Historian Tiya Miles traces four generations of African American women through a single cloth sack
In "Le Sac d'Ashley," the American historian reconstructs a family history spanning slavery and its long aftermath, starting from an ordinary bag passed down from mother to daughter.
The American historian Tiya Miles has published "Le Sac d'Ashley," a book built around a single object: a cotton sack handed down from mother to daughter across four generations of African American women, according to Le Monde. The sack, the newspaper reports, carries the imprint of both slavery in the United States and the difficult decades that followed abolition.
Le Monde describes the book as moving, noting that Miles uses the object to "make it speak," piecing together what can be known about the women who owned, used and embroidered it over time. The review gives no further detail on the sack's exact contents or the identities of the women involved beyond this lineage across generations.
No publisher, translator or publication date for the French edition is given in the available material, nor any information on the book's original English title or its release in the United States.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
