In Visual Materiality and Silent Memories: Searching for the Enslaved Victims in Plantation Spaces, Susan Burns Garza offers a compelling and timely examination of how plantation memorial spaces visually construct public memory through both presence and absence. Drawing on the visual-material rhetorics framework, Garza demonstrates that the silencing of the violence and victimization experienced by the enslaved is not merely an omission but a material and rhetorical condition that continues to shape historical consciousness and contemporary understandings of race. By thoughtfully applying visual-material rhetorics to plantation memorial spaces, this book makes a significant contribution to scholarship on visual rhetoric, material rhetorics, memory studies, and public memorialization, revealing how the design of these spaces participates in the production of meaning, historical narratives, and collective remembrance. Garza's thoughtful analysis challenges readers to reconsider what – and who – is made visible in memorial landscapes while demonstrating how visual-material analysis can illuminate the rhetorical and material consequences of historical silences in ways that are both theoretically rigorous and socially consequential. This is a timely and important contribution that will resonate with scholars of rhetoric, memory studies, public history, critical race studies, and anyone interested in the rhetorical power of visual and material representations to shape our understanding of the past and its enduring effects on the present.

Eda Ozyesilpinar, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition, Illinois State University, USA