Alea Adigweme, MFA student in Interdisciplinary Studio Art at UCLA Zoom - Click here to register for the event.
In this presentation I explore how the dense vectors of material culture and spirit possession established in the crucible of the modern era continue to inform the decisions of millions of west Africans as they navigate everyday realities at home and abroad. In the first half of this talk, I explore emerging themes in “fetish […]
October 18, 5 pm Mario Biagioli (UCLA Law and Information Studies) (please note the later time) This paper moves from the recent findings of agnotologists (like the book Merchants of Doubt) about the post-WWII strategy by tobacco and oil companies to cast doubt about the scientific evidence concerning, respectively, the risks of tobacco smoking and the existence […]
Nov 1 Chris Willoughby (Huntington Library) "Collected without Consent: Imperialism and Enslavement in Harvard’s Medical Museum." Co-sponsored with the Atlantic field In 1847, upon his retirement, John Collins Warren gave his entire anatomical collection to Harvard’s medical school, including a collection of racial skulls that would grow to include more than 150 objects. In this […]
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Pirates which infest that coast’: Illicit Trade and Imperial Rivalry in Seventeenth-Century Western Hispaniola This presentation considers the illicit trade of tobacco and other goods from Western Hispaniola. French, Dutch, and English ships came from the 1560s to trade with the diverse groups living there—Indigenous, Spanish, and African. In response, in 1605-6, western and northwestern […]
Brett Rushforth, Associate Professor, University of Oregon “Consuming Colonialism: The Atlantic World in Sixteenth-Century France” Zoom RSVP Here
Beginning in the seventeenth-century, members of the Carmelite order adopted two ancient Ethiopian saints, Efigenia and Elesban. While their interest in ancient saints was tied to the order’s longstanding efforts to prove the antiquity of their order dating back to the Prophet Elijah, the inclusion of Ancient Ethiopia in these efforts tell a more complex […]
This talk follows Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Watara, a Timbuktu-born teenager who was enslaved in Jamaica from 1805 to 1834. Upon securing his manumission, Watara undertook a trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan journey, in a bid to return home. A close examination of Watara’s words and writings about him, and a reconstruction of his trajectory, provides insight into […]
Marc Hertzman, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign Flying Home? Palmares and the Afterlife Most histories of Palmares, the sprawling collection of settlements in Brazil that became perhaps history’s largest fugitive slave society, end in 1695, when colonial forces assassinated the famous rebel leader Zumbi. My book project plays the story forward […]
Marc Hertzman, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign Flying Home? Palmares and the Afterlife Most histories of Palmares, the sprawling collection of settlements in Brazil that became perhaps history’s largest fugitive slave society, end in 1695, when colonial forces assassinated the famous rebel leader Zumbi. My book project plays the story forward […]
Mika Lior, Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at the University of Malta "Circling With/In: Choreographies of Gendered & Regendered Agency in Bahian Candomblé" Based on history, dance studies methodologies and critical ethnography, this paper addresses choreographies of invocation and incorporation in the Afro-Brazilian ritual practice of Candomblé through the lens of indigenous feminisms and choreographic analysis. […]
