Cogut Institute for the Humanities

France and the Black Atlantic: Geographies of Slavery and Memory

March 14 – 15, 2024

By inviting leading scholars from France and the United States and throughout the Francophone world to engage with these questions through a day-long symposium in Providence (with a keynote lecture the evening prior), this workshop highlighted the work of historians, literary scholars, anthropologists and sociologists who have been at the vanguard of these new histories and whose scholarship has advanced our understanding of newly articulated geographies of enslavement.

This workshop was supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and partially funded by the Pierre and Mary Ann Sorel Fund for French Studies, the Mollie B. Mandeville Lectureship Fund, and the Herbert H. Goldberg Lectureship Fund. It wascosponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. The keynote was also cosponsored by the Department of History, and the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

Convened by Neil Safier, director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and associate professor of history.

Schedule

Thursday, March 14, 2024 — Pembroke Hall 305

4:00 pm – 5:15 pm

Film Screening and Discussion
Anne-Sophie Nanki, Ici s’achève le monde connu [Here Ends the World We’ve Known] (2022)

5:30 pm – 7:00 pm

Introduction and Welcome
Neil Safier

Keynote Lecture
Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University), “The Gift: A French Atlantic History of Slavery and Memory”

7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Reception

Friday, March 15, 2024 — Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center, Petteruti Lounge

9:30 am – 12:00 pm

Panel I

  • Paul Cohen (University of Toronto), “Language, the Middle Passage, and the French Atlantic Slave Trade”
  • Cécile Vidal (EHESS and Institute for Advanced Study), “Suicide in the Slave Trade and Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment”
  • Pierre Saint-Amand (Yale University), “Le Blanc et le Noir: Raynal, Pigault-Lebrun, and a Saint-Domingue Revolt”
  • Discussant: Ourida Mostefai (Brown University)
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Lunch Break

1:30 pm – 2:45 pm

Panel II

  • Marlene Daut (Yale University) “Henry Christophe and Napoleon”
  • Arielle Alterwaite (University of Pennsylvania) “Sovereign Debt: The Case of the 1825 Haitian Indemnity”
  • Discussant: Bertie Mandelblatt (Brown University)
3:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Panel III

  • Darlène Dubuisson (University of Pittsburgh), “Feminine Archetypes and Intellectual Exiles in Contemporary Haiti”
  • Jerry Philogene (Middlebury College), “Conceptual Provocateur: Luce Turnier, Portraiture, and Black Feminism in Haiti and Paris”
  • Mame-Fatou Niang (Carnegie-Mellon University), “French, but Not (Q)White: Expanding Frenchness for the 21st Century”
  • Discussants: Sabine Lamour (Brown University and Université de Haiti) and Mohamed Amer Meziane (Brown University)
5:30 pm – 6:00 pm

Closing Discussion with Kaiama Glover (Yale University)

Image: Plan, Profile, and Layout of the Ship The Marie Séraphique of Nantes, 1770, Musée d’Histoire de Nantes