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- Convenors:
-
Anna Seiderer
(University Paris 8)
Lotte Pelckmans (Copenhagen University)
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- Discussant:
-
Mads Anders Baggesgaard
(Aarhus University)
- Stream:
- Arts and Culture
- Location:
- Chrystal McMillan, Seminar Room 1
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 12 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel explores the imagined connections and/or ruptures between past and present African slavery and their representations in images/the Arts (visual, performative, written).
Long Abstract:
While a vast body of literature now exists on the visual and literary cultures of both past and present legacies of slavery in the US (e.g. Zabunyan 2004, Cederholm 1973, Tawil 2016) an explicit focus on (west) African artistic expressions and representations of historical and contemporary forms of slavery seems to be more shallow, scattered and difficult to find.
The panel thus proposes to explain the seemingly representational gap between Africa and US by connecting the potential for imaginations of slavery with the actual images of slavery in the African context. With potential imaginations of slavery, we mean the temporal, spatial, socio-political and institutional ways (memory politics, funding, regions and historical conjunctures) in which African forms of slavery have been or are -allowed to be- imagined and their impact on the accessibility and/or production of artistic work. We understand both art works (visual, performative) and (literary) texts (including pamphlets, songs, testimonies, activist reports) as images in the sense that they represent a certain form of imagination.
We welcome papers examining images, i.e. the various archives of artistic expressions (written, visual, performative) on either historical or contemporary forms of slavery produced on the African continent, for example investigating how (inter-)national patrimonialization, commemoration politics (Bortolotto 2011; Ciarcia, 2016), or human rights and humanitarian discourses have influenced the (in-)accessibilities and (mis-)interpretations of these images. In so doing, the explicit connections (or ruptures) between arts and African slavery understood as a "scarce resource" (Appadurai 1981), can be established.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 12 June, 2019, -Lotte Pelckmans (Copenhagen University)
Paper short abstract:
Several anti-slavery organisations are active in West Africa and they all increasingly face the challenge and task to include visuals in their campaigns. I analyse the visuals used by three anti-slavery movements (Mali-Niger) to explore political imaginations of the anti-slavery cause.
Paper long abstract:
The legacies of internal African slavery have a long history in West Africa and are only quite recently making their way out of the sphere of strong taboos, moving into more public realms of representation, recognition and mobilisation.
Several anti-slavery organisations are active in West Africa and they all increasingly face the challenge and task to include visuals (symbols, 'proof', logos, membership cards) of present day 'slaves' and 'slavery' in their logos, websites, reports and so on.
Reasons for this increased need for visuals can range from the internationalization of their advocacy work over the visual demands of social media as well as the need to unite around symbolic values, not least vis-a vis the anti-slavery movements' national members, many of which are poor and illiterate.
In this paper, I focus on the visuals used by three anti-slavery movements -Timidria-(Niger), TEMEDT (Mali), and Gambannaxu fedde- RFMP (Mali)- to explore political imaginations of the anti-slavery cause. An important observation is that the visual tropes of chains and despair seem to be largely left out in favor of more context- specific visuals that tend to break away from, rather than establish connections to those used by other abolitionist, anti-slavery and human trafficking movements in other parts of the world. I will analyse the paradoxes of these visual 'subtleties' of the West-African anti-slavery imagination and mobilization by connecting histories of taboo with the expectations of consensus (cfr. Siméant), social cohesion and conformity in a morally fragmented post-slavery context.
Marta Fossati (Milan State University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses H.I.E. Dhlomo's short story "Farmer and Servant", a telling indictment of the exploitation of black labour in South Africa in the thirties and forties.
