A lot of people know about me, but very few people know of me.

Nino Guruli unexpectedly became one of those few people. And now I have lost one of those few people, since she passed away yesterday at 41 from a breathtakingly quick and aggressive cancer. Even typing this out leaves me light-headed with shock and grief. And a significant amount of vulnerability that I am not used to allowing myself to feel or reveal. Considering the tender parts of myself that our friendship touched upon related to being illegible women, it is with this memory that I send off women’s history month—that commemorative month that doesn’t quite capture the still complicated, difficult, and tricky idea and identity of “woman.”

Last week, I participated in a panel about archives at the Museum of African American History, in partnership with Queer History Boston, which followed a screening of Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 film The Watermelon Woman. I hadn’t seen the movie in over a decade, having first encountered it as an undergrad in a Black film history seminar that paired Dunye with Isaac Julian’s Looking for Langston, Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, and Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle. Black cinema that was archivally rooted in the history of Black performance and representation, and excavating the interiorities of early Black celebrities and actors, while also grappling with the exegencies of the business of filmmaking. Dunye’s film in particular was a journey of where do Black women—and Black lesbian women in particular—appear in the archive. What are those absences? Where are those silences held? And who determines what is and is not a legitimate archive?

Despite spending the better part of almost twenty years circling these questions, first as a novelist, then as a museum/archives professional, and as a doctoral student, I am always surprised by how I answer these questions. Truthfully speaking, these questions that have nagged at me for so long begin with the women in my family. Several generations of subterfuge and painstaking reconstruction of stories about themselves and sometimes outright blatant lies. Piecing together who they are or were, is why I still feel I myself am fragmented, parts of me scattered across the women who’ve concealed and withheld, and thus, withheld me.

I tell myself that I am not a historian. The discipline of history has held itself as arm’s length from me, forcing me into this push-pull dynamic of rebellion alternating with longing for acceptance. And yet, watching the main character in The Watermelon Woman transition from general knowledge to intimate knowledge of this lost Black actress through a methodology blending oral histories, archival clippings, and finally, the community that held this actress’s life—I suddenly saw myself.

One of the audience members asked—how do you know? If there is no complete archive—how do you know what happened?

In the moment, I cited Saidiya Hartman’s tool of "critical fabulation,” a speculative, archive-grounded methodology that holds the knowing and the unknowing—and the reasons for both. Even though this methodology and others like it focus on the history of slavery, it remains integral to the work of doing women’s history (or the histories of other marginalized communities). My career has shifted between private collections and major institutions. I was one of nine curators hired by the Smithsonian Institution as part of an initiative to bring more women’s history into the museums and sites. And yet, the same questions persisted—where are women, how are women captured, what do women leave behind of themselves?

Metadata isn’t neutral. Cataloging isn’t neutral.

My work on Black women tends to these questions in the context of Darlene Clark Hines’s culture of dissemblance, the silences around a particular violence they—we—have faced for centuries.

And yet, the demands of history place a particular pressure on naming the unknown, of making legible the unseen, of indexing the unruly.

Nino and I met in Chicago the summer of 2021 shortly before I moved to DC to begin my position as women’s history curator at NMAAHC. I seem to have a knack of leaving an impression on people, because a few months later, I get a DM:

A key personal lore is that I was raised very religious and very sheltered (there’s a whole other story about that), and the only non-church related people who understood not being allowed to do this or go here or wear that or watch this, etc have been the children of immigrants. I still regret not going to dinner at this Georgian restaurant with her—we never seemed to make our busy schedules align after the first year of hanging out. But we bonded particularly over what it meant to be illegible to wider society as unmarried/unpartnered childless women over 35. Last year I sobbed in a therapy session about the unfairness of “beating” my family’s history of the women being married and mothers by 25 and taking out their lost dreams and individuality on their children. And that I emerged professionally, culturally, and personally successful to realize that there was no one waiting on the other side. That while it’s never “too late,” there is a particular way of being a woman who has never been defined by a man or motherhood that makes you dangerous. You are a site of suspicion. You refuse being indexed by society (and I experienced this two years ago with the first and only man I ever thought about marrying and even having children; things went south when I realized I was supposed to be an accessory to his ambitions).

Most of the women whose archives I have handled or processed have been wives and mothers. It is because of their children that their lives were preserved and documented during their lifespan and after their death. And so I sit with the complexity of this while also grieving the thought of who archives my friend? Who indexes her and makes her legible to the record? And maybe these questions are answered by a film like The Watermelon Woman, by queer archival practices that refuse the cataloging, the metadata, the LOC or Getty object schema that only know how to process the kinds of lives that are said to be properly indexed.

