Department or Administrative Unit
Anthropology and Museum Studies
Document Type
Article
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Author Copyright
© 2017 The Author(s).
Publication Date
3-3-2017
Journal
Present Pasts
Abstract
One of the most evocative objects in the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture is an embroidered cloth bag that has come to be known as “Ashley’s Sack”. Stitch-work on the bag, signed “Ruth Middleton”, recounts the bag’s painful history, as a gift presented by an enslaved woman, Rose, to her daughter Ashley, when Ashley was sold at age nine in South Carolina. This paper explores ‘Ashley’s sack’ as an object of history, memory, ritual action, and aesthetic creativity.
Recommended Citation
Auslander, M. (2017). Rose’s Gift: Slavery, Kinship, and the Fabric of Memory. Present Pasts, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/pp.78
Included in
African American Studies Commons, American Studies Commons, Museum Studies Commons, United States History Commons
Comments
This article was originally published in Present Pasts. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.