WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly

Abstract:

In many white colonial and transatlantic families, heirlooms store wealth generated by, and at the expense of, the enslaved. Disconnected from their violent origins, such objects make wealth palatable, transmitting it down generations. This paper lays bare the domestic practices of inheritance, which encompass the keeping of and caring for objects, and selective remembering and silencing that endows heirlooms with filial significance. This intergenerational labor has largely been enacted by white women, and thus this paper argues that this labor of forgetting is a female technology—even if in service of a patrilineal genealogy.