That at the end of the day, Nino Guruli was my friend, she mattered a lot to me, and that if someone wants to know about me, they should know about her.

Performances of the Semiquincentennial

This past weekend, I closed out Black History Month and kicked off Women’s History Month with two events that speak deeply to who I am as a curator and as a scholar in the 250th anniversary of the United States.

Score I—Gamin (Joy Street), 2026

Score II—Mother and Child (Passages), 2026

Score III—African Dancer (Sanctuary), 2026

by jonathan gonzález

in Magical Thinking, of Systems and Beliefs organized by Dr. Laurel V. McLaughlin

Photo from surfacing site: A discussion on "suite for a minor meeting" with Jonathan González, Angela Tate, and Phillip Howze at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (February 25, 2026)

For the most part, graduate school doesn’t tell you the WHAT or WHY of citational practices. Just the WHO, WHERE, and HOW.

As much as I study Black feminist theory, the what and why didn’t fully click until I spent the past 4-5 weeks moderating and speaking on panels in Boston, Worcester, and NYC. Each time, I found myself repetitively reaching for the scholars whose works have inspired me and the conversations with colleagues and interlocutors with whom I’ve worked closely over the years.

It wasn’t a showy moment of “here’s what I’ve read” or “here’s what I’ve written/curated”—it was a generous acknowledgement of the thinkers upon whom my work rests. The people whose ideas and experiences and works took me down paths I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. Or at least would have taken longer to travel down without them.

This was never more visible than in the almost 18 month process of collaborating with Laurel V. McLaughlin and jonathan gonzález on “suite for a minor meeting.” I wrote about this piece and this process with them. I sat through several rehearsal sessions. I thought alongside them even up to the day before the performance debuted. Those candles everyone carried? Me being inspired by watching the performers whom jonathan choreographed to engage with the shadows of the museum during the dress rehearsal.

Ifeanyi Epum, countertenor

What we all joyfully, reverently witnessed on Saturday wasn’t just the brilliant piece that jonathan constructed in the African Meeting House, but my own embodied experience of moving to Boston and—as I shared on the surfacing site panel—my first encounter with the city being the built environment of the early Black community. Seeing the multiple citations embodied and embedded into how we engaged with each other and the meeting house was astonishing.

When I was adamant that my methodology was to be included in “Black Voices of the Revolution,” it was initially to show my work. To make visible the choices I had to make in order to surface the voices of Black people in the early colonial period. I never expected that explicitly citing Marisa Fuentes was considered a revolutionary act in an exhibition (no pun intended).

photo credit: Denise Douglas for the Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket

It was unintentional that this collaborative performance coincided with both the centennial of Black History Month and the 220th anniversary of the African Meeting House in Boston. Adding the semiquincentennial (or America 250) to the list of commemorative events of 2026 is merely serendipitous.

This past Sunday, I joined a slate of impressive scholars at the New-York Historical Society for the 11th annual Diane and Adam E. Max Conference on Women’s History. The theme was Liberty for All? Women in the Age of Revolutions.

It was a weekend, so the normal flow of visitors was to be expected. What I didn’t expect to encounter was an embodied performance of women’s revolutionary work via the living history installation of Cheyney McKnight.

McKnight stood near two tables of women busily enacting the workroom of a mantua maker, where she explained the process of dressmaking in the 18th century, textile history, the myths around dress, and also ties between fashion, the body, and slavery via runaway slave ads (a thread—another unintentional pun—I want to tug on in the future).

Once inside the conference, scholar after scholar (myself included) grappled with the issue and idea of the American Revolution (or, War of Independence, as Jennifer L. Morgan positioned). The lens of race and gender both complicates and obscures the straightforward intentions of A250 celebrations.

I wasn’t alive in 1976, but this commemoration of the bicentennial is why/when the African Meeting House was named a national landmark, public history became a professional career via the National Park Service, and Black, LGBTQ+, female, indigenous, etc scholars and communities began to question about whom history was about and for. I am reflecting on the almost meta-ness of A250 reacting not to 1776, but to 1976, where the complexity of the American Revolution and the historic sites developed in the aftermath of the bicentennial era are now threatened with dismantling.

These performances of the American Revolution mean more to the past, present, and future of this nation than ever before. As we turn to traditional (and nontraditional) archives to re-read the founding documents of what became the United States of America, this current era is also an archive. An archive of who we are in the context of our backward glances to the past. What gets preserved. What gets surfaced. What gets told.

