On the heels of the international conference on "Slavery in Africa" held in Kenya and Kwasi Konadu's Transatlantic Africa, which tells the story of transatlantic slaving through African optics and voices, this symposium brings together leading thinkers of global slaveries in the African world to share their work through a full-day of engaged dialogue, offering new perspectives and directions.
This program is sponsored by the Advanced Research Collaborative and the Ph.D Program in History. The symposium is free and open to the public. Seating is limited.
Welcome (9:45 am) by Helena Rosenblatt, Executive Officer, Ph.D. Program in History, CUNY Graduate Center
Panel 1 (10:00-12:00 PM): Economies of Slaveries and their Reverberations
Historians have for decades probed the economies of slavery in and outside of Africa and through new databases the quantification of this commerce has enriched both recent scholarship and teaching by providing accessible data spanning centuries, geographies, and key historic and societal patterns. Though this composite data is not without serious limitations, the datasets do help us to frame and figure out the economics of slaveries and how to grapple with their reverberations into our present. This panel features Catherine Hall (University of London), Warren Whatley (University of Michigan), and Joseph Inikori (University of Rochester) to discuss their ongoing work on the economics of slavery and their reverberations in the form of reparations and slave-ownership in the shaping of modern societies. Moderated by Kwasi Konadu, ARC Fellow/CUNY Professor.
Panel 2 (12:00-2:00 PM): Theory and Story in the Narration of Slaveries
This panel explores the place of theory and storytelling in the (re)presentation of slaveries in the African world. As the regime of quantification has given some ground to the stories of Africans or their worldwide diasporic counterparts in the scholarship on global slavery, the theorization of historical periods and processes therein has also been advanced. The panelists JAMES H. SWEET (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Herman Bennett (CUNY Graduate Center, History Program), and Kwasi Konadu (ARC Fellow/CUNY Professor) discuss these matters through their own work and against the current scholarship and its future directions. Moderated by C. Daniel Dawson, New York University/Columbia University.
Panel 3 (2:00-4:00 pm): Atlantic and Indian Ocean Slaveries in Conversation
The closing session features Boubacar Barry (Chiekh Anta Diop University, Senegal), Pier Larson (The Johns Hopkins University), and Patrick Harries (University of Basel) in conversation about their own work and the emergent perspectives on and shape of scholarship on Atlantic and Indian Ocean slaveries. This panel also offers an important opportunity for scholars of these oceanic worlds to engage each other. Moderated by Megan Vaughan, CUNY Graduate Center.
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