Initiatives
Slavery and Visual Culture Working Group
The Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture is an interdisciplinary forum based concurrently at Yale and the University of Chicago. It was created to discuss research related to images of slavery and the slave trade as well as the creation and use of images and objects by enslaved peoples and slaveholders. Our aim is to explore the multivalent relationship between slavery and visual cultures, examining themes such as visuality and memory of the slave trade; the role of the gaze and surveillance in slave societies and societies with slaves; regional comparisons of visual regimes associated with slavery; visual culture’s connection to racialized regimes of slavery; and the roles played by self-fashioning and the accumulation of visual capital by the enslaved.
The Working Group, founded in 2016 at the University of Chicago by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Larissa Brewer-García, and Cécile Fromont (now at Yale), now has a new organizing member Danielle Roper. It is now a collaborative endeavour between the two universities.
African Humanities Working Group 2020-2021
Spring 2021
Fall 2020
The African Humanities Working Group brings together graduate students, faculty, and invited speakers to workshop projects and engage in intellectual conversation on African expressive cultures and dance.
Summary: 2019–2020
September 20
Cécile Bushidi, postdoctoral fellow, Yale
“Between the anxiogenic and the soothing: dance and settler affects in colonial Africa”
October 11
Presenter: Samuel Severson, PhD student, History
“Guarded anti-politics: bureaucracy, welfarism, and the Lesotho Prison Service, 1959-71”
November 15
Professor Mhoze Chikowero, History, UC Santa Barbara
“‘Mazwi Ane Unga:’ The Chimurenga Afrosoni-Cities That Birthed Zimbabwe”
January 21
Marius Kothor, PhD student, History
“Securing Ablodé Blibo: West African Women Traders and the Gendered Politics of Decolonization, 1930-1963”
March 3
Tony Yeboah, PhD student, History
“Compromised Tradition: Destruction, Negotiation and the Imaginary Reconstruction of the Palace of the Asantehene”
April 7
Professor Jill Jarvis, French, Yale (To be rescheduled)