Way back in the earliest days of my doctoral program, my first seminar was on early American history. By that time, I had committed myself to the twentieth century—it was fast, it was exiting, it had technology. And as someone raised in the DC area, I also avoided early American history because I’d had my fill of the “Founding Fathers” and the Civil War. But I found synergy between my museum work and this seminar when I started thinking about the actual material culture of the house museums and plantations and historic sites I was exposed to on school field trips (taking fourth graders to Mount Vernon and not telling us it was a plantation is an experience I still recount many many years later). Namely, that the furniture, the furnishing, the fashion, the food, the houses, the streets—everything—were fashioned by Black people or in the context of slavery.

The annual Met Gala for the Costume Institute is tonight, and there has been a lot of excitement about the theme and the accompanying exhibit, inspired by Dr. Monica L. Miller’s 2009 publication, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity.

In the introduction, Miller argues that the book contends with

“how and why black people became arbiters of style and house they use clothing and dress to define their identity in different and changing political and cultural contexts…the ways in which Africans dispersed across and around the Atlantic in the slave trade—once slaves to fashion—make fashion their slave."

Because of my interest in early twentieth century history, I had blogged about the dandy in that context, where men of the Edwardian and Belle Epoque eras found new ways of expressing masculinity at a time where society was in flux due to colonialism, technologies such as the camera, cinema, and electric light, immigration, the rise of department stores that democratized fashion, and rapidly shifting gender roles. I also blogged about the cakewalk, where African American performers flipped racial stereotypes from minstrel shows on their heads to poke fun at the ways in which the white gaze misinterpreted their behavior and style. My younger mind could not make the connections that I can make today, as a scholar, curator, and published researcher; in light of the The Met Gala’s theme, Miller’s thesis statement about how Black people used fashion to shape a new identity during a long history of denying humanity and equality did not occur outside of how white men in the US and in Europe constantly used fashion to shape their identities (around white supremacy, colonialism, eugenics, etc) to circumvent the increasing access of subjugated peoples to the same material culture they had access to.

A lengthy sentence to say that the material culture of the Atlantic world was a contested space for legitimacy, humanity, and power. The dandy wasn’t merely an affected figure, it existed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth—and twenty-first—centuries to reveal the tensions around what was masculinity and what was race? It is no coincidence that all of these anxieties around both were visible in the materialities of the growing modernity of Western society. One of my favorite academic texts is Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest where she discusses how the struggle for power in the British Empire can be found in ads for the soap brands advertised to white Britons and British subjects in Africa and Asia.

But to return to my ruminations on material culture and the materiality of Atlantic World, the ideas around representation of Black people, free and unfree, and how that intersected with adornment and self-fashioning are present in the physical objects circulating in abolitionist circles of the late 18th century. I wrote this several years ago when I thought my dissertation topic would be on the material culture of the Black Atlantic; I am returning to it again as I think through the Met Gala’s dandy theme.

Let us consider the Anti-Slavery Medallion manufactured by Josiah Wedgwood in the 1780s. The figure of a partially clothed enslaved man, kneeling, with chained hands raised in supplication, and the sentence “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” curving neatly over his bare head, is rendered in white jasper and black basalt—minerals Wedgwood favored in the late eighteenth century for the casting of the medallions and plaques of famous personages for mass consumption.1

Innocuous though it may seem to modern eyes—a pretty piece of the past at which to cast a passing glance whilst wandering through the European Decorative Arts gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago—; revolutionary its fashioning seemed to late eighteenth and early nineteenth century British abolitionists; a closer reading of the medallion raises questions not only about the commodification of a commodity, but the linkages of taste, civilization, and bondage. One can imagine how smart eighteenth century abolitionists felt as they purchased this fine Wedgwood piece, intending to display both their pleasure in possession of such an object and their personal politics to the public.

Yet, the object of the object, the objection of the object, the object of the objection—the black body—is only visible to satiate the tangible tangle of appetite and enslavement in the early modern world; the very blackness of the basalt molding of the enslaved man, set against the white jasper, reveals the subconscious Othering of blackness in material goods to reveal the whiteness of its consumers. To clarify, without Africans there would be no civilization—either in rendering the black body as legibly uncivilized in contrast to white bodies, or in black bodies existing as, to create, to supply, and to fashion the objects with which white bodies signified their modern, enlightened, civilized identities.

As bell hooks succinctly states in the essay “Eating the Other” in Black Looks: Race and Representation:

When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual practices affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the Other.

