Authoring slavery - Forms and Conditions for Narrating Slavery

Seminar at the Aarhus University, Denmark. The experience of enslavement is often portrayed as shrouded in silence due to the simple fact that the number of texts and accounts written by enslaved people is very limited, especially when compared to the vast amounts of documentation produced by the colonial powers.

As recent scholarship has shown, however, enslaved people were not always silent — silence is rather an effect created by the privileging of some forms of writing and as a result certain voices and viewpoints over others. And even when there is silence this does not necessarily mean that nothing is being said or done. Silence can also be a strategic choice, which can serve as a means for ‘protecting one’s identity from pathologization’ (Bayo Holsey 2008, 235).

In this seminar we focus on authoring as a term for a process in which individuals or groups position themselves in relation to written or oral texts, but also visuals and other forms of artistic expression (film, tattooing/scarification, dress, song and so on) in an ongoing struggle for forms of rhetorical, personal and political agency in what can be described as a non-continuous and complex ‘series of […] practices of the self’ (Achille Mbembe 2001, 272). The focus includes an awareness of authoring as the multiple, repeated and sometimes veiled or negated placing of a text in social space.

Registration

The deadline for registering for the seminar is Friday 1 March 2024, at 23:55. Read more about the seminar and register.