Short Abstract

Reparations depend on what counts as harm, and how knowledge about slavery is produced. This panel explores how bodies, memories, landscapes, objects and songs recover marginal histories, reshape understandings of gendered harms, and raise questions of epistemic repair.

Long Abstract

What does it mean to seek reparations for slavery when our understanding of its harms is shaped by how knowledge about slavery has been produced, preserved and transmitted?

Reparations discourse has addressed the political, economic, and developmental consequences of slavery. Yet what must be repaired depends on whose histories, experiences and knowledge forms are recognised as evidence of harm. Under slavery and colonialism, dominant knowledge systems denied African dignity, agency and intellectual contributions while producing ideas that justified slavery, racial hierarchy and colonial domination. This epistemic hegemony has endured, shaping what knowledge is valued and whose harms become visible. Methodology is therefore political: how knowledge is produced and validated shapes what harms become visible, and what forms of repair become thinkable.

What if such knowledge extends beyond colonial documents to bodies, families, landscapes, objects, oral and musical traditions such as Negro spirituals as repositories of memory, experience and coded communication? Photographs, bodily marks, language, genealogies, castles and plantations likewise can preserve traces of violence, survival and resistance. These prisms of knowledge may recover histories marginal to official archives while challenging established understandings of harm and repair.

Gender is central to this question because the production of knowledge about slavery has shaped which gendered harms become visible. Enslavement involved the regulation of sexuality, reproduction, motherhood, fatherhood, kinship and family alongside forced labour. Bringing these experiences and forms of knowledge into reparations discourse raises questions about whose harms are recognised, what forms repair should take and whether reparations must entail epistemic repair.

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