Philosophy Politics Aesthetics seminar series. 'Race', History and Representation.

Professor Alan Rice, University of Central Lancashire. 

This paper will investigate how African American, Caribbean and Black British artists have used innovative artistic modes and methods to interrogate the traumatic history of the Transatlantic slave trade and have created a range of unbelievable Utopian worlds that work against Afro-Pessimism’s limitations. Artists discussed will include Ellen Gallagher, Lubaina Himid & Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons.

Alan Rice is Professor in English and American Studies at the University of Central Lancashire. 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 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.

For further information, please contact Dr Cathy Bergin: C.J.Bergin@brighton.ac.uk.