University of North Carolina Press
Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery
Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery
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Behind the Big Houses of the antebellum South existed a different world, socially and architecturally, where slaves lived and worked. John Michael Vlach explores the structures and spaces that formed the slaves' environment. Through photographs and the words of former slaves, he portrays the plantation landscape from the slaves' own point of view.
The plantation landscape was chiefly the creation of slaveholders, but Vlach argues convincingly that slaves imbued this landscape with their own meanings. Their subtle acts of appropriation constituted one of the more effective strategies of slave resistance and one that provided a locus for the formation of a distinctive African American culture in the South.
Vlach has chosen more than 200 photographs and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey--an archive that has been mined many times for its images of the planters' residences but rarely for those of slave dwellings. In a dramatic photographic tour, Vlach leads readers through kitchens, smokehouses, dairies, barns and stables, and overseers' houses, finally reaching the slave quarters. To evoke a firsthand sense of what it was like to live and work in these spaces, he includes excerpts from the moving testimonies of former slaves drawn from the Federal Writers' Project collections.
Author: John Michael Vlach
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 05/28/1993
Pages: 278
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.75lbs
Size: 11.12h x 8.54w x 0.82d
ISBN: 9780807844120
Review Citation(s):
School Library Journal 11/01/1993 pg. 152
The plantation landscape was chiefly the creation of slaveholders, but Vlach argues convincingly that slaves imbued this landscape with their own meanings. Their subtle acts of appropriation constituted one of the more effective strategies of slave resistance and one that provided a locus for the formation of a distinctive African American culture in the South.
Vlach has chosen more than 200 photographs and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey--an archive that has been mined many times for its images of the planters' residences but rarely for those of slave dwellings. In a dramatic photographic tour, Vlach leads readers through kitchens, smokehouses, dairies, barns and stables, and overseers' houses, finally reaching the slave quarters. To evoke a firsthand sense of what it was like to live and work in these spaces, he includes excerpts from the moving testimonies of former slaves drawn from the Federal Writers' Project collections.
Author: John Michael Vlach
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 05/28/1993
Pages: 278
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.75lbs
Size: 11.12h x 8.54w x 0.82d
ISBN: 9780807844120
Review Citation(s):
School Library Journal 11/01/1993 pg. 152
About the Author
Vlach, John Michael: - John Michael Vlach is professor of American studies and anthropology and director of the folklife program at The George Washington University. His books include The Planter's Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings and The Afro-American Tradition in the Decorative Arts.
