Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International

53 Pages·2012·0.55 MB·English

by  Melody Trantham

Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Panel 5: Race Racism, Memory and The Legacy of Slavery

Speakers:
 Randall Robinson
 B. Anthony Bogues
 Ana Lucia Araujo
 Susan Roveson
Moderator: Barbara Ransby
Introduction: Susan Levine

Susan Levine: …and many other parts of their lives from here on. I would like to here at
the end to thank all of the sponsors of this symposium. I’m not
going to list them, they’re all in the program but all of the units at
UIC, administrative units, faculty who have worked very hard to
put this program together and to think through the ideas that we’ve
been talking about for the last couple of days. I also want to thank
all of our audience participants for coming and for really engaging
with the issues that this conference has raised. So now we have, as
I say, come to our last panel on racism, memory and the legacy of
slavery. I would like to introduce Barbara Ransby of the UIC
History Department, African-American studies and gender and
women’s studies who will introduce the panelists.
Barbara Ransby: Welcome, welcome, welcome. It’s nice to see all of your faces on this
brisk Chicago afternoon. I have to start off by saying we are
expecting Randall Robinson any moment. He is in Chicago and so
we assume he will find his way to the panel. There was a little
communications glitch but we are hoping he will arrive. If not we
are going to have a lively conversation with our very, very
illustrious panel. Before we begin I am going to invite Susan
Robeson who is going to explain the significance of this instrument
she has a little bit later. Some of you may be familiar with abeng.
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Panel 5: Race Racism, Memory and The Legacy of Slavery

Abeng was used, and you’ll tell me if I’m wrong…you’ll do it and
you’ll explain briefly. We feel like this will get us started in the
right spirit.
Susan Robeson: This is my first public abeng blowing so you’ll forgive me and it’s with
permission of the Maroon community that gifted it posthumously
to my grandfather recently. (horn noise)
Barbara Ransby: A call to resist. This session is entitled Race, Racism, Memory and the
Legacy of Slavery. I want to thank all of my colleagues who have
worked so hard to put together this symposium. We are very
happy to be a part of it. I know that there’s a lot of behind-the-
scenes work that has happened early in the morning and late at
night so we are grateful to the Institute for the Humanities and
staff, Susan Levine and others who have worked on this project
very devotedly. Allow me to say a little bit about this panel and
then I will introduce our panelists. We are going to try to keep to
our time. I’m going to retain the mic there and we’ll be 20 minutes
each and then we’ll have some time for conversation at the end.
This panel is on race, racism, memory and slavery. I teach here at
the University of Illinois at Chicago but I’m not a slavery scholar.
I am a scholar of the black freedom movement. I wrote a book on
Ella Baker and I’ve just actually finished a book on Eslanda
Robeson who was an anti-colonial activist and anthropologist and
happens to have been Susan Robeson’s grandmother and also the
wife of Paul Robeson so I look at the long trajectory out of the
anti-slavery movement into the twentieth century when black
people have fought for a greater margin of freedom than
emancipation delivered.
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Panel 5: Race Racism, Memory and The Legacy of Slavery

I also work with something called the social justice initiative here
which helped to organize this particular panel. The social justice
initiative is really about pushing and reclaiming a part of the
mission of a public university which is to strive for a greater good,
to strive to make a contribution to a greater good and also to take
us beyond the bounds of the campus. If any subject does that and
looking at the wealth of experience and diversity of experience and
wisdom in this room the subject of slavery does because in many
ways it cannot be reduced to an academic subject. It is a very
visceral subject in the Americas and in this country in particular in
the United States.

Racial slavery in the Americas has been a painful memory but it’s
also a fabricated memory because none of us were actually there.
So we experience slavery through lies, through myths, through half
truths and through that part of truth that we capture through
storytelling and scholarship. There are many convenient silences,
myths and omissions in the larger grand narrative about slavery
and we have made a particular point to reinsert the term racism
into the conversation quite deliberately because the end of
racialized slavery did not really begin full freedom. That struggle
continued out of Jamaica, Brazil, Mississippi and on.

