Visual Materiality and Silent Memories

Searching for the Enslaved Victims in Plantation Spaces

Susan Burns Garza (Author)

Visual Materiality and Silent Memories

Searching for the Enslaved Victims in Plantation Spaces

Susan Burns Garza (Author)

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Description

Visual Materiality and Silent Memories provides a type of remembrance journey through plantation history to raise awareness of what is missing about the enslaved, and question what changes should be made in these spaces.

Visual representations can memorialize, marginalize, or ignore victims of cultural oppression. By refocusing the history of plantations on the enslaved, with the visual disjoint between the resurrected plantation glory and the downplaying of the enslaved experience in plantation spaces, Susan Garza uncovers how the victimization of the enslaved has previously been absent from the conversation. The visual research in this text aims to look differently at spaces we may encounter every day and seek out what we are unaware is happening as a result of the design of visual spaces.

Garza argues awareness of the silence of the victimization and how it can affect visitors is one way to build racial awareness. Memorial plantations have been called to reexamine deception through manipulation of events, as victimization has been basically written out of history through the visual focus in these spaces. This book is one answer to that call.

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Acknowledgements

Introduction
1. Come With Me and See What We May Find at a Plantation
2. Look, the Slave Cabins Were Right Behind You the Whole Time: Sequence
3. The New “Whitewashed” Cabins: A Safe Story? Depth
4. You'll Have to Go to the Swamp to Find the Victims: Distance
5. Rice in a Baby Food Jar? Perception
6. Counter Narratives/Counter Memories
Appendix A: Memorial Plantation Sites Visited and Research Conducted
Appendix B: Holocaust Concentration and Extermination Camps, and Memorials Visited

Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Product details

Published	10 Dec 2026
Format	Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition	1st
Pages	192
ISBN	9798216480372
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations	14 bw illus
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Susan Burns Garza

Susan Burns Garza is Professor of English at Texas…

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