Rose’s Gift: Slavery, Kinship, and the Fabric of Memory

Authors

Mark J. Auslander, Central Washington UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Department or Administrative Unit

Anthropology and Museum Studies

Publication Date

3-3-2017

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.

Comments

This article was originally published in Present Pasts. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.

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

Journal

Present Pasts

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rights

© 2017 The Author(s).