Since the 1980s, the slavery past has been revisited in numerous literary works and artistic productions, sparking intense public debates over the meaning and commemoration of this painful and shameful chapter in the history of former slaveholding and slave trading nations in Europe and the Americas. Invariably the initiative for the remembrance of slavery has come from writers, artists, and social groups who identify themselves as descendants of the enslaved and whose investment in the memorialization of slavery is bound up with their own diasporic history and their minority position in the societies in which they live. Literary and artistic productions that bear witness to the slavery past, such as Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved and Kara Walker’s cut-paper silhouettes, as well as local and national slavery monuments, commemorations, and museum exhibits represent vital efforts to rewrite the master narrative of national history by reinscribing counter-memories into the hegemonic discourse. At the same time, precisely because their enslaved forebears were cut off from ancestral “communities of memory” (Patterson), African-American and Afro-European writers and artists are engaged in the production of a collective memory of slavery both to redefine themselves as diasporic Africans and to imagine transnational mnemonic communities and identities.
Rooster
Friday, 9.00-13.00 hr.
Lipsius Building room 203
Onderwijsvorm
The colloquium will take the form of a workshop, in which the students are expected to participate and contribute actively. As we are reading and discussing a number of historical, literary, and theoretical texts and viewing and discussing sample works of visual art as well as a couple of films together, students are expected to develop group or individual projects, on which they’ll give a presentation, and which will result in individual research papers.
Depending on their interests, students can, for example, apply a memory or trauma theoretical model to the analysis of literary texts and/or art works; do research on special museum exhibits on slavery or on recent attempts to integrate slavery history into existing exhibits; study representations of slaves and other people of African descent in painting (diachronically or synchronically) and explore the memory work they do; study the construction of race in black minstrel shows and literary deconstructions of the racial stereotypes produced by these shows; public debates about the memorialization of and/or reparations for slavery in the United States, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and/or France; literary and artistic revisionings of the Middle Passage; the interaction between historiographical paradigm shifts and the literary/artistic remembrance of slavery; the relation between the politics and aesthetics of slavery monuments and the (de)construction of communities and identities; and so on.
Leerdoelen
The imaginative return to the history of slavery is linked with, and has itself contributed to, the emergence of trauma theory and even the new, interdisciplinary field of memory studies. Drawing on the work of influential theorists of memory such as Pierre Nora, Cathy Caruth, James Young, Ann Rigney, and others, this interdisciplinary colloquium aims to study the role literature and art have played in the production and construction of the collective and public memory of slavery as well in its forgetting, both historically and more recently. Reading a number of literary texts from the nineteenth century to the present, from slave autobiographies to contemporary fiction, and watching two films, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Spielberg’s Amistad, we’ll discuss the ways in which these cultural productions define (and divide) mnemonic communities and (de)construct identities. We’ll also look at the ways the representation of slaves and other people of African descent in works of art and popular culture (black minstrel shows) have been crucial to the formation of a hegemonic collective memory, and how contemporary artists of African descent such as Faith Ringgold, Kara Walker, Lubaina Himid, and Willie Cole resist and signify on these earlier images and stereotypes and revision and renegotiate the slavery past. Finally, we’ll try to place these literary and artistic acts of remembrance in the context of public debates about the commemoration of and reparations for slavery and the development of local and national slavery monuments throughout the Atlantic world.
Toetsing
Presentation and paper
Informatie
Dr. J.C. Kardux: j.c.kardux@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Or: Secretary’s office of Pallas, Institute for Art-Historical and Literary Studies, P.N. van Eyckhof 3, room 104a. Tel. +31 (0)71 527 2166. E-mail: pallas@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Students are requested to register at the Pallas office.