Lecture by Dr Barbara
Bush
Thursday 3
May
National
Maritime Museum, Greenwich
11.00 -
13.00
This lecture explores the experiences of African
women on the West African coast, on board the slave ships, and on arrival
in the Caribbean, including concubinage relationships with white
men. The lecture critically
analyses white representations of African women, including the 'sable
Venus'. More broadly it considers the ways in which African women negotiated
new, and deeply unequal, relationships with Europeans in the context of the
profound - and traumatic - changes in their lives created by the
transatlantic slave trade. Key themes are cultural continuities between
Africa and the Caribbean, the dynamics of change during the Middle Passage, and
the ways in which African women were forced to embrace new identities
as slaves within the developing race/ gender orders that emerged with the
expansion of the slave trade. The "Lost Daughter's of Afrik" -
referred to sympathetically in a contemporary abolitionist poem - are the
countless anonymous women slaves who made the journey of no return and are still
remembered by their descendents in the African Diaspora. They experienced
alienation and dislocation from kin and family but also demonstrated resilience
and a capacity to resist and hold on to their personhood. Their odyssey to
the Americas evokes sorrow but also the strength to resist enslavement and a
desire to survive and to hold on to the cultural memory of Africa.
Barbara Bush is a Professor of Imperial History at
Sheffield Hallam University. She has published widely on gender and culture in
slave and post-slave societies and her most recent research has been in the area
of imperial history. Her key publications include Slave Women in
Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (James Currey; Indiana University Press,
1990); Imperialism, Race and Resistance: Africa and Britain 1919-1945
(Routledge, 1999), ‘Gender and Empire: The Twentieth Century’ in Philippa
Levine ed., Gender and Empire, Oxford History of the
British Empire, Companion Series (2004) and, most recently, Imperialism and
Postcolonialism (Pearson Education, 2006).
Lecture: £7.50/£5.50
conc. / 5 free student places
Bookings: 020 8312
8560