A Received Grace (Slavery, Heirlooms, and the Feminine Labor of Forgetting)

In A Received Grace, Macushla Robinson examines the afterlives of transatlantic slavery through the intimate terrain of gendered family inheritance, material culture, and memory. Rooted in an investigation into an heirloom passed down through her own family, Robinson asks how everyday objects carry the legacies of colonial violence into the present. She brings together archival research, personal narrative, and cultural analysis to trace the histories embedded within inherited possessions and the social worlds they sustain. Robinson also reveals how whiteness is continually maintained through practices of inheritance, sentimentality, and selective remembrance, as well as the gendered dimensions of how white women in particular become active participants in the reproduction of racial hierarchies, family mythology, and structures of privilege. Moving between memoir, historical inquiry, and critical reflection, A Received Grace is a meditation on the persistence of colonial histories in domestic life and how to reckon with the material traces of slavery that inhabit the present.