Visiting Professors: Lectures and Workshops

Visiting Professor Marisa Fuentes

Dr. Fuentes' talk "Refuse Bodies, Disposable Lives: A History of the Human and the Transatlantic Slave Trade." will consider the precarious lives and lingering deaths of what European slave traders called, “refuse” slaves— African captives who were refused at purchase or who survived the Middle Passage but died before they could be sold in Atlantic ports. This topic arose during her confrontation with an archive that mentioned or referred to—in abstract—hundreds of thousands of people who died in the process of the slave trade but who are taken for granted in the historical and theoretical accounts of slavery, theories of precarity, and the human liminality. Fuentes wants to dwell on these people and bodies because the production of “the raw material of slaves” as laborers and property, also rendered humans as “waste”—the collateral damage of the capitalist regime of early modern slavery. This is a new project in which Dr. Fuentes is contemplating the conditions of “refuse slaves” in the archive and the consequences of this category of human to our understanding of capitalism, slavery, histories and theories of the human, and the origins of black disposability.

Visiting Professor Sean Field. Oral history, Memory and Post-Apartheid South Africa

Professor Sean Field, one of the world's leading oral historians, will be Visiting Professor at the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories, University of Brighton, from 13th to 30th June 2019. Professor Field has worked at the Department for Historical Studies in the University of Cape Town since 1997. Through his published writings, lectures and papers at international conferences and other forums, he has made a major contribution to the theory and practice of oral/life history and the politics of memory with a particular emphasis on issues of violence, loss and identity, usually in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. As coordinator of the Western Cape Oral History Project, and Director of the Centre for Popular Memory at UCT from 2001 to 2012, he has pioneered the use of oral interviews, photographs and the evidence of material sites of memory in work to create community histories of place, belonging and displacement in Cape Town, the Cape Flats and the Western Cape. He has also studied the politics of memory in post-conflict or transitional societies more broadly, and in relation to the movement of refugees within Central and Southern Africa. Prof Field's work has been centrally concerned with issues of subjectivity and experience, trauma and healing, emotion and empathy, utilising psychoanalytic as well as cultural and historical methods. His more recent interests lie in trans-generational memory, gender and family history. During his visit Prof Field will attend as a delegate 'The "I" in History' symposium, 14th–15th June at the University of Essex; and 'The Radical Sixties: Aesthetics, Politics and Histories of Solidarity' international conference, 27th–29th June at the University of Brighton. He will also contribute to four events for CMNH, see event listings below.

Visiting Professor Tina Campt Black Gravity: Impossible Stories of Black Possibility

Drawing from her manuscript-in-progress, The New Black Gaze, this talk engages the concept of fabulation as a black feminist methodology that challenges discreet understandings of memory, archive, and narrative. Focusing on the creative ways black contemporary artists render the black experience, the talk reflects on the visual modalities they are creating to imagine a different trajectory of black futurity. They are trajectories routed in and through the black body and its capacity to subvert the gravity of white supremacy that manifests as antiblackness. Tina Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, whose work explores gendered, racial and diasporic formation in black communities in Europe, the US, and Southern Africa through the oral, sonic and visual cultural texts produced by these communities. Campt is Claire Tow and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Africana and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College-Columbia University. She is currently in residence as Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Professor Tina Campt will be contributing to two events for CMNH, one of which is a lecture that is open to the public, see event listing below.