CMNH Public Lecture: Refuse Bodies, Disposable Lives: A History of the Human and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Unfortunately this event has been cancelled. We hope to reschedule in the Summer term.
 

Professor Marisa Fuentes (Rutgers School of Arts and Science)

Refuse Bodies, Disposable Lives: A History of the Human and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Dr. Fuentes' talk 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.

Booking is essential. 

Workshop and Reading Group.

Prof Marisa J. Fuentes will be a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories on Monday 16^th and 17^th March 2020. Prof Fuentes’s scholarship brings together critical historiography, historical geography, and black feminist theory to examine gender, sexuality, and slavery in the early modern Atlantic World.

The reading group will cover her acclaimed 2016 monograph Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (for more details, see below). Reading group attendees are also invited to join the workshop.

Marisa Fuentes workshop: Tuesday 17th March, 10am–5pm, Room 101 Pavilion Parade.

Marisa Fuentes reading group: Reading Archives of the Enslaved. Tuesdays, 2–4pm, Room 401 Dorset Place, City Campus, University of Brighton

All welcome, but places are limited so please email Tim Huzar (T.Huzar@brighton.ac.uk) to sign up for the reading group and/or workshop.

Week One — 4^th February

‘Introduction’

‘Chapter One — Jane: Fugitivity, Space, and Structures of Control in Bridgetown’

Week Two — 11^th February

‘Chapter Two — Rachael and Joanna: Power, Historical Figuring, and Troubling Freedom’

Week Three — No Session (reading week)

Week Four — 25th February

‘Chapter Three — Agatha: White Women, Slave Owners, and the Dialectic of Racialized Gender’

Week Five — 3rd March

‘Chapter Four — Molly: Enslaved Women, Condemnation, and Gendered Terror’

Week Six — 10th March

‘Chapter Five — “Venus”: Abolition Discourse, Gendered Violence, and the Archive’

‘Epilogue’