Symposium: University College Dublin, 28-30 October, 2013

Confirmed Keynotes:

Richard Blackett, Vanderbilt University

Nini Rodgers, Queens University, Belfast

Call for Papers:

Nini Rodgers’ Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 1612-1865 (2007) demonstrated that slavery has had ‘a dramatic impact both on the Irish who emigrated across the Atlantic and upon the economy at home’. As significantly, for black abolitionists, Ireland occupied an important site both as a place of literal freedom and as a vehicle through which complex questions of race, freedom, equality, empire and political subjectivity might be explored. This symposium offers the opportunity to further these discussions, and also to open debate on sometimes neglected relationships between Ireland and Latin America, Brazil, Africa or India, and to the related complexities, ambivalences and contradictions that the context of empire introduces to discussions of slavery and anti-slavery more broadly.  

‘Ireland, slavery, anti-slavery, empire’ invites papers or panels from across the humanities and social sciences, and from Hispano, luso, franco and Anglophone areas of scholarship, focused on the relationship between Ireland, slavery, and ethical culture in the context of empire(s) from the 17^th into the early 20th century. We also welcome papers on the memory, representation and challenges of that relationship in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

Revolution or rebellion

Slavery in Irish writing or Ireland in Black writing

The archive

sovereignty

The Congo

The Caribbean, Africa, Indian, Latin America and Ireland

Missionaries

emancipation

Collection and curation

Labour

War and military service

American slavery

Religion

Black activism and imperial space

Death

Travel writing/Exploration

The raced/gendered body

Slavery, empire and visual culture

Whiteness

Emigration/colonisation

Kinship

Remembering or forgetting slavery, including contemporary slavery, and empire.

Abstracts of c 200 words, and a brief biography,  should be sent to Fionnghuala Sweeney, Maria Stuart or Fionnuala Dillane ([log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask])  by 16 June, 2013. Papers should be in English and of 20 minutes duration. Offers to chair or respond are also welcomed.