2022-2023
Spring 2023
April 3, 2023, 5:00-6:30PM CST: Book Event with Prof. Danielle Terrazas Williams
May 5, 2023, 12:00-1:30PM CST: Workshop with Prof. Melanie White
Melanie White will workshop her paper “Envisioning the Miskitu Coast: Colonial Intimacies, Archives of Refusal” with comments by Danielle Roper and Kaneesha Parsard. This event will be held in Wieboldt 207.
To register, please fill out this form.
To download the reading selection with a password, please click here.
May 18, 2023, 4:30-7:00PM CST: Lecture by Prof. Mia Bagneris
Mia Bagneris will give her lecture “Seeing Double: Fanny Eaton and the Specter of Blackness in Simeon Solomon’s Mother of Moses.” This event will be held in the Social Sciences Tea Room.
Abstract: In 1860, Pre-Raphaelite-affiliated artist Simeon Solomon exhibited The Mother of Moses at the Royal Academy. The work garnered generally positive feedback; however, nearly every reviewer called attention to the decidedly “ethnic” features of Moses’s mother and sister in the picture. They all agreed that there was something “off” about them, but as to their specific defect—too Jewish, too Egyptian, or just plain too dark—there was no consensus. What no critic would just come right out and say was that Fanny Eaton, the Afro-Jamaican model whose face represented both women in the painting, was, for their tastes, just too Black. The mixed-raced Eaton’s ostensibly racially ambiguous appearance meant that artists had previously cast her as a variety of ethnic “Others”. However, this talk contends that, within the context of a picture that was ultimately about slavery, liberation, and diaspora, Eaton’s Blackness—and the realities of British involvement in Atlantic World slavery that it embodied—did not prove so fungible, and the patina of portraiture that pervaded her presence in the picture informed the way in which viewers received the work.
May 19, 2023, 11:30-12:50PM CST: Workshop with Prof. Mia Bagneris
Mia Bagneris will workshop her paper “‘Lady, while you are young and beautiful ‘Forget not’ the slave…’: Finding Black Feminist Art in an Abolitionist’s Friendship Album.” This event will be held in Room 152 of the Cochrane-Woods Arts Center.
To register, please fill out this form.
To download the reading selection with a password, please click here.
May 23, 2023, 4:00-5:30PM CST: Palimpsests Launch and Roundtable Discussion
Co-curators Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Isabela Fraga will launch their digital exhibit “Palimpsests: Visual Idioms of Enslavement in the Nineteenth Century and their Afterlives.” This collaborative exhibit unearths various modes in which nineteenth-century visual idioms of enslavement endure in present-day constructions of Blackness as a site for policing, discipline, labor, desire, love, death, and/or pity, as well as the challenging responses offered by contemporary artists across the Americas to that legacy. The conceptual figure that organizes this exploration is the palimpsest – the idea of a primary inscription that both persists and is disfigured underneath the surface of a new one. The event will be held at Neubauer Collegium (5701 S. Woodlawn Ave.) with a reception to follow.
Winter 2023
February 24, 2023, 12:00-1:30PM CST: Reading Group in Conversation with Prof. Pamela Patton
To download the reading selection with a password, please click here.
Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts 2023
Logan Center for the Arts (Logan 201), 915 E. 60th St., Chicago
In 1976, an extraordinary group of Black feminist artists and activists organized the first ever Black women’s film festival: the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts. Films by Michelle Parkerson, Ayoka Chenzira, Edie Lynch, and Madeline Anderson, among others, were screened. The festival was simultaneously a celebration of the emerging world of Black women’s filmmaking as well as a radical call for the kinds of socio-political and institutional changes necessary for a Black women’s film culture to thrive. Four decades later, the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts, 2023 commemorates the 1976 festival with a nine-week screening series, held in conjunction with Professor Allyson Nadia Field’s winter 2023 course “Creating a Different Image: Black Women’s Filmmaking of the 1970s-90s,” and a two-day symposium about the original festival and the tradition of Black feminist filmmaking. For more information and the full schedule of screenings, visit voices.uchicago.edu/sojourner.
Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts Symposium (selected events)
Thursday March 2, 7pm: Film Screening and Q&A with filmmakers (Logan 201)
Interior Lives
-S. Pearl Sharp, Back Inside Herself (1984, 4 min)
-Zeinabu irene Davis, Cycles (1989, 17 min)
-Fronza Woods, Killing Time (1979, 9 min)
-Aarin Burch, Spin Cycle (1989, 5 min) & Dreams of Passion (1989, 5 min)
-Cauleen Smith, Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (1989, 6 min)
-Yvonne Welbon, Monique (1991, 3 min)
-Melvonna Ballenger, Rain (Nyesha) (1978, 15 min)
Q&A with filmmakers moderated by Yvonne Welbon following the screening.