That historians of the early modern Atlantic tend to skate around this linkage of black materiality and the “consumer revolution”—and that meditations on blackness/whiteness, civilization, and consumption are more often found in interdisciplinary fields, such as literature, art history, or anthropology—speaks to the meanings history reads onto material culture. That is, the narratives privilege the stories told by the objects owned and collected by the elites and middle classes (clothing, utensils, jewelry, paintings, etc.), while casting the bodies literally owned by these selfsame subjects outside of the material space. Black bodies are at once stripped of their role in the global and domestic community as simultaneously consumed and consuming, and the Africanness of Atlantic World culture is underestimated.

Histories of the early modern Atlantic world, of slavery, and of consumption, consumerism, capitalism, and material culture rarely converge. When they do, they tend to drift together uneasily, as demands of traditional historiographies weigh on how to tell the story of this complex temporal and geographical area. Through the lens of material culture, I seek to address the linkages of civilization and slavery and consumerism in the eighteenth century, where the concept of modernity—or Enlightenment—and its physical expression via clothing, food, furniture, and other material goods, can only exist through the labor and production of the enslaved.

I argue that the civilization and respectability of the Atlantic World via material culture could only be performed by Europeans because of their consumption of the enslaved and the goods they produced. My thoughts work across the wood grain of the furniture and home goods created by enslaved craftspeople in the Atlantic world and give these craftspeople the starring role in the fashioning—literally—of the age of empire and revolution. When looking at furnishing, fashion, domestic spaces, and design and architecture they are the space where Black people’s labor helped white colonists and Europeans shape their ideas about their modernity and physically built modernity and self-fashioning.

Material Culture

The history of things—or, material culture studies—is a relatively new methodology, though its roots, as Dan Hicks argues, are embedded in the “museum-based studies of 'technology' and 'primitive art' during the late nineteenth century.”2 To recognize its origins is to understand why material culture can often be wedded to the ideas of “civilized” vs “primitive” (or folk) objects, which obscures the production of these objects by “primitive” peoples either residing in or transported to the New World.

Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello push against this obscuring of production, consumption, and trade in The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, mapping the history of things in the Atlantic World as spaces created by commodities, which “reconfigured geographies and brought into contact societies living at vast distances from each other.”3 Furthermore, these objects created “‘imagined spaces”—views where they were produced or where they were thought to have come from.” Unfortunately, Gerritsen and Riello’s examples reinforce the emphasis on the things left by elites and place the commodities in the context of the consumers more so than the producers.

Arjan Appaduri argues in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective for the emphasis to be placed on the traders as “critical agents for the articulation of supply and demand of commodities.”4 To take the middle ground approach, so to speak, positions material culture as a site of negotiation. We see this in Thornton’s text on Africa and the Atlantic, where trade with Europe was influenced by “prestige, fancy, changing taste, and a desire for variety” than a scarcity of industry or commodities. The geographic distance between Europe and Africa, as well as the interiors and the coast, determined the relationship between the explorers and traders of the nations; there was neither wholesale conquer nor naïve commercialism.

When opening up material culture to that perspective, the black body as material via the transatlantic slave trade becomes itself a site of negotiation. As a commodity. As a being. As African. As New World. As consumed. As consumer. The integration of the slave into the European household as thing and as labor blurred the liminal spaces of man and object, or even liberty and bondage.

Sidney Mintz argues in Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History that sugar created “two so-called triangles of trade...the first and most famous triangle linked Britain to Africa and to the New World...the second triangle” ran somewhat in reverse. But both trades involved human cargo—slaves:

Millions of human beings were treated as commodities. To obtain them, products were shipped to Africa; by their labor power, wealth was created in the Americas. The wealth they created mostly returned to Britain; the products they made were consumed in Britain; and the products made by Britons—cloth, tools, torture instruments—were consumed by slaves who were themselves consumed in the creation of wealth.5

In Empire of Cotton: A Global History, Sven Beckert characterizes the role slavery and slaves played in the “re-creation of the world”6 as war capitalism—that is, the violence and subjugation of Africans and Native peoples, coupled with the mechanization of production, built the modern Atlantic economy. Zara Anishanslin probes this a bit in Portrait of a Woman in Silk, but ultimately maintains the British-America relationship; however, she argues that early American history reveals itself to have “cut across regional distinctions”7 through the consumption of luxury goods, such as silk.

The creation of an American identity through material goods was part of the need for gentility, as Richard Bushman argues in The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. Gentility “bestowed power…it occupied a central position in a far-reaching cultural system…[and] objects or practices”8 bestowed gentility. As such, the ownership of slaves both permitted (funded) the practice of gentility and created the necessary contrast with which (white) gentility was defined and refined.

