The Global Plantation Symposium’s keynote speaker will be Deborah A. Thomas.
The keynote lecture, What Lies Beyond The Plantation?, is available for viewing here. The symposium’s first live session on Thursday, October 15 at 5.00pm EDT will feature a moderated discussion and Q&A period with Dr. Thomas.
Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also core faculty in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, holds a secondary appointment with the Graduate School of Education, and is a member of the graduate groups in English, Africana Studies, and the School of Social Policy and Practice. Prior to her appointment at Penn, she spent two years as a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for the Americas at Wesleyan University, and four years teaching in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is the author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Entanglement, Witnessing, Repair (2019), Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (2011), and Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and The Politics of Culture in Jamaica (2004), and is co-editor of Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (2006). She is also co-director and co-producer of two films: BAD FRIDAY: RASTAFARI AFTER CORAL GARDENS (with John L. Jackson, Jr. and Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn), a documentary that chronicles the history of violence in Jamaica through the eyes of its most iconic community – Rastafari – and shows how people use their recollections of the Coral Gardens “incident” in 1963 to imagine new possibilities for the future; and FOUR DAYS IN MAY (with Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn and Deanne M. Bell), an experimental documentary that juxtaposes archives related to the “Tivoli Incursion” in May 2010, when Jamaican security forces entered West Kingston to arrest Christopher Coke, wanted for extradition to the United States, and killed at least 75 civilians. Thomas is also the co-curator of a multi-media installation titled Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston, which opened at the Penn Museum in November 2017. Thomas has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals across the disciplines.
Panelists
Amie Batalibasi is an Australian-Solomon Islander writer, director and producer based in Melbourne, Australia. Her filmmaking practice aims to bring diverse stories to light by collaborating with people and communities at a grassroots level, to unearth stories that have the possibility to spark empowerment and create change. Her short narrative and documentary films, exploring issues of social justice, human rights and cultural diversity are award-winning, and have screened at festivals around the globe. Her debut short drama, BLACKBIRD, inspired by the history of Australia’s sugar slaves, screened at the 69th Berlinale International Film Festival, received several script awards from the Victorian College of the Arts, and debuted on NITV (National Indigenous Television) and SBS OnDemand in 2017. BLACKBIRD will be broadcasted throughout the Asia-Pacific via ABC Australia in 2020. In 2018, Amie was selected to attend the Berlinale Talents Summit 2018 as part of the Berlinale International Film Festival, as well as the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) Filmmaker Lab. She is the 2017 recipient of the Sundance Institute Merata Mita Fellowship (in the name of the late Maori filmmaker), a year long fellowship awarded to a Native or Indigenous filmmaker from a global pool of nominees.
Amy Clukey is associate professor of English at the University of Louisville, where she is affiliated with the university honors program, the women and gender studies department, and the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research. She teaches courses on environmental literature, global modernism, Irish studies, and southern studies. Her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Modernism/Modernity, PMLA, The New Hibernia Review, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, and Twentieth-Century Literature, among other venues. She co-edited a special issue of the journal Global South on the topic of “plantation modernity” with Jeremy Wells (2017) and she is currently coediting a collection of essays on speculative Souths with Erich Nunn and Jon Smith. Her article “Plantation Modernity: Gone with the Wind and Irish-Southern Culture” was awarded the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize for the best article on southern literature published in 2013 by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. She is completing a monograph entitled Plantation Modernism: Transatlantic Anglophone Fiction 1890-1950.
Andil Gosine is Professor of Environmental Arts & Justice at York University, Toronto. Dr. Gosine’s scholarship and artistic and curatorial practices examine imbrications of ecology, desire and migration, and include numerous scholarly publications and multimedia projects, including his forthcoming monograph, Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (Duke). His recent solo exhibitions include rêvenir (Port of Spain, 2020), Deities, Parts I & II (New York in 2019), and Coolie Coolie Viens and All the Flowers (various, Canada, 2018). He is curator of the current retrospective exhibition, Wendy Nanan at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C.
Clare Corbould is Associate Professor of history at Deakin University, Melbourne. She is author of Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939 (Harvard University Press, 2009) and co-editor of Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation-Making from Independence to the Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). Recent work germane to this symposium is her 2018 article co-authored with Hilary Emmett: “Australian Afterlives of Atlantic Slavery: Belatedness and Transpacific American Studies,” in volume 52 of Journal of American Studies.
