periodical flooding and storms such as the one that thwarted Gabriel’s plan, and the prospect of a baseball stadium built on African Burial Grounds.

Drawing on the work of Avery Gordon, this module asks students to read these traces through the frame of haunting. Gordon understands haunting as both “language and the experiential modality…an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known.” Haunting alters our linear experience of time, where past, present, and future converge in the experience of place and demands attention.[1] To Gordon, hauntings are “living and breathing in place hidden from view: people, places, histories, knowledge, memories, ways of life, ideas.” Drawing on Gordon’s coupling haunting with futurity, this module asks students to move beyond conventionally negative associations with haunting (such as grief and loss) by focusing on the generative properties of “what haunts” as a prompt for action (106).

Following Ujijji Davis’s essay “The Bottom,” (2018) this module considers Shockoe Bottom as a place that describes the historical and cultural context of racialized violence and oppressive policies and practices that inform geographic landscapes (and other “Bottoms”) across the United States. In this way, the module is both specific to Richmond, Virginia but can be broadly adapted to read and examine places across other geographies and historical sites. Through a series of readings, discussions, and guided site visits, students will: 1) assess the relationship between histories and hauntings; 2) examine how histories manifest in experiential hauntings of place; 3) Create a Zine to document and explore their experience of place; and 4) assess how embodied experiences of place alter our understanding of the archive and vice versa.