This final program in the 9–week screening series “Creating a Different Image: Black Women’s Filmmaking of the 1970s–90s,” foregrounds Black female interiority. S. Pearl Sharp’s Back Inside Herself (1984) is a visual poem on identity and the assertion of a sense of self, starring the magnetic Barbara O. Jones. In Zeinabu irene Davis’s Cycles (1989), a young woman performs African–based purification rituals as she awaits her period. Visually experimental, especially in its use of stop–motion sequences, the film also features music from throughout the African diaspora, resulting in a unique film language that honors African American women. Melvonna Ballenger’s Rain (Nyesha) (1978), set to a soulful John Coltrane soundtrack, traces the political awakening of one woman. Fronza Woods’ first short film Killing Time (1979), in which she also stars, is an offbeat, wryly humorous look at the dilemma of a would–be suicide unable to find the right outfit to die in. Aarin Burch’s Dreams of Passion (1989), set in a dance studio, explores desire between two Black women; Spin Cycle (1989) takes an autobiographical look at Burch’s own love affairs and filmmaking aspirations. Yvonne Welbon’s short film Monique (1991) muses on memory. Reflecting on a childhood experience of racism, Welbon considers how racism is deeply ingrained in the fabric of society, pervasive enough to even inflect or infect children’s play. Cauleen Smith’s Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (1989) is a collage of voices, images, and scrolling text that acts as a meditation on Black history and its portrayal in media.
https://filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu/events/2023/interior-lives
Friday, March 3 (Logan 201)
11am: Welcome followed by Keynote by Michele Wallace
1:30pm: Roundtable Conversation
Remembering the Sojourner Truth Festival 1976
3:15pm: Roundtable Conversation
The 1970s Black Arts Scene
5pm: Film Screening, followed by a special tribute to the director
I am Somebody (Madeline Anderson, 1970, 30’) chronicles the efforts of Black women hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina to gain union recognition and a wage increase, up against the oppressive forces of state government and the National Guard. A key document in the struggle for labor rights, I am Somebody is one of the earliest films to demonstrate the connection between Black women’s labor struggles and the fight for civil rights. The film was named to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2019.
Fall 2022
November 4, 2022, 2:30-4:00PM CST: Seeing David Drake’s Ceramics: Guided Gallery Visit and Conversation with Elizabeth McCoy, Associate Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago
November 17, 2022, 5:00-6:30PM CST: Lecture by Cécile Fromont
December 2, 2022, 11:00AM-12:15PM CST: Reading Group for Noémie Ndiaye’s Scripts of Blackness
2021-2022
Spring 2022
Monday, May 16, 3PM CST: Virtual Talk with Sarah Thomas (Birkbeck College, University of London)
“Consumption, Wealth, and Art Collecting in the Age of British Emancipation”
Abstract: Over the course of the 1820s, as British slaveholders were drawn increasingly into a bitter and contested debate about the future of slavery, the nation’s art institutions were thriving. The foundation of a National Gallery in 1824 was the culmination of several decades of lobbying from various quarters, and the concomitant rise of private collections in Britain. The wealth and confidence of British art collectors and connoisseurs in the period is amply demonstrated in a grand painting by Dutch artist Pieter Christoffel Wonder, Patrons and Lovers of Art (1830). I take this painting as the starting point for seeking to understand how the brutal system of colonial slavery infiltrated the world of aesthetics and taste during this seminal period in the history Britain’s major art institutions. Wonder’s careful delineation of collectors, and works of art with their own individual provenance histories, entangled with and ultimately dependent upon the economy of plantation slavery, is a useful springboard for a deeper consideration of the cultural legacies of slave-ownership, encouraging reflection about a history that has for too long remained silent.
Click here to register for the event.
Winter 2022
Friday, March 11, 1-2:30pm CT: Virtual Workshop with Reginald Jackson (University of Michigan)
“Burdens of Proof: Enslavement, Evangelization, and the Performativity of Visual Evidence in Jesuit Japan”
Join us for our discussion of Prof. Reginald Jackson’s pre-circulated paper, “Burdens of Proof: Enslavement, Evangelization, and the Performativity of Visual Evidence in Jesuit Japan.” Yunning Zhang (Comparative Literature, UChicago) will be the discussant. The paper will be available for download a week before the workshop.