Eric Foner has a title of a book called Nothing But Freedom and in
that he actually talks about how important that margin of freedom
was for people who were emancipated from chattel slavery but at
the same time people look forward to a larger, a longer and a
complex trajectory of struggle.
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Panel 5: Race Racism, Memory and The Legacy of Slavery

So it is partly for these reasons that the history of slavery has been
such contested to reign. The historian Ira Berlin said the struggle
over slavery’s memory has been almost as intense as the struggle
over slavery itself. David Blight of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center
for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition wrote about the
popular academic discourse about slavery, “If we don’t tell it like it
was it can never be like it ought to be.” So it’s in that spirit that we
begin this conversation, the last panel of this very important
symposium today. I am thrilled and honored to have this panel
sitting with me to have this conversation with you. I mentioned
the social justice initiative at UIC earlier and I began my week
talking about peace building with nobel laureates Jody Williams
who we had on campus and the Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr. I
jokingly said I’m ending my week talking about remembering
slavery but I don’t see it as a downward trajectory because part of
the memory of slavery is also the memory of that abeng and the
memory of resistance. I think the work of these scholars and
activists and creative thinkers here will remind us of that. I’m
going to introduce the panel. I’ll save Randall Robinson’s
introduction until he arrives. The order of the panel will be Tony
Bogues will begin us off and then we will move next to Ana Lucia
Araujo and then Susan Robeson and Randall Robinson will be the
final person.
Barrymore Anthony Bogues, Tony Bogues, is a professor, write
and curator. He is currently the Harmon Family Professor of
Africana studies and an affiliate professor of political science and
modern culture in media at Brown University in Providence,
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Panel 5: Race Racism, Memory and The Legacy of Slavery

Rhode Island where he was recently appointed the director of the
Center for the Study of Slavery Injustice. For those of you who
might be familiar, that center grew out of a multiyear deliberation
and investigation inspired in part by the leadership of Ruth
Simmons at Brown to look at Brown’s connection to slavery. In a
sense it was a kind of truth and reconciliation in Rhode Island. I
don’t know if you would accept that characterization of it, Tony,
but many of us who watched that process unfold were just ecstatic
to see someone of Tony Bogues’s both intellectual and political
credentials take over the leadership of that center. He is also a
visiting scholar at the Rhode Island School of Design and a visiting
professor of humanities at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia and
has also had an ongoing affiliation with the University of
Capetown. He’s the author or editor of five books and over 60
essays in the field of intellectual history, political theory, culture
and literary history and is a member of the editorial collective of
the journal Boundary 2. His publications include Empire of
Liberty, Power, Freedom and Desire; Black Heritage and Black
Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals which was published by
Routledge in 2003; and Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political
Thought of C.L.R. James. He is working on a political biography
of C.L.R. James and of Michael Manly, two enormously influential
black internationalist thinkers.

He recently co-curated a national exhibition in the U.S. on Haitian
art entitled Reframing Haiti: Art, History and Performativity.
Professor Bogues is currently working on four major projects. One
about human emancipation and the black intellectual tradition.
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Panel 5: Race Racism, Memory and The Legacy of Slavery

Another one is a political and philosophical project on questions of
human freedom. A Haitian exhibition for 2013 in Capetown and
editing a series of monographs on the history of Haitian art so I
don’t know when he sleeps but he is quite busy and prolific. A
number of books in process including a very interesting title
Trauma Representation: History and the Making of Democracy as
well as some cultural histories on the black music of the black
Atlantic world. He is an eminent scholar of black radicalism and
black internationalism.

Next Professor Ana Lucia Araujo. Professor Araugo is currently
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the
Department of History at Howard University. Her work deals with
the history and memory of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in
present social and cultural legacies. She is particularly interested
in the public memory and visual culture of slavery. She has
conducted field work in Canada; Benin, Brazil where she comes
from; and the United States.

Her first book, and I will say the English title although it was first
published in French, Tropical Romanticism: The Illustrated
Adventure of a French Painter in Brazil published in 2008 which
examines the construction of particular image of Brazil as it relates
to people of African descent in nineteenth century France. Her
most recent book, Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and
Perpetuators in the South Atlantic is a study of the recent
phenomena of memorialization of slavery in both Brazil and
Benin. Over the last five years she has edited numerous books
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Panel 5: Race Racism, Memory and The Legacy of Slavery

including Living History: Encountering the Memory of Heirs of
Slavery and Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade Interactions
Identities. Presently she is finishing an issue Brazil Slavery and Its
Legacies for the journal Luso-Brazilian Review.

Next Susan Robeson. Susan Robeson is a producer, a
documentary filmmaker, writer and consultant. She recently
developed a citizen journalism project in collaboration with the
president of Timor-Leste, a nobel prize winner, Dr. Jose Ramos-
Horta, to promote civic engagement and build democracy in the
first new nation of the twenty-first century. She is currently
developing a feature film based on her original screenplay about
the resistance of a Cherokee woman of African descent and her
resistance to the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation in 1838.