This contrast preoccupies Jennifer L. Anderson’s Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America. Far more than cash crops and sugar, this dark, supple wood marked a different kind of consumption and gentility. Mahogany, she argues, was “converted into substantial, long- lasting, material artifacts— physical things— that people gradually imbued with a range of cultural connotations that held shared meaning.”9 It is no coincidence perhaps, that abolitionists of the nineteenth century fixated on mahogany—its darkness, its harvesting, its uses, all spoke to the black bodies producing the luxury goods for the drawing rooms of the elite and the common areas of those aspiring to gentility.

Drawing on the burgeoning interest in the consumer or marketplace revolution of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the participation of the African diaspora as consumers reveals itself when you think about the dandy. Since Africans participated in transatlantic trade and, while in the New World, were clothed and fed, had visual—if not material—access to the latest goods and fashions, and frequently produced the foods, clothing, dyes, wigs, etcetera consumed by Europeans, the juxtaposition of their bondage and their adornment complicates the idea that Black people merely copied modern style. That, as many assumed during the rise of minstrel shows and the cakewalk, that they took their cues from white Americans and Europeans.

The dandy asks us to rethink and reconfigure beliefs about how Black people’s self-fashioning being in reaction to modernity instead of being the primary driver of it.

This was originally written in 2021, but revised in response to Meghan’s own Netflix productions.

It’s not a coincidence why the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have championed internet safety as one of the core pillars of their foundation. Since being exposed as Prince Harry’s girlfriend way back in late summer of 2016, Meghan (née Markle) has been the target and the subject of intense scrutiny—and racism and sexism. Dr. Moya Bailey developed the concept of misogynoir to explain the specific violences that Black women face, particularly in digital spaces. Bailey’s most recent work, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance, delves into the ways Black women have developed internet communities and methods to push back against the abuses and harassment.

The Glitch Charity, based in the UK, released a report in 2023 about digital misogynoir to demonstrate the harms against Black women online. They explicitly state:

Digital misogynoir is the continued, unchecked, and often violent dehumanisation of Black women on social media, as well as through other forms such as algorithmic discrimination. Digital misogynoir is particularly dangerous because of its ability to incite offline violence. For example, after spending time on far-right social platforms, white supremacist Dylann Roof went on to murder nine Black church members, seven of whom were women, while they were at bible study. In the UK, misogynoir has recently been prominent in the sustained and targeted harassment of Meghan Markle in the tabloid press and online.

Since 2016, the print and online media industries have built an empire on manipulating public perception of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. The fever pitch of digital abuse reached its peak in 2019 when Meghan was pregnant with her first child and again in 2020 when the Duke and Duchess of Sussex stepped back from their position in the British royal family to live independently in the United States. Since then, the digital harm has been steady, with spikes of intensity whenever the couple releases projects or emerges on the public stage together or separately (though Meghan’s appearances—and absences—are more substantially targeted than Harry’s).

The release of Harry & Meghan on Netflix in late 2022 gave the couple space to tell the story on their own terms, and also attempted to place their relationship—and specifically the racist and negative reactions to Meghan—in historical context. Black British thinkers Afua Hirsch [author of Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging] and David Olusoga (author of Black and British: A Forgotten History) drew links between the formation of race and anti-Blackness and the British empire, a history that continues to be contested and criticized by attempts to force Britain to reckon with its racial past. Dr. Corinne Fowler in particular has drawn controversy for the National Trust’s Colonial Countryside Project, which argues that “British country houses were influential centres of colonial wealth and bureaucracy.” All of which revises ideas about what is Britishness and what is the role of Black people in British history.

Meghan’s individual voice (on her podcast, Archetypes) drew the same abuses and spiked more digital misogynoir, and it has reemerged with the release of the trailer for her upcoming Netflix series, With Love, Meghan. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, millions of people turned to online spaces to make community and engage with others at a time when physical interactions were dangerous. Black and brown internet users participated in and developed cycles of online microtrends, with “cottagecore” being a particular microtrend and micro-community that young women in particular gravitated towards.

(Image credit: @styleidealist via WhoWhatWear)

Images of Black and brown women wearing prairie dresses, carrying flowers, making bread, enjoying picnics and tea parties, and otherwise indulging in pastoral frolics drew controversy. In her 2020 article in Lithium Magazine, Irma K pushed back on the critiques about romanticizing the past and pushing tradwife imagery, arguing that they

aren’t just glamorizing an aesthetic; they’re politicizing a lifestyle. The movement embodies an aesthetic, sure, but it promotes real, actionable choices. With its focus on sustainability and self-sufficiency, cottagecore shows that everyday actions have profound political significance.