Emilia Terracciano is a writer, translator, and lecturer in Modern Art History. Before joining the Art History and Cultural Practices Department at the University of Manchester, Emilia was a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellow and later, AW Mellon Global South Fellow at the Ruskin School of Art (2015-20). She was also the Bowra Junior Research Fellow at Wadham College, University of Oxford. Emilia’s research interests lie in art, science and ecology, with a focus on the global south. She is currently working on a new project about art, agronomy and science in art. Emilia is an active critic and essayist, writing regular book and exhibition reviews for Frieze, The Caravan Magazine and Marg. She has published in numerous peer-reviewed journals including Oxford Art Journal, Art Journal, The Art Bulletin, ArtMargins and Third Text. Her essays have been commissioned by Sculpture Journal, MetBreuer, Paul Mellon Centre, Lux, Jhaveri Contemporary, and La Biennale di Venezia. Her first book Art and Emergency: Modernism in Twentieth-Century India was published by IB Tauris in 2018.
Gaiutra Bahadur is an essayist, critic and journalist who writes frequently about literature, history, memory, migration, race and ethnicity and gender. She is the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, a personal history of indenture shortlisted in 2014 for the Orwell Prize, the British literary prize for artful political writing. She teaches writing and journalism as an assistant professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University in Newark. She writes regularly for The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Nation, and Dissent.
Hilary Emmett is Associate Professor in American Studies at the University of East Anglia. Her essays on transnational Area Studies have appeared in Journal of American Studies, Australasian Journal of American Studies, Common-place, and in collections published by Oxford University Press, Palgrave, and the Modern Languages Association.
Imani Uzuri, raised in rural North Carolina, is an award-winning vocalist, composer, librettist, and improviser called “a postmodernist Bessie Smith” by the Village Voice. She composes, performs, and creates interdisciplinary works often dealing with themes of ancestral memory, magical realism, liminality, Black American vernacular culture, spirituality and landscape. Her ritual performance Wild Cotton was recently cited as one “with subtlety and vision” by the New York Times. As a Jerome Foundation Composer/Sound Artist Fellow Uzuri made international sojourns in support of her forthcoming ritual opera celebrating the holy iconography of the Black Madonna. Uzuri has been commissioned by Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, The Ford Foundation and her recent Chamber Music America New Jazz Works commission She Knows Suite premiered at Lincoln Center Atrium in February 2020. Uzuri received her MFA from Goddard College Vermont and her M.A. in African American Studies from Columbia University. Uzuri was a 2019-2020 Harvard University W. E. B. DuBois Hutchins Center Fellow in support of her forthcoming experimental chamber opera Hush Arbor (The Opera), which has been commissioned by The Momentary.
Imelda Miller is the Curator, Torres Strait Islander and Pacific Indigenous Studies at the Queensland Museum Network, Brisbane, Australia. Imelda works with material culture and archival collections inside and outside of traditional museum environment and spaces to create access to collections for communities of origin. Her collaborative curatorial practice incorporates a combination of cultural practice, community engagement and community-led research and development. Mil4ler’s Australian South Sea Islander heritage drives her passion in creating awareness about the Australian South Sea Islander history, heritage and identity.
Jasmine Togo-Brisby is a multidisciplinary artist whose work engages in concerns of cultural memory and the effects of intergenerational trauma that are transmitted through ongoing oppression across several generations, particularly in contrast to the inheritance of wealth that has come to those who have benefitted from slavery and colonisation. Togo-Brisby studied Fine Arts at Southbank Institute of Technology and Queensland College of Art, Australia, she then relocated to Massey University, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa, Wellington New Zealand where she received her BFA (2017) and is now in her final year of MFA. Togo-Brisby’s art works are held in private and public collections, amongst others, Auckland Art Gallery, Queensland State Library, New Zealand Maritime Museum and Wellington City Collection. Her recent solo exhibitions include, From Bones and Bellies, Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch, New Zealand (2020); Dear Mrs Wunderlich, Page Galleries Wellington, New Zealand (2020); If these walls could talk, they’d tell you my name, Courtenay Place Park Light Box Project, Wellington, New Zealand (2020); Birds of Passage, Dunedin School of Art, Dunedin, New Zealand (2019); Adrift, Page Blackie Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand (2019).
Lacey Wilson is currently the Site Manager for the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Historic Site. The Historic Site is only historic in the North Carolina site named for a woman, and a black woman. Previously Lacey was a historic interpreter at the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters under the Telfair Museums in Savannah Georgia. In that position, she interpreted the economics and politics in urban slavery from the 1810s to the 1850s. In this position, she was interviewed by the New York Times and A1 the NPR about changing narratives at Southern historic sites that interpret slavery. Currently, she serves on the NCPH Advocacy Committee and is active with the Black Interpreters Guild. She received an M.A. in History with a concentration in Museum Studies from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro ( UNCG). While at UNCG she collaborated on “Etched in Stone? Governor Charles Aycock and the Power of Commemoration,” a permanent exhibition and winner of two AASLH awards in 2017. Additionally, she developed “Voices from the Cells,” an exhibit for GrowingChange from oral interviews on incarceration in North Carolina 1980s to 2000s.
