Unsilencing Slavery: Telling Truths About Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica

The Rose Hall Great House in Jamaica is famous for the legend of the White Witch of Rose Hall, but Celia E. Naylor's book explores the lives of the enslaved people who actually had a right to haunt the place. She offers a careful reading of Herbert G. de Lissers' 1929 novel and a critical analysis of the current tours at Rose Hall Great House. Naylor's interdisciplinary examination engages different modes of history making, history telling, and truth telling to excavate the lives of enslaved people, highlighting enslaved women as they navigated the violences of the Jamaican slavocracy and plantationscape.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 274 pages
Publication date: 01 July 2022
Publisher: University of Georgia Press

The Rose Hall Great House in Jamaica is a popular destination for tourists, with over one hundred thousand people visiting each year in search of the White Witch of Rose Hall. However, many of these visitors leave Jamaica haunted by the silences of the tour, and Celia E. Naylor, a historian, decided to write a history of Rose Hall that focuses on the enslaved people who had a right to haunt this place of terror and trauma. Naylor's interdisciplinary examination engages different modes of history making, history telling, and truth telling to excavate the lives of enslaved people, highlighting enslaved women as they navigated the violences of the Jamaican slavocracy and plantationscape. She examines iterations of the afterlives of slavery in the ongoing construction of slavery museums, memorializations, and movements for Black lives and the enduring case for Black humanity. Naylor has also created a website as another way for readers to explore the truths of Rose Hall: rosehallproject.columbia.edu.

Weight: 322g
Dimension: 151 x 229 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780820362151