Click here to register for the event.
Fall 2021
Thursday, November 17, 4pm CT: Virtual Workshop with C.C. McKee (Bryn Mawr College)
“At the Threshold of Human and Vegetable: Painting Black Monstrosity in the French Atlantic”
We will be discussing Prof. C.C. McKee’s pre-circulated paper, “At the Threshold of the Human and the Vegetable: Painting Black Monstrosity in the French Atlantic.” Prof. Andrei Pop (Art History, UChicago) will be the discussant. The paper will be available for download a week before the workshop. This event is conducted with support from the French section of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.
Click here to register for the event.
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Wednesday, October 27, 2-3pm CT: Virtual talk by Elzbieta Sklodowska (Washington University in Saint Louis)
“Etched in Sugar, Soil, Metal, and Blood: The Afterlives of the “Plantation Machine” and Countervisuality in Contemporary Cuban Art”
Abstract: Sugar—both as a commodity and as a metaphor—has been woven into the fabric of Cuban history and identity ever since the indigenous genocide and the ensuing enslavement of African peoples had put the pan-Caribbean “plantation machine” into a relentless forward motion. In this paper, I analyze the reinscriptions of the sugar plantation in select paintings, photography, installations, and performance by contemporary Cuban artists: Tania Bruguera (b. 1968), Carlos Martiel (b.1989), Douglas Pérez Castro (b. 1972), Reinaldo Echemendía Cid (b. 1987), and Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo (b.1984). I argue that by etching—both literally and metaphorically—the black, gendered experience in sugar, soil, metal, and blood these artists reclaim the “right to look” by creating their own discourses of “countervisuality” (Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms) in the crucible of enslavement, resistance, and (re)productive plantation machine.
Click here to register for the event.
Click here to download article.
2020-2021
Spring 2021
April 19 & 20, 4pm CST | Launching “Visualizing/Performing Blackness in the Afterlives of Slavery: A Caribbean Archive”
We will be launching our first digital exhibit in two roundtables with the invited artists. Click here to know more and to register.
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Winter 2021
Tuesday, January 19, 5pm CST/4pm EST | Theorizing the Afterlives of Slavery in the Americas: A Roundtable
With the participation of Deborah Thomas (UPenn), Tavia Nyong’o (Yale), and Lorgia Garcia Peña (Harvard)
Click here for more information and to register for the Zoom session.
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Tuesday, February 18, 12-1:30pm CST |Reading Group on African American Artistic Resistance in the Civil War South
We will be reading two essays by Jennifer Van Horn (Art History, University of Delaware). Professor Claudia Brittenham (Art History, UChocago) will moderate the discussion.
Click here for more information and to register for the Zoom meeting.
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March 18: Faculty Workshop with Brodwyn Fischer (History, UChicago)
We will be discussing prof. Fischer’s pre-circulated essay, “Intimate Inequalities: Urban History and the Afterlives of Slavery in Recife, Brazil.” Prof. Rashauna Johnson (History, UChicago) will be the discussant.
Click here to download the paper and to register for the Zoom meeting.
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April 19 & 20, 4pm CST | The Afterlives of Slavery (Launch)
Launching of The Afterlives of Slavery, a digital platform that will host two virtual exhibits on the legacies and presences of slavery in the contemporary world.
Stay tuned for more information.
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Fall 2020
Wednesday, October 14, 1pm CT: Virtual Welcome Back Reception
An opportunity to reconnect, greet new colleagues, and to discuss the new plans for our working group this year.
Click here to join the Zoom session.
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Friday, October 23, 12-1:30pm CT: Faculty Workshop with Sarah Jessica Johnson
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Friday, October 30, 12-1pm CT: Launching of Larissa Brewer-García’s new book, Beyond Babel
We will celebrate and discuss Professor Larissa Brewer-García’s new book, Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (Cambridge, 2020). Brewer-García is Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Chicago.
Three special guests will introduce and discuss the book: Michelle McKinley (University of Oregon), Cécile Fromont (Yale University), and Anna More (Universidade de Brasília).
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Wednesday, November 18, 12-1:30pm CT: Meditations on the Afterlives of Slavery
In this reading group meeting, we will be discussing selections from:
Deborah Thomas’ Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation (Duke, 2019);
Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro Fabulations: The Drama of Black Queer Life (NYU, 2018); and
Lorgia García Peña’s The Borders of Afro-Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Duke, 2016)
Professor Danielle Roper (Assistant Professor in Latin American Literature) will be the discussant.