This argument finds an echo in the other movement that emerged in 2020, where longtime vintage aficionado and band leader Dandy Wellington coined the phrase “Vintage Style NOT Vintage Values” in response to the experiences people of color and LGBTQ+ vintage lovers.

In Shondaland’s first production for Netflix, Bridgerton, the hero Simon, Duke of Hastings strides arrogantly into the frame, arches an eyebrow in response to witty repartee, and his muscled, well-dressed physique sends ballrooms of fluttering debutantes into a swoon.

To audiences accustomed to a steady diet of period dramas—often Jane Austen adaptations shipped across the pond to Masterpiece Theater—and historical romance novels, this is a familiar figure. A figure frequently duplicated across dozens of romantic historical entertainment inspired by the likes of Darcy, Heathcliff, Maxim de Winter, Rochester, and more. Simon’s cravats are starched and tied high, his carriage erect, his arrogance intriguing, and his glances are suitably smoldering—so why is this figure immediately rendered alien when these familiar visual tropes are performed by a Black man?

History has long been a battleground over the power vested in who controls access to narratives about the past; however, when history is materialized in popular culture, this battle is obscured under the demands for “accuracy.” Furthermore, historical popular culture has developed visual codes across decades over who does and does not belong in the rarefied worlds of royalty, aristocracy, and the other sumptuous settings favored by period drama and historical fiction aficionados. And as seen by the continued racism and harassment faced by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, this visual code has real world implications wherein what consumers envision of the past—and of fantasies about powerful, influential, elite spaces—through consumption of history-based entertainment transfers to opinions and assumptions about who should occupy the past (and these spaces) in everyday life.

Early reviews of the drama approached the series with the assumption that it was another Downton Abbey, or an “updated” period piece. Some early reviews did view it as a romance genre adapted and trotted out the stereotypes about “bodice rippers” that the genre has struggled to shake off forty years after its emergence as blockbuster fiction. The most vocal responses to Bridgerton have come from academic historians, a profession who has always had a contentious relationship with period dramas and other history-based entertainment.

Furthermore, the choice to make the fictionalized fantasy Regency setting include people of color (POC), a decision known in fandom circles as racebending, caused many scholars—particularly scholars of Haitian history—to decry the downplaying of slavery and colonialism, to discuss what changing the characters’ race means for the plot, and the erasure of Haiti and its own aristocracy in the early 1800s. Romance readers and writers also had their own conversations, many of which dealt with the issues of consent and translating Regency romance speak for audiences, not to mention the decades’-old debates about “accuracy” and POC in historical romance—and the sting of both Quinn’s rejection of POC in her novels on a panel at the 2018 Romance Writers of America conference and the backlash from Quinn’s readers when she revealed the casting of Regé-Jean Page as Simon. 

As a history blogger, a museum curator, a longtime reader and writer of historical romance, a period drama aficionado, and as someone soon to wrap up a PhD in History, I stand at the intersection of these debates. In particular, I remember the massive popularity of ITV’s Downton Abbey (2010-2015) and the uneasy response to the addition of Jack Ross (Gary Carr) in season four. Ross was an African American jazz musician who briefly romances the rebellious Lady Rose Macclare (Lily James), and his presence created a flurry of responses about “accuracy” and the interracial romance aspect. It doesn’t help that as the series wrapped up, an esteemed British actor opined that the show was popular in the US because it lacked Black characters. Coincidentally(?), Jack Ross also happened to debut on Downton Abbey at the same time the BBC premiered its 1930s jazz-based period drama, Dancing on the Edge, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as bandleader Louis Lester (Mr. Selfridge also made an attempt to be inclusive in its final season, set in the 1920s, with the introduction of Tilly Brockless).

(BBC’s Dancing on the Edge, 2013)

I used Edwardian Promenade as a vehicle to introduce viewers to the presence of Black people in interwar Britain and the influence of jazz ; however, the still-entrenched beliefs that period dramas—that the past itself—is the sole playground for white characters is entangled with the uses people make of the past, their anxieties about the present, and, to be frank, the way history is often weaponized in ways many don’t recognize except to understand that when they see the past, they attempt to see themselves. And current events have shown that this attempt has real-world implications, ranging from the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building to the targeted harassment of prominent women of color.