M. Neelika Jayawardane is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York-Oswego, and a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD), University of Johannesburg (South Africa). She is a recipient of the 2018 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for a book project on Afrapix, a South African photographers’ agency that operated during the last decade of apartheid. Jayawardane’s research concentrates on South Africa, and her writing focuses on the nexus between written texts, visual art, photography, and the transnational/transhistorical implications of colonialism, ongoing forms of discrimination, displacement, and migration on individuals and communities.
Michael Laffan is professor of history at Princeton University, where he teaches courses on the history of Southeast Asia and Islam across the Indian Ocean. A native of Canberra, Australia, he is the author of Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia (Routledge 2003), The Makings of Indonesian Islam (Princeton, 2011), and Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is currently working on two manuscripts, the first being a history of Islam and Empire across the Indian Ocean in the 19th century, and the second on the Cocos Keeling atoll and its indentured Muslim population under the Clunies-Ross family.
Monique Allewaert, associate professor of English, studies eighteenth-century American plantation colonies with particular attention to intersections of ecology, critical race studies, and aesthetics. She is completing a book that explores how plantation colonies’ inadvertent proliferation of insects became surprisingly central to the cultural productions of enslaved, free black, and indigenous stakeholders.
Olivia Williams began her work as a Cultural History Interpreter at McLeod Plantation Historic Site in 2016. At this site we interpret the history of enslaved people and the legacies of slavery. During Olivia’s time at McLeod, she’s had the opportunity to become certified through the National Association of Interpretation as a Certified Interpretive Guide.She earned my Bachelors in History and African American Studies from the College of Charleston and is currently pursuing a Masters of Arts in History with a concentration in Public History. During her time in this program she’s had the opportunity to be a Graduate Assistant at Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture..
Shiraz Bayjoo is a Mauritian artist based between London and Mauritius. Shiraz Bayjoo’s practice explores the social, political and historical conditions integral to Mauritian cultural identity and the wider Indian Ocean region. Often using photographs and artefacts from public and personal archives, culminating in a multidisciplinary practice of video, painting, photography and sculpture. His practice considers the formation of collective identity and nationhood through the entangled legacies of European colonialism, and their relationships to slavery and indentured labour. Bayjoo studied Painting at the University of Wales, Institute Cardiff, and was artist in residence at Whitechapel Gallery during 2011. He has exhibited at Tate Britain and the Institute of International Visual Arts, London, New Art Exchange, Nottingham; 5th Edition Dhaka Art Summit; 14th Biennale of Sharjah; 13th Biennale of Dakar; 21st Biennale of Sydney; and is a recipient of the Gasworks Fellowship and the Arts Council of England. His work is represented in the Sharjah Foundation collection, UK Government collection, and French National collection, as well as private collections both in Europe and Asia. Born in Mauritius, Bayjoo’s work focuses on the Indian Ocean and the European historical legacies that have shaped the region. Bayjoo has been a visiting lecturer and critic at universities both in Europe, USA, and Australia.
Sophie Sapp Moore is a broadly-trained political ecologist with a background in critical geography, comparative literature, and postcolonial theory. Moore holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from UC Davis, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. She is currently a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2018-2020). Her interdisciplinary research uses ethnographic and historical methods to understand intersecting processes of socio-ecological and political change in the Afro-Caribbean. Moore has conducted ethnographic research in rural Haiti since 2012, working with peasants, social movement leaders, organizers, and trainers, as well as international aid and local grassroots organizations. She writes and teaches on a diverse array of subjects that bridge critical geography, postcolonial theory, and the environmental humanities, including rural development, agrarian social movements, Black political thought, and race and space in the Americas.
Tiffany King is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. Her research is situated at intersections of slavery and indigenous genocide in the Americas. King’s book The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019) argues that scholarly traditions within Black Studies that examine Indigenous genocide alongside slavery in the Americas have forged ethical and generative engagements with Native Studies—and Native thought—that continue to reinvent the political imaginaries of abolition and decolonization. King is also co-editor of an anthology titled Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Black Racism (Duke University Press 2020). This collection of essays features leading scholars in the fields of Black and Indigenous Studies in order to stage a conversation between Black and Indigenous thought and politics on “otherwise” terms that are less mediated by conquest and settler-colonial logics.
Zinzi Minott’s work focuses on the relationship between dance, bodies and politics. Zinzi explores how dance is perceived through the prisms of race, queer culture, gender and class. She is specifically interested in the place of Black women’s body within the form. As a dancer and filmmaker, she seeks to complicate the boundaries of dance seeing her live performance, filmic explorations and objects a different, but connected manifestations of dance and body based outcomes and enquiry. Zinzi is interested in ideas of broken narrative, disturbed lineage, and how the use of the glitch can help us to consider notions of racism one experiences through the span of a Black life. She is specifically interested in telling Caribbean stories and highlighting the histories of those enslaved and the resulting migration of the Windrush Generation.