• Notes on the African Burial Ground National Monument, New York City
• Erich Kessel Jr. (bio)

What does a national monument to a forgotten slave cemetery confer upon the history to which it refers? And what does the form of the monument itself do to how we are meant to grasp this history? In a germinal form, these questions occupied me as I approached the African Burial Ground National Monument, a structure that takes up about a quarter of a small block enclosed by Duane and Reade Streets in New York City amid a towering complex of federal administrative buildings. The monument sits atop a larger span of land that, following a 1697 law in the recently established Province of New York, became a burial plot for slaves and free blacks who had been banned from being interred alongside white parishioners.¹ Andrea Frohne’s history of the site points to a 1735 map that marked the plot as the “Negro Burying Place,” reflecting its situation within the racial geography of Manhattan’s sprawling slave estate.² After 1794, the burial ground was closed and within a century became a plot that would be occupied successively by a department store, a credit reporting agency, and finally a federal building—each erecting an architectural stage in a process of forgetting that transmuted slave society into a multicultural democratic space. Preparatory excavation for a new federal government structure in 1991 once again unearthed the racial history of the plot. The site’s 300-plus year history thus is an archive of this forgetting, and this is the problem that the monument seeks to redress.

The monument project was set in motion when the site was named a National Historical Landmark in 1993, following a law signed by George H. W. Bush halting further construction on the plot after two years of protest over the destruction of what Black community members saw as sacred ground. In years following this new designation, researchers at Howard University partnered with General Services Administration (GSA) officials to conduct extensive archaeological research to attempt to reconstitute a history of the erstwhile Negro Burial Ground; their excavations suggested the presence of as many as 15,000 skeletal remains on the site. From this process, a total of 419 skeletal remains were exhumed, and later reinterred in a 2003 ceremony when [End Page E-47] the memorial site was officially dedicated. As an event that drew on West African funerary practices and traditional African religious sites, the ceremony was intended to re-sacralize the space, establishing it as a place of reflective contemplation.

As the future of the site became a question at various levels of government, the nomenclature tied to the location shifted—from the “Negro Burial Ground” to the “African Burial Ground.” For Frohne, this shift marks the influence of pan-African and Afrocentric community organizations in the process of protecting the plot; the framing of the space more broadly was shaped by a desire for “a return to Africa (at times a homogenous one)” that could unite the varying arts, cultures, and spiritualties of the diaspora.³ Such a desire played a central role in the design competition run by the GSA for the creation of a monument. The proposal that won the competition was designed by Rodney Léon, a Haitian American architect, in association with Nicole Hollant-Denis and AARIS Architects. Through its visual and processual design, their plan for the site pursues one kind of affective relationship between the Black diaspora and Africa as a lost homeland, wherein the imagination and performance of a return to West Africa repairs an experience of absence, lack, and forgetting.

Understanding the aesthetic potentialities of monumentality helps to illuminate how the architects recruited monumental form for the project of remembrance. Writing in early twentieth-century Vienna, the conservationist and art historian Alois Riegl offered a paradigmatic description of the monument. For him, the category defined “a work of man erected for the specific purpose of keeping particular human deeds or destinies (or a complex accumulation thereof) alive and present in the consciousness of future generations.”⁴ His is a distinctly anthropocentric definition of monumentality, and it also implies that...

• 纽约市非洲墓地国家纪念碑的笔记
• Erich Kessel Jr.（生物）

一座被遗忘的奴隶公墓的国家纪念碑赋予了它所指的历史什么？纪念碑本身的形式对我们如何理解这段历史有什么影响？当我走近非洲墓地国家纪念碑时，这些问题以一种萌芽的形式占据了我，这个建筑占据了纽约市 Duane 和 Reade 街包围的一个小街区的四分之一，位于高耸的联邦行政大楼群中。这座纪念碑坐落在一块更大的土地上，根据 1697 年在最近成立的纽约省的一项法律，这块土地成为了奴隶和自由黑人的墓地，他们被禁止与白人教区居民一起埋葬。¹Andrea Frohne 对该遗址的历史指出了一张 1735 年的地图，该地图将该地块标记为“黑人墓地”，反映了它在曼哈顿庞大奴隶庄园的种族地理中的情况。² 1794 年之后，墓地被关闭，在一个世纪之内变成了一块地，先后被一家百货公司、一家信用报告机构占据，最后是一座联邦大楼——每一个都在忘记那个变态的奴隶的过程中搭建了一个建筑舞台社会进入多元文化的民主空间。1991年为新的联邦政府结构进行的筹备挖掘工作再次发掘了该地块的种族历史。因此，该遗址 300 多年的历史是这种遗忘的档案，这也是纪念碑试图解决的问题。

这座纪念碑项目于 1993 年被命名为国家历史地标时启动，此前乔治·H·W·布什 (George HW Bush) 签署了一项法律，在对黑人社区成员视为圣地的破坏进行了两年的抗议后，停止了该地块的进一步建设。 . 在这一新名称之后的几年里，霍华德大学的研究人员与总务管理局 (GSA) 官员合作进行了广泛的考古研究，试图重建昔日黑人墓地的历史；他们的发掘表明，该遗址上存在多达 15,000 具骨骼遗骸。在这个过程中，总共挖掘出 419 具骨骼遗骸，后来在 2003 年的一次仪式上重新安葬[End Page E-47]纪念地正式投入使用。作为一项借鉴西非丧葬习俗和传统非洲宗教场所的活动，该仪式旨在重新神圣化该空间，将其打造为一个反思沉思的场所。

随着该遗址的未来成为各级政府的问题，与该地点相关的命名法发生了变化——从“黑人墓地”变为“非洲墓地”。对 Frohne 而言，这一转变标志着泛非和以非洲为中心的社区组织在保护地块过程中的影响力；更广泛的空间框架是由“回归非洲（有时是同质的）”的愿望所塑造的，这种愿望可以将侨民的不同艺术、文化和精神联系起来。³ Such a desire played a central role in the design competition run by the GSA for the creation of a monument. The proposal that won the competition was designed by Rodney Léon, a Haitian American architect, in association with Nicole Hollant-Denis and AARIS Architects. Through its visual and processual design, their plan for the site pursues one kind of affective relationship between the Black diaspora and Africa as a lost homeland, wherein the imagination and performance of a return to West Africa repairs an experience of absence, lack, and forgetting.

了解纪念性的审美潜力有助于阐明建筑师如何为纪念项目招募纪念性形式。环保主义者和艺术史学家阿洛伊斯·里格尔（Alois Riegl）在 20 世纪早期的维也纳写作，对这座纪念碑进行了范式描述。对他而言，该类别定义为“为保持特定人类行为或命运（或其复杂积累）的特定目的而建立的人类作品，并存在于后代的意识中。” ⁴他是一个明显以人类为中心的对纪念性的定义，它还暗示...