In 2015, when a friend asked if I wanted to take part in an anthology about Armistice Day, I immediately said yes! At the time, I was struggling with my writing career—primarily because I had started to become uncomfortable with the notion that I would have to only write about white aristocratic characters in order to be published. I had already self-published a two-part historical saga about a British family on the brink of WWI, and as much as I loved the characters there was still a part of me that felt I’d given into the pressures of the genre. I am happy with my contribution to Fall of Poppies, After You’ve Gone, but it was written in an incredibly self-conscious vacuum.

In that it was a moment to reflect on why historical fiction is so white, what do popular tropes and conventions mean for readers and writers, and what does it mean to insert POC into this? And as the sole woman of color contributor writing about characters who shared my background, the self-consciousness also included Representation—that old chestnut about having to be “the best” in order to prime readers to expect other authors of color to provide the same experience as a white author; mediocrity only supports the preexisting beliefs about “quality.” But overall, I also hoped that my inclusion was a strong argument that we were there too.

Ironically, this very argument is what causes so much uneasiness and disruption in Bridgerton. In episode four, a tête-à-tête between Simon (Page) and Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) attempts to explain why Black and Asian characters exist in this Regency world by drawing on the longtime belief that Queen Charlotte of England was of African descent. Tracing this African descent uncovers the underwritten stories about the African presence in Europe before the 20th century, but it also asks if Africans did exist in the Regency period, did the transatlantic slave trade also exist?

The handwaving over POC characters sits uneasily with the actual history of the early 1800s, while also contending with historical romance’s uncomfortable relationship with including POC—and the complete fantasy world that has been dubbed “Alamackistan” (which is why many ask why POC cannot be characters?).

Coincidentally, the first Lifetime fictionalized drama about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s relationship draws on this as well, with the movie ending with a scene of Queen Elizabeth II showing Meghan (Parisa Fitz-Henley) and Harry (Murray Fraser) a painting of Queen Charlotte in her palace. Bridgerton’s Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel) swans about palaces and ballrooms in a variety of hairstyles that reflect Black textures, from braids to locs to afros, further cementing the visual aspect of her supposed African heritage. These visual cues are even more fascinating when taken with the various responses to the neat locs (and nose stud) of Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland. 

We were apparently there too—we are there—but how? And why?

In April 2020, British writer Liv Siddall tweeted her dramatic exit from Instagram in response to seeing a photo of the then-unknown Paula Sutton, picnicking and reading a book on the verdant grass of her country estate in a wide-brimmed hat and green dress. Though Sutton’s face is covered by the hat, her limbs are clearly brown, marking her—through the eyes of Siddall and many others who chimed in—as undeserving, illogical, jarring in such a context. Sutton, a former fashion editor, used her Instagram to display her joys in her country life, her vintage decor, and her homemaking. In the context of the aforementioned survey on British country houses and slavery, the concept of a Black woman enjoying the lifestyle and housing that was and is marked as for whiteness, for power, and was constructed to conceal the slavery-generated wealth was inconceivable.

Perhaps the linkage can be viewed as less tenable in the case of the criticism of Meghan’s upcoming lifestyle show, which draws on similar visual rhetorics of romanticism and domestic life. California appears to be dissimilar to the British countryside—or was it? If you’re from the Golden State, you are aware of the many Spanish missions that dot the state from north to south, which are/were colonial sites of brutal oppression of indigenous peoples. Furthermore, much of the ideas around and about California were created by boosters in the early 20th century to encourage white settlement of the West to counteract the presence of Black and brown people. Dr. Paul J. P. Sandul describes this particular phenomenon in his book California Dreaming: Boosterism, Memory, and Rural Suburbs in the Golden State. Back in 2016, I was part of the team to reinterpret and reimagine how the California Citrus State Historical Park told the story of the citrus industry’s influence on California’s social, cultural, and economic growth, and the stories the state tells itself about who was involved in this history.

(Claremont Citrus Fruit Crate Labels - Claremont Heritage)

The image of Meghan participating in this storytelling has sparked controversy and claims about her pushing “tradwife” content. But is it criticism of the participation itself, or is it once again about a woman of color, a Black woman, utilizing the ideas and strategies that continue to be considered the purview of whiteness only and thus disrupting the belief that people of color—women in particular—are mere commodities that allow their oppressors to develop and enjoy prosperity?