Paper long abstract:
Even though slavery had been formally abolished in 1807 in the territories of the British Empire, the native population of South Africa continued to be harsh exploited by white South Africans. The short story by the prolific native writer H.I.E. Dhlomo, written in the thirties but published only in 1985, focuses on farm labour in particular. My aim in discussing this paper is to show how racial categories have been used in South Africa to lgitimise slavery, even before the institutionalisation of apartheid. Dhlomo's fictional account of the plight of rural blacks in Boers' farms poignantly adheres to the conventions of verisimilitude. The short story, for instance, interestingly pinpoints the structural differences in the hierarchy of labourers, from the socalled "indunas" to recruited labourers. Apart from its engaging use of realism, "Farmer and Servant" further deserves scholarly attention. Indeed, it can be considered the fictional counterpart - and forerunner - of the journalistic reports on slave labour of the fifties - and particularly those by Henry Nxumalo. Thus, Dhlomo's piece of short fiction can be considered a valid example of artistic representations on a peculiar form of slavery in the African continent, namely farm labour in South Africa in the midst of the twentieth century.
Georgia Axiotou (Koc University)
Paper short abstract:
Being attentive to the historical trajectories of slavery's history in the West African region and the regimes of silencing imposed on its narrative, the paper foregrounds the ways in which West African authors return back to the event of transatlantic slavery and reinstate slave voices into history
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the relation between history and fiction from the perspective of a constituted forgetting of the history of slavery and its consequences on the formation of the West African imaginary. Shifting the centre of Black Atlantic studies by setting Africa as constitutive of slavery's narrative rather than its silent counterpart, it will explore the ways through which West African texts memorialize the loss of an irretrievable past that haunts the present. Taking Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments (1970) as a symptomatic instantiation of a text that pushes for new configurations of re-membering slavery, it renders visible the different formal and memorial strategies of African texts.
Situating the novel within Ghana's nationalistic discourse in the Nkrumah years, and the ways this discourse shaped the modes of remembering and forgetting that inform literary production, it will read Armah's retrieval of slavery's history as an act that interrupts the homogenizing tendencies of the nation's narrative towards the silenced aspects of its past. It will then turn to the novel's references to the slave castles that overshadow Accra and read the depictions of its urban landscape as a palimpsestic text in which silenced historical traces become apparent. Having exposed how Armah's text generates productive models for re-evaluating the role of literature as a vehicle of counter-memory, it will argue that post-independence Ghana exists in what Saidiya Hartman calls the "time of slavery" that is the persistent unfolding of slavery in the sustained stories of loss, violence and dehumanisation that characterise the neo-colonial present.
Karina Simonson (Vilnius University)
Paper short abstract:
The research explores the question of representation of trans-Atlantic slave trade and African slaves in Lithuanian visual culture. It raises the questions regarding sources of this knowledge and if/how it was reflected in the representation of Africans in Lithuanian art from 16th-21st centuries.
Paper long abstract:
My research explores the question of representation of trans-Atlantic slave trade and African slaves in Lithuanian culture. It is the first research on this topic in Lithuanian Humanities, therefore the following questions will be considered: Who at that time produced the knowledge about the trans-Atlantic slave trade and African slaves? If/how this knowledge was reflected in the representation of Africans in Lithuanian art from 17th-21st centuries? In order to understand the Lithuanian attitudes towards the slave trade I will first establish the categories, where the contacts and flow of information could have happen. Among those the most important will be:
1). City dwellers enjoyed the traveling African shows that have visited Lithuania as part of their European tour. Such performances could have provided a lump of imagination and talks to Lithuanian town dwellers, but without constant support from the state racial propaganda, racist sentiment quickly drowned, leaving room for never-ending domestic anti-Semitism. 2). Lithuanian noblemen, who starting from 16th century quite often had one or two black servants in their mansions. 3). Lithuanian and Jewish travelers and immigrants to the USA and African countries, who brought back different stories and artifacts.
The most important works representing African slaves and servants will be presented and discussed. It will include few paintings of the black servants in the Lithuanian noble families, photographic collection of the "exotic" people held at the Vilnius University Rare Collection library, works by the contemporary Lithuanian artists on the concept of "slave", and others.