Jeanne moutoussamy-ashe daufuskie island
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More Just and Joyful Futures:
Blossum Robinson’s Daufuskie Island
Before they touch the coast, the waves of the Atlantic break along the Sea Islands. It has been this way for five thousand years, since the end of an ice age led to rising water, and the Lowcountry’s highest ground reemerged as islands, separated from what is now known as mainland South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida by inlets, rivers, and salt marshes. These barrier and tidal islands shield the coast from storms, and their interaction with ocean currents nurture an abundant but delicate ecosystem for the people and creatures that live there. The same conditions that allow the Sea Islands to shield, sustain, and nurture life, however, also man them uniquely vulnerable to the ravages of climate change and the rippling consequences of pollution and commercial development.
In 1974, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe spent several months of her junior year of college making photographs in West Africa. On a visit to Cape Coast Ca
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Daufuskie Island
In the many years since 1982, when I first published Daufuskie Island, A Photographic Essay with the University of South Carolina Press, my experiences in the Gullah community have remained a presence in my thoughts, even if quiescent in my work.
The Gullah Geechee people’s exceptional position in American history remains unaltered. The Low Country culture is singular in how it brings African traditions that came over with the slave trade together with a rather isolated American experience. The Gullah language is one example of this synthesis. It mixes English and West African languages to create a new language distinctly separate from either parent language but bearing the mark of both. An additional example would be the prayer houses, the places of worship that mixed the christian religion imparted bygd slave masters and indigenous religious practices brought from Africa. The hybrid nature of the Daufuskie culture coupled with its seclusion as a
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Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and the Last Gullah Islands
Dec 5, 2024–May 2025
Since the early 1970s, artist, activist, and scholar Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (b. 1951, Chicago, IL; lives and works in South Kent, CT) has made photographs that testify to the beauty and complexity of Black life, honoring the rhythms of the everyday and marking important rites of passage for the people who appear in them.
In 1977, following an earlier six-month independent study in West Africa, Moutoussamy-Ashe traveled back across the Atlantic Ocean to Daufuskie Island, which sits between Hilton Head, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. There and on the other surrounding Sea Islands, she began making photographs among the Gullah Geechee—many of them descendants of the formerly enslaved people who acquired land from white plantation owners when they fled at the conclusion of the Civil War. For Moutoussamy-Ashe, these places, separated by the Atlantic, were inextricably linked, with the Sea Is