Susan Robeson began her career as cofounder of Third World
Newsreel, an independent film and distribution collective
producing and directing her first film, Teach Our Children, about
the 1971 Attica prison uprising. She went on to produce for the
Emmy award winning television program Like It Is with Gil Noble
and her body of work includes documentaries on jazz legends Ella
Fitzgerald and Billy Eckstein.

Robeson was executive producer at Twin Cities Public Television
in St. Paul, Minneapolis, where she managed the station’s second
channel and transformed it into a model for empowering
communities of color through innovative programming and
outreach. There she created an award-winning program for and
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Panel 5: Race Racism, Memory and The Legacy of Slavery

about the Southeast Asian Hmong community and also a program
called Don’t Believe the Hype planned and produced by African
American youth. Robeson also contributed to the startup of the
station’s nightly news program and worked with street gangs
around the nation documenting their efforts at organizing peace
treaties.

In addition to her television and film work Susan Robeson has
numerous awards and fellowships including an artist-in-residence
at the Walker Art Center. She has been a visiting professor in film
and African American studies at Macalester College, Carleton
College and Colorado College. She is the author of the award
winning book about her grandfather, Paul Robeson, entitled The
Whole World in His Hands: A Pictorial Biography of Paul
Robeson as well as a forthcoming children’s book, Grandpa Stops
a War. She has two new projects on the horizon. She is filming
and recording the songs of the Maroon communities, songs that
have been passed down through the generations and she is working
on a graphic novel about Jamaican Maroon Qua and resistance in
the Maroon communities. That will be part of the topic of her
remarks today. So join me in welcoming this panel and we will
start off with Professor Tony Bogues.
Professor Tony Bogues: Good afternoon everyone. I would like to begin first by
thanking Susan Robeson for blowing the abeng. Thank you very
much. I think it’s really appropriate if you wish way to begin a last
panel that is thinking around for a symposium and thinking around
questions of slavery. I hope you can hear me at the back because I
think if I speak into the mic will I…okay, just worried about
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Panel 5: Race Racism, Memory and The Legacy of Slavery

feedback there. Let me begin by thanking very much the
organizers for inviting me to address this symposium and
particularly thanking Professor Barbara Ransby for putting
together this panel.

What I would like to do this afternoon is really to say three things.
The first thing I want to talk about is to suggest that perhaps we
need to think about how we need to name the system of traces and
sentiments and legacies in the contemporary world today. That is
the question of naming. The question I want to ask and try to
answer briefly is if we say that this is a long history or a history of
racial slavery is that sufficient to actually understand traces and
legacies and sentiments that shape our world today. The second
thing I want to talk about is to suggest that there are a set of
relationships between slavery, emancipation and freedom and that
to think about those relationships briefly may be productive for us
in the world today. The third thing that I would like to do and
speak a little bit about is the matters of memory and history and the
relationship between history, memory and justice and particularly
the last 15 years or so. There has been said before in this
conference the growth, if you wish, of a memory industry. I don’t
want to talk about the growth of industry or spend time thinking
about this industry today. What I want to talk about is the
relationship between memory, justice and freedom. So let us
begin.

One does not need to rehearse the voluminous historical literature
on slavery nor the abolition of slavery. They have heard that and
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Panel 5: Race Racism, Memory and The Legacy of Slavery

we have had major scholars in this conference that have done that
and whose work has made a remarkable difference to
understanding of the subject of slavery and abolition. Nor do we
need to rehearse, if you wish, and think about the relationship
between slavery and capitalism. Instead no matter what kind or
what side of the fence you fall on, what you argue about slavery
and capitalism generated by Eric Williams, 1940s document which
really tells us about kind of early history and the early stages of
capitalism, what I like to call really racial colonial modernity. No
matter what side of the argument you fall on whether or not there
is no relationship or whether a relationship is 10 years ****, no
matter what side of the argument you fall on one of the things is
absolutely clear that there is some relationship. There is some
****, if you wish, between racial slavery and this thing that we call
capitalism.

What I want to do, therefore, is to make a slight shift to think about
the slave him or herself. To think about the slave as a figure. To
think about what does it mean to be an enslaved person. An
enslaved person that has been dominated by a system of racial
slavery. To think about, therefore, the historic phenomenon of
racial slavery but to think about it through trying to think about the
slave himself or herself. I am here not thinking about resistance
because that’s the way we like to do it when we think of the slave.
We think of the slave and then we think of resistance.

Orlando Patterson in a remarkable book has suggested that slavery,
he says, was really a system of social death. Other scholars and so