 |
 |
***
Public History Discussion Group
Saturday 21st March 2015
Room 209
Institute of Archaeology, 31-34 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY
Room on the 2nd floor- lift and stairs to all floors
Talk starts promptly at 11.30am
“Making public forgotten black histories 1750-2014: From ghostly hands to children’s memorials on slave graves”
The talk discusses not only traditional memorials, walking trails and artworks, but also ghostly legacies of the trade, including
human body parts. Taking the small slave port of Lancaster, England, as a key case study, the talk draws on recent theoretical work on corporeality, spectrality, Holocaust studies, trauma, dark tourism, the Black Atlantic and memory studies to interrogate
the meanings of these legacies. It develops the idea of “guerrilla memorialisation” used historically and in recent responses to the trade.
Professor Alan Rice, University of Central Lancashire
Alan Rice is Professor in English and American Studies at the University of Central Lancashire and co-director of the recently formed
Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR) there. He has degrees from the University of Edinburgh, Bowling Green State University, Ohio and Keele. He has worked on the interdisciplinary study of the Black Atlantic for the past two decades including publishing
Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (Continuum, 2003). Alan was academic advisor to the
Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project in Lancaster, was editor in chief of Manchester’s
Revealing Histories Website and a co-curator of the Whitworth Art Gallery Manchester’s 2007-8 exhibition
Trade and Empire: Remembering Slavery. His latest monograph is Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic (Liverpool UP, 2010) and his latest edited collection is a special issue of
Atlantic Studies on the “Slave Trade’s Dissonant Heritage” edited with Johanna Kardux (2012). He is also continuing the work on black abolitionists in Britain started in his co-edited
Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Georgia, 1999) with a new collection in
Slavery and Abolition (2012) with Fionnghuala Sweeney. He is an advisor to museums in Liverpool, Lancaster and Manchester and his latest museum publication is a catalogue essay for Manchester’s 2012
We Face Forward West African Art exhibition. His articles have appeared in a wide range of journals including,
Slavery and Abolition, Atlantic Studies, Patterns of Prejudice, Journal of American Studies and Research in African Literatures. He has organised landmark events on issues in Black history in Britain including a 2013 event commemorating the mutiny of
African American GIs in Bamber Bridge. He has given keynote presentations in Britain, Germany, the United State and France and in January 2012 he gave the Martin Luther King Memorial Lecture in Hamburg. He has contributed to documentaries for the BBC, Border
Television and public broadcasting in America as well as appearing on BBC’s The One Show in February 2013. More information can be found at:
http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/newsletters/newsissue14/king1.htm
http://www.uclan.ac.uk/staff_profiles/alan_rice.php
***
You are being sent this email because you are on the Public History Group mailing list. Please let me know if you would like your name
to be deleted.
Eleni Vomvyla
http://publichistorygroup.wordpress.com/
https://www.facebook.com/publichistoryuk