It was my great pleasure to bring a session I originally organized for the SHA meetings to the AAA meeting, with my co-organizer Whitney Battle-Baptiste (UMass). I delivered a paper representing a theoretical updating of my earlier ideas on Rosewood as part of this session, in a paper titled “The Archaeology of Intersectional Violence: The 1923 Rosewood Pogrom in Historical Perspective.” Update: it was presentations like this that helped me frame my book, “The Rosewood Massacre: An Archaeology and History of Intersectional Violence.”Here’s abstract for the session: This session brings together archaeological work investigating how the intersection of multiple identities and social structures disadvantage individuals and communities in the past and present. Intersectionality is a critical-theory inspired approach to analyzing social inequality as the interaction of various identity constructs, and has found its greatest proponents among critical race theorists and black feminists. An intersectional analysis of modern individuals and communities presents a number of challenges for archaeologists and centers on our ability to accurately map and interpret various matrices of domination. Most researchers focus on particular social experiences and examine the ways race, class, gender, religion, age, and so forth impact specific social practices. The goal of this session is to explore the potential of these concerns within archaeology. How can researchers complicate the experiences of groups marginalized on the basis of race, class, gender, religion, and so forth? Such a project simultaneously requires and generates new theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and research questions.
We are particularly interested in papers exploring the following topics:
- archaeological investigations of conflicting identities (e.g., double consciousness)
- analyzing assemblages of oppression (e.g., intersectional violence)
- questions of scale and intersectionality in archaeology
- exploration of related concerns within archaeology (e.g., whiteness, privilege)
- research into the interaction between multiple forms of domination and resistance
- role of archaeology in combating the objectification of groups (e.g., standpoint theory)