Click here for more information, to access the texts, and to register.
2019-2020
Fall 2019
October 2nd-4th: John Hope Franklin Lecture Series — Slavery and Its Afterlives (Related event)
Wednesday October `14 at 1pm for our informal welcome back event
- “Madwomen on the Slave Ship, Reproduction and Racial Capitalism” (October 2 – SSRB 122 – 4:30 PM). Jennifer Morgan, professor of history and chair of the department of social and cultural analysis at New York University (NYU).
- “Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War” (October 3 – SSRB 122 – 4:30 PM). Vincent Brown, the Charles Warren Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard.
- “Slavery and its Afterlives” (October 4 – 10 AM – Classics 110): Roundtable discussion moderated by Destin Jenkins, UChicago’s Neubauer family assistant professor of history. The panelists will include Brown, Morgan, and four UChicago scholars: Adam Green (History), Julie Saville (History), Brodwyn Fischer (History), and Sarah Jessica Johnson (English).
Click here to see the full schedule.
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Friday, October 11th — 11am-12:30pm: Legacies of Slavery: An Interdisciplinary Roundtable
@ Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge (5737 S. University), room 104
With Christopher Allison, John Clegg, Honey Crawford, John Harpham, and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz (discussant)
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Tuesday, October 29th — 5pm-6:30pm: Reading Group on Slavery and Visual Culture
Two texts from Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (edited by Angela Rosenthal and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz):
- “Introduction: Envisioning Slave Portraiture,” by Angela Rosenthal and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz
- “Looking for Scipio Moorhead: An ‘African Painter’ in Revolutionary North America,” By Eric Slauter
@ Rosenwald 405
Click here for more information and to access the texts.
Refreshments will be provided.
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Friday, November 22nd — 12:30pm-2pm: Faculty Workshop: Kaneesha Parsard (Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in English)
“Is the ‘Coolie Group’ a Bargaining Unit?”
@ CSRPC First-Floor Conference Room (5733 S. University Ave)
Click here to access and download Parsard’s paper (password: bargain)
Lunch will be provided.
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Thursday, December 5th — 12:30pm-2pm: Guest Faculty Workshop: Miguel Valerio (Assistant Professor of Spanish, Washington University in Saint Louis)
@ Foster 103 (please note the room change)
Click here to download Valerio’s paper. Password: festival.
Lunch will be provided.
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Winter 2020
Thursday, Feb. 6
Public Lecture by Nicholas Mirzoeff (NYU): “Whiteness Falls in the Shattered City”
Classics 110, 5pm
A reception will follow.
Friday, Feb. 7
Seminar with Nicholas Mirzoeff (NYU) on the first chapter of The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Duke, 2011), to be read in advance.
Foster 103, 11:30am-1pm
A light lunch will be served.
Friday, Feb. 21
Faculty Workshop with Andrei Pop (Art History and Social Thought).
“Sugar, Slavery, and Subjectivity: On Henry Fuseli’s Oroonoko and Several Others”
Discussant: Sarah Johnson (English)
Foster 103, 11:30am-1pm
A light lunch will be served.
Thursday, March 12 (CANCELLED)
Book presentation and lecture by Cécile Fromont (Art History, Yale) on her newly-edited volume, Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition (Penn State, 2019).
Classics 110, 5pm
Friday, March 13 (CANCELLED)
Seminar with Cécile Fromont (Art History, Yale) on selections of Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition (Penn State, 2019), with pre-circulated readings. Click here to download the text. To get the password, please email fraga@uchicago.edu.
Professor Fromont will be participating via Skype.
John Hope Franklin (SSRB 224), 11:30am-1pm
A light lunch will be served.
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Spring 2020
The Slavery and Visual Culture Working Group is holding two virtual events in the Spring quarter:
Monday, May 25, 2-3pm CT
Reading Group (on Zoom) on Alejandro de la Fuente’s “Afro-Latin American Art,” published in Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2018), edited by Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews.
Registration for this meeting is required. Please click here to register.
Click here for more information and to download the text.
Tuesday, June 16, 2-3pm CT
2018-2019
Fall 2018
Sunday November 4th, 2018 (Related event): Gurumbé: Afro-Andalusian Memories, at the Logan Center, Screening Room.
Film screening: 5-7pm
Flamenco Performance: 7-8pm
Monday, November 5th, 2018: Public conversation with the director and dancer of Gurumbé (Miguel Ángel Rosales and Yinka Esi Graves) about the film and subject matter of Gurumbé. Facilitated by Professor Larissa Brewer-García.
