Preservation as Wake Work

II.Preservation as Wake Work

Christina Sharpe describes the wake as the enduring afterlife of slavery—a spatial and temporal condition that shapes Black life through loss, precarity, and systemic erasure.¹ Wake work, in her framing, is the practice of attending to that condition with care. It is a methodology of witnessing, resisting, and remembering within systems that refuse to see. This section argues that preservation, in the context of Black land loss and cultural erasure, must be understood as wake work: a practice of care, refusal, and memory-making in the aftermath of dispossession.

Rather than restoring a fixed past, preservation as wake work tends to what remains—material traces, spiritual sites, cultural fragments, and ancestral infrastructures that persist in the face of disappearance. The overgrown cemetery, the collapsed roofline, the stories passed from elder to youth: these are not remnants. They are acts of survival. They carry forward the presence of people, practices, and places that institutions have long failed to protect.

On Daufuskie Island, this manifests in sites that are both sacred and precarious. Family compounds where multiple generations once lived are now subdivided or condemned. Homes passed through heirs property sit shuttered or deteriorating, not for lack of care but for lack of structural support. Cemeteries like the one behind the Robinson Family Home remain unmarked, vulnerable to overgrowth and encroachment. These are not peripheral spaces. They are the ground on which memory is made and kept.

Wake work, in this context, is not symbolic—it is spatial. It requires mapping what is unmarked, remembering what has been removed, and holding space for stories that have no archive. This is the work of Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson when she gestures toward a tree where a neighbor once lived or calls out the names of those buried beneath her feet. It is also the labor of immersive documentation: capturing not only what can be seen, but what must be narrated, interpreted, and held in relation.

Through field scanning, oral history, and digital annotation, Daufuskie3D builds a counter-archive of wake work. In one 3D scan, the collapsed ceiling of a Gullah home frames the sky like an open wound. An annotation notes where a family altar once stood. This is not a simulation of the past—it is a record of rupture, and a call to repair. These digital environments do not claim to restore wholeness. Instead, they trace what Sharpe calls “the past not passed”: the enduring presence of histories that refuse to stay buried.²

In doing so, wake work becomes a bridge—from memory to action, from loss to reparation.