Despite my many, many years of writing a history blog, I have learned each day that we are always experiencing history in fragments. Bits and pieces of stories passed down by relatives. Scrapbooks of photographs. Random odds and ends preserved and passed down. Someone once asked me how did archaeologists know what they were looking at when unearthing fragments from the ground. I am not an archaeologist. I spent one summer on a dig before realizing that I dislike heat and bugs and dirt. But I do remember that fragments can tell a huge story, one that connects something as mundane as a piece of broken pottery to the transatlantic slave trade and the housewares filling the homes of the elite and the international commercial trading routes and who lived where before it was bulldozed for urban renewal.

One wouldn’t connect fragments of history with a celebratory affair like the Black Professionals in International Affairs (BPIA) all-white jazz brunch, but the entire weekend revealed that while BPIA was celebrating its 35th anniversary, the presence of African Americans in foreign affairs remains an ephemeral idea to so many. In my remarks to Alexandria J. Maloney, president of BPIA (and one of my best friends), I noted how easily I was rerouted from a career in the field due to not seeing anyone who looked like me doing this work. Multiply this by dozens and dozens of people of color and women, and the viewing the work of not just 35 years, but of over one hundred years as a collection of fragments says there is still work to do.

Back in my undergrad days, I wrote a senior thesis on the role of the World’s Fairs in international affairs. Because of the racism of the period, African Americans were only allowed to participate in the 1893 Chicago fair in the Haitian Pavilion. Frederick Douglass was appointed minister to Haiti in 1889-1891—a political maneuvering by the Harrison administration that speaks to the US government recognizing early on that domestic relations with African Americans were being watched on a global scale.

Douglass was asked to speak at the opening of the Haitian Pavilion two years after resigning from his post, and his speech walked the tightrope that most had to walk: showing pride in being American while also acknowledging the linkages between the African Diaspora at a time when Jim Crow violence permeated the South while the US government also hoped to make allies of the Caribbean and Latin America (which had large Black populations).

About a decade later, poet and composer James Weldon Johnson was appointed US consul in Venezuela (1906-08), Nicaragua (1909-13), and the Azores (1912), on account of his campaigning for Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential campaign, and his fluency in Spanish (he was born and raised in Florida). There are only fragmented mentions of Johnson’s work as a diplomat, since history prefers to remember him as a novelist (The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man) and composer (he wrote “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” with his brother Rosamond).

After celebrating BPIA, where a few founding members shared their memories of 35+ years ago, it is obvious that the work of gathering these fragments and piecing them into something substantial remains an important part of celebrating historical moments.

Curator’s Corner

Transitioning from a large national institution to a small local institution has been an interesting shift. The stakes are similar, but operate on a different scale. Where many of my concerns at NMAAHC were how to translate a thematic history to a national—and often international—audience, my concerns now are how to distinguish this particular narrative for a regional audience that has its own ideas about their history. Prior to moving to and working in Boston, my concepts of the city and New England in general were vague snatches of happenings and people that are integrated into the larger American narrative: Salem Witch Trials, Plymouth Rock, the Mayflower, Crispus Attucks, Phillis Wheatley, the Kennedys, Lowell mills. Three months into my tenure as chief curator and director of collections, there is a lot of rich history—and an even deeper interpretation of those familiar events, places, and people.

Some deeper interpretations I am meditating on:

A Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs — an interdisciplinary and public performance project that explores the legacies of abolitionist Harriet Jacobs

The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters — I met the PIs of the project earlier this summer, since I was the curator who acquired the largest collection of PWP materials in a public institution. You can read my thoughts in Fine Books & Collections.

"Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom" by Ilyon Woo — a Pulitzer Prize winning biography on William and Ellen Craft, who escaped to freedom disguised as white man and his bondsman. The Crafts settled in Beacon Hill after leaving Georgia.

In tandem, one of the more fascinating personal discoveries as a curator and historian is that having lived in various regions of the US, I am curious about what threads we weave from different cities and states and places to create the fabric of “American history.” This is especially interesting as we approach the Semiquincentennial—or 250th—in 2026.

When you reflect on your own hometowns and places you’ve visited, what major narratives and themes have been pulled from that local fabric to become a national thread?

Other things I am thinking about: AI

The Museum of African American History was awarded $75,000 from the Massachusetts 250 Grant Program last month! The proposed exhibition, “Black Voices of the American Revolution,” will explore how to build an immersive digital experience to recreate the lives of Black Bostonians during the 1770-1815 period. There are many questions and thoughts about Artificial Intelligence, and I am doing my due diligence in maintaining an ethical standard for its use.

If you’re in the Boston area, my museum is hosting the annual MAAH Stone Book Award ceremony on Thursday, October 10 at 6:30 PM. This award celebrates the best in historical writing on themes related to African American history.

RSVP here.