Building on conversations developed through the Working Group’s programming on campus since 2016 and the international colloquium held at the UChicago Paris Center in March 2018, in June 2019 we convened our second international conference in Cartagena, Colombia, titled “Esclavitud, visualidad y memoria: Prácticas de reactivación” [Slavery, Visuality, and Memory: Reactivation Practices].

Cartagena was one of the most important slave trading ports of the Atlantic world during the first hundred years of the slave trade and is now a key site of UNESCO-sponsored commemorations to the African Slave Trade. The city served as the setting for a meeting of scholars, researchers, and artists who work on the relationship between visual images and memories of slavery in the Americas. Held at Universidad de Cartagena, the conference consisted of talks by 2 keynote speakers, the discussion of 4 pre-circulated papers, 8 conference papers on participants’ research-in-progress, two art installations, a musical performance by Tambores del Cabildo, and a dance performance by the Afro-Colombian dance group Permanencias. In addition, we traveled to San Basilio de Palenque, a town founded by fugitives from slavery in the early eighteenth century that serves as a beacon for remembering slavery in Colombia. For a full program of the event, see: https://voices.uchicago.edu/slavicultcartagena2019/program/. The conference was a joint project the University of Chicago, Yale University, the Universidad de Cartagena.

Larissa Brewer-García, Romance languages and literatures, University of Chicago

Cécile Fromont, Art History, Yale University

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago

Danielle Roper, Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago

Francisco Flórez Bolivar, History, Universidad de Cartagena

Jane Landers, History, Vanderbilt

Alejandro de la Fuente, History and African American Studies, Harvard University

Alfonso Múnera, History, Universidad de Cartagena

Sergio Paolo Solano, History, Universidad de Cartagena

Alfonso Cassiani Herrera, Instituición Etnoeducativa e Inclusiva Antonia Santos y Universidad del Sinú Sede Cartagena

Rubén Hernández Cassiani,Universidad de Cartagena, Fundación Instituto de Educación e Investigación Manuel Zapata Olivella

Gabriel Rocha, History, Drexel University

Bethan Fisk, History, Leeds

David Sartorius, History, University of Maryland

Angélica María Sánchez, African American Studies, Harvard University

Ximena Gómez, Art History, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Asiel Sepúlveda, Art History, Southern Methodist University

Beatriz Balanta, Art History, independent scholar

María de Lourdes Ghidoli, Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Liliana Angulo, Artist

Mercedes Angola, Artist

Nemecio Berrío, Artist and director of Permanencias