Panel: Commemorating the African American Past Through Sacred Burial Sites and Rites

I am seeking to form (or to join) an AHA panel devoted to the commemoration of the African American past through burial sites or rituals. I am open to a panel that covers all geographies--including the wider African diaspora--and time periods, and which can include public history, arts, and media approaches. I examine the creation of a historical memory of nineteenth rural African American communities in the Midwest. Specifically, I examine African American cemeteries and houses of worship and how these actual sites--as well as replicas of them at a living history museum--construct a public memory of nineteenth-century rural midwestern African Americans. This memory blends a nostalgia for a midwestern "heartland," which is free of racism with a spirit of community revitalization among the descendants of these nineteenth-century people.