| Sumario: | In All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake , National Book Award-winning author and historian Tiya Miles transforms a Black family heirloom—Ashley's sack—into a profound archive for interpreting Black women's lived experience and American history. More than that, Miles's work reveals Black Americans' adherence to family and family love, and humans' perseverance and faith in love in times of adversity. Rather than simply focusing on the sack as a research object to analyze this monograph, I am interested in exploring the rich connotations of the sack and their relevant wider social, cultural, and environmental implications for American society, the Black world, and the human world at large. Taking the ambiguous main title of this book as a clue and following the traces left by the research object "she," this article reexamines the identity and agency of "she" from the perspectives of archival studies, Black feminism, Afrofuturism, history, material culture studies, and humanistic geography. I argue that, in All that She Carried , "she" is a fluid and subversive representation of life force with the agency to expose serious problems faced by Americans, Black people, and all human beings, as well as to resist racial and ecological oppression, thus promoting social justice and a sustainable future for both humanity and the earth.
|
|---|