Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site and creolization: the material and visual culture of archival memory

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site in Dresden, Ontario is dedicated to the life of Josiah Henson (1796–1883), a Reverend, abolitionist, and ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad. The Historic Site is also located on what remains of the Dawn Settlement. Creolization in the context of Trans Atlantic Slavery is thought to have occurred when select elements from the enslaved were mixed, intertwined and reframed with different sets of meanings within sites of enslavement, such that new identities, realities, and sensibilities emerged. Creolization also reflects a relationship between time and space, and the erasure of a past that is replaced by a hybridized present. How is Henson’s creolized (‘real’) life and his fictionalized (‘fake’) life as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’ imagined at the Historic Site? In what ways does erasure frame how we read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as both an archive and a novel?