Center for Identity and Inclusion Conference Room, 5710 S. Woodlawn Ave.
12pm-1:20pm. A light lunch will be served.
Monday, November 19th, 2018: Reading Group meeting on Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke, 2016) at CSRPC first floor conference room, 12pm-1:20pm. A light lunch will be served.
Friday, December 7rd, 2018: Workshop on pre-circulated paper by Professor Agnes Lugo-Ortiz at the CSRPC first floor conference room, 12pm-1:20pm.
Winter 2019
Thursday, January 10th
Public lecture by Kathryn Joy McKnight: “Battling for Definition: Healing and Gender among Afro-Iberian Herbalists in 17th-Century Cartagena de Indias.”
Foster 103 (1130 E. 59th St), 12:30pm-1:50pm. A light lunch will be served.
(Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies)
Thursday, January 10th (Related Event)
Public conversation with Kathryn Joy McKnight, “Archival Interventions: A conversation about publishing and teaching archives of people of African descent in the Americas.”
Kelly 114, 4pm-5pm. Light refreshments will be served.
(Co-sponsored by the Romance Languages Department and the Humanities Diversity Committee.)
Friday, January 25th
Workshop on pre-circulated paper by Professor Emily Osborn (History), “Coloring the Slave Trade Red: Cochineal, Cloth, and the Making of the Atlantic World.” There’s no pre-circulated paper for this event.
CSRPC First Floor Conference Room, 12:15pm-1:45pm. A light lunch will be served.
March 15th
Reading Group meeting conducted by Barbara Weinstein (NYU) on three short texts: Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen (1947); Alejandro de la Fuente, “From Slaves to Citizens? Tannenbaum and the Debates on Slavery, Emancipation, and Race Relations in Latin America;” and “Slavery and the Law: A Reply;” and Bianca Premo, “An Equity Against the Law: Slave Rights and Creole Jurisprudence in Spanish America.”
Foster 103, 12pm-1:30. A light lunch will be served.
Spring 2019
Monday, April 8th
John Hope Franklin Room (Social Sciences 224), 12:30pm-2pm.
Lunch will be served.
(Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies)
Monday, April 8th
“African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic”
Book talk by Herman Bennett, professor of History at the City University of New York (CUNY)
Social Sciences Tea Room, 5pm.
A reception will follow.
(Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies, the African Studies Program and the Department of History)
Wednesday, April 17th
Reading group meeting to discuss Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Duke, 2017); and Maurie McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale (UChicago Press, 2011).
Classics 110, 12:30pm-2pm.
Lunch will be served.
Friday, May 17th
Workshop on pre-circulated paper by Professor Chris Taylor (English), titled “Divine Servitude against the Work of Man: Dispossessive Subjects and Exoduses to and from Property.” Professor Adom Getachew (Political Sciences) will be the discussant. We will circulate the paper a week before the event.
Classics 110, 12:30pm-2pm.
Lunch will be served.
May 21st (Related Event)
“Black Mirror in Golden Age Spain: Juan Latino, Diego Velázquez, and the Poetics of Self,” talk by Maxim Rigaux, Fulbright and Belgian American Educational Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow.
Wieboldt 408, 5pm.
Light refreshments will be served.
2017-2018
March 2018
Traveling Colloquium to Paris and Nantes, Journées d’études sur l’esclavage et les cultures visuelles
March 22nd: Public Lecture by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby (University of California, Berkeley), “Ingre’s Creoles (Secrets),” at the University of Chicago Center in Paris
2016-2017
Fall 2016
October 11th: Reading Group Discussion of Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011)
October 27: Public Lecture by Simon Gikandi (Princeton University), “The Spaces of Enslavement: Rethinking the Architecture of the Castle/Dungeon”
October 28th: Workshop Discussion with Simon Gikandi
Winter 2017
February 14th: Public lecture by Carmen Fracchia (University of London), “Picturing the Emergence of the Emancipatory Subject and the Formation of the Black Nation in Seventeenth-Century Spain”
February 15th: Workshop Discussion with Carmen Fracchia (University of London)
February 22th: Reading Group Discussion of Melissa Fuentes’ Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and the introduction and first chapter in Umi McMillan’s Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (NYU Press, 2015).
Spring 2017
April 13h: Public Lecture by Anne Lafont (French National Institute of Art History in Paris), “How did Skin Color become a Racial Marker ? The Contribution of Art in the Eighteenth Century”
April 14th: Workshop Discussion with Anne LaFont
May 22nd: Reading Group Discussion of Hortense J. Spillers’s 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”