On Wednesday, November 18, 12-1:30pm CT, the Slavery and Visual Culture Working Group will hold a virtual reading group meeting titled “Meditations on the Afterlives of Slavery.” Professor Danielle Roper (RLL UChicago) will moderate the discussion. We will be reading:

The Introduction of Deborah Thomas’ Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation (Duke, 2019)

In this book, Thomas theorizes the roots of contemporary state violence in Jamaica and in post-plantation societies in general. Drawing on visual, oral historical, and colonial archives, Thomas traces the long-term legacies of the plantation system and how its governing logics continue to shape and replicate forms of violence. She places affect at the center of sovereignty to destabilize disembodied narratives of liberalism and progress and to raise questions about recognition, repair, and accountability.

Chapter 4 and Conclusion of  Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-Fabulations: The Drama of Black Queer Life (NYU, 2018)

In this book, Nyong’o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the era of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960’s and the intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival erasure.

The Introduction of Lorgia García-Peña’s The Borders of Afro-Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Duke, 2016)

In this book, Lorgia García-Peña explores the ways official narratives and histories have been projected onto racialized Dominican bodies as a means of sustaining the nation’s borders. García-Peña constructs a genealogy of dominicanidad that highlights how Afro-Dominicans, ethnic Haitians, and Dominicans living abroad have contested these dominant narratives and their violent, silencing, and exclusionary effects.

Professor Danielle Roper (Assistant Professor in Latin American Literature at the University of Chicago) will be the discussant. This reading group is a preparation for a roundtable with the three authors, titled “Critical Reflections on Visualizing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery,” which will be held in January 2021.

Reading Group: Meditations on the Afterlives of Slavery

Wednesday, November 18

12-1:30pm

Click here to access the texts (password: afterlives)

This event requires registration. Click here to register.

The Zoom link will be sent on the morning of the event.