Mammoth Cave's Black Power

Lara Langer Cohen’s paper, “Mammoth Cave’s Black Power,” considers Kentucky’s famous cave as an unexpected site for nineteenth-century theorizations of racial blackness. Mammoth Cave became a major tourist... [ view full abstract ]

Lara Langer Cohen’s paper, “Mammoth Cave’s Black Power,” considers Kentucky’s famous cave as an unexpected site for nineteenth-century theorizations of racial blackness. Mammoth Cave became a major tourist attraction in the 1840s, generating a host of guidebooks, travel accounts, magazine illustrations, panoramas, newspaper articles, and fiction. Crucial to its fame was the fact that the guides who led visitors through the cave were enslaved men, who methodically choreographed the visitors’ subterranean experience. This paper explores how white writers consistently conflated the cave with its guides, racializing its vast subterranean space in visions—variously fearful, fascinated, and burlesqued—of insurgent Black power. At the same time, it considers these texts as fraught co-creations, whose imaginative parameters were established by the guides’ own production of the cave’s space. However reluctantly, these accounts glimpse in Mammoth Cave what Katherine McKittrick has theorized as “black geographies,” which pressed in on the writing of the cave’s white visitors and demand our attention, even as we cannot definitively grasp them. Shading from the spatial into the cultural and political, the antebellum visions of a Black underground animated by Mammoth Cave both anticipate subterranean imagery that would become so crucial to Black Studies—consider Édouard Glissant’s “abyss,” Sylvia Wynter’s “underlife,” and Frantz Fanon’s famous definition of what it means to be Black, “I am truly a drop of sun under the earth”—and hold forgotten theoretical possibilities of their own.