The Lovell Archive
In the fall 2018 I joined the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation group at the University of the South (Sewanee), a six-year initiative investigating the university’s historical entanglements with slavery and slavery’s legacies. Recently discovered, the Lovell Family Papers at the William R. Laurie University Archives and Special Collections, bring forward archival findings of pre- and post-Civil War history tied to the Sewanee’s storied Lovell-Quitman family. These papers, including extensive plantation records and documents from the Lovells’ service in the Confederate military, came to the university’s archives through an association with William Storrow Lovell and his wife, Antonia, who was the daughter of John A. Quitman (1799-1858), a large slaveholder and one-time governor of Mississippi. Beginning in 1873, the Lovells maintained a home in Sewanee, “Sunnyside,” which was demolished in 1953 to make room for a dormitory.
The Students of the History 328: Slavery, Race, and the University class, led by Prof. Woody Register joined the research project focusing on the continuing impact of slavery’s legacies on the university and the community. After multiple meetings at the Special Collections Library, students worked in groups and presented their research as a sound performance in a public community screening on October 14 at the historic Sewanee’s Convocation Hall. For 45 minutes, students read the names of the enslaved. Complexity of representation remains a challenge. Amplifying the voices of the enslaved, traditionally not visible on photographs, solidifies our responsibility of locating the descendants of the enslaved associated with the Lovell-Quitman family, and recording their oral histories. In continuing working with the archive, I rely on my previous work which includes examination and photographic representation of specific political and cultural histories. These representations include photographic archives and related artifacts, which I treat as material to produce new images and installations. In this process, we are committed to collaborating with diverse communities, inviting conversations and community actions.
