Academic Slavery

Saratoga Springs is of the important memory sites in the antebellum American History, and also of great national interest of the United States. It is a landmark where you speak of human freedom and justice. What makes this place important is Solomon Northup, who was an important figure in early nineteenth century; a freeborn then kidnapped and sold into slavery for twelve years. Made into film in the late 2013 and awarded an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, Northup’s ‘Twelve Years a Slave’ plays a key role in documenting his account with vivid details to have direct effect on his own identity as a slave, which is also another key element of such an autobiographical novel to support author’s intention of achieving autobiographical veracity. His own insight and perfect depiction of the place where he lives contributes much to specialization of Saratoga Springs and the places where he was taken. Northup’s account is ironic in many ways that he loses his primary right in the nation’s Capitol. The capitol fails to save his freedom, which is the symbol of democracy, but at the same time leads to his corruption

This paper examines the return to Africa, in 1836, of a group of affluent Yoruba-speaking freed people who had been slaves in Bahia. It examines their interrelated lives during the years before they left Brazil, also analyzing how they were affected by the rebellion and its aftermath, and presenting preliminary data showing that after reaching Africa they settled in the coastal own of Agoué, in present-day Benin Republic. The paper appears in the edited volume, "The Vile Trade: Slavery and the Slave Trade in Africa," Derefaka, Abi Alabo; Ogundele, Wole; Alao, Akin and Ajibola, Augustus Babajide (eds) (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2015), pp. 211-224. This volume contains papers presented at the conference, "International Colloquium on Slavery, the Slave Trade and Their Consequences", held in Iloko, Osun State, Nigeria, in August 2010,

Dutch Racism, 2014

History of Political Thought

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought has recently been reclaimed as a robust, albeit short-lived, cosmopolitan critique of European imperialism. This essay complicates this interpretation through a study of David Hume’s reflections on commerce, empire, and slavery. I argue that while Hume condemned the colonial system of monopoly, war, and conquest, his strictures against empire did not extend to colonial slavery in the Atlantic. This was because colonial slavery represented a manifestly uncivil institution when judged by enlightened metropolitan sensibilities, yet also a decisively commercial institution pivotal to the eighteenth-century global economy. Confronted by the paradoxical “commercial incivility” of modern slavery, Hume opted for disavowing the link between slavery and commerce, and confined his criticism of slavery to its ancient, feudal, and Asiatic incarnations. I contend that Hume’s disavowal of the commercial barbarism of the Atlantic economy is part of a broader ideological effort to separate the idea of commerce from its imperial origins and posit it as the liberal antithesis of empire. The implications of analysis, I conclude, go beyond the eighteenth-century debates over commerce and empire, and more generally pertain to the contradictory entwinement of liberalism and capitalism.

Anja Bandau, Anne Brüske, Natascha Ueckmann (eds.): Reshaping Glocal Dynamics of the Caribbean. Relaciones y Desconexiones – Relations et Déconnexions – Relations and Disconnections., 2018

2016

This article offers a transcultural reading of the issues of cultural trauma and mobility in Daniel Black’s novel They Tell Me of a Home (2005). The protagonist, T.L., returns to his agrarian home community, Swamp Creek, in Arkansas, after a ten-year absence in which he received a PhD in black studies in New York. His homecoming foregrounds the cultural clash between the patriarchal black community and the elitist academic world that T.L. represents. This is articulated in the novel at the aesthetic level as the tension between the oral storytelling tradition of the black community and the literary expression favored by T.L. The opposite sides of the cultural clash and their respective modes of cultural production are understood as ways of dealing with the cultural memory of slavery and its aftermaths. The Meetin’ Tree, the site of storytelling in Swamp Creek, becomes a transcultural space where these issues are negotiated. T.L. eventually adopts a newfound appreciation for his cultural roots and also initiates a change in the negative attitudes of the community towards education and reading. He thereby becomes a transcultural mediator between these conflicting cultures, aiming to stress and combine their strengths and to negotiate their weaknesses.

Universities are distinctive institutions, whose essential tasks include the preservation of memory and the dissemination of history. But how do universities remember their own pasts, particularly when those pasts deemed difficult or problematic? To understand institutional strategies of memory work we focus on how American universities remember and commemorate their fraught relations with slavery, examining in particular two cases in which universities have been forced to remember their past involvement in slavery. Through interviews at Brown University and the University of Alabama and the analysis of news accounts, we explore the conditions of successful and less successful apologies for slavery. We argue that universities are potentially effective sites for apologies because of their commitment to active consideration, their ability to engage in the process of apology, and their function, in effect, as museums of ideas. As a consequence, apologies can play a powerful and continuing role in collegiate settings.

Universities are distinctive institutions, whose essential tasks include the preservation of memory and the dissemination of history. But how do universities remember their own pasts, particularly when those pasts deemed difficult or problematic? To understand institutional strategies of memory work we focus on how American universities remember and commemorate their fraught relations with slavery, examining in particular two cases in which universities have been forced to remember their past involvement in slavery. Through interviews at Brown University and the University of Alabama and the analysis of news accounts, we explore the conditions of successful and less successful apologies for slavery. We argue that universities are potentially effective sites for apologies because of their commitment to active consideration, their ability to engage in the process of apology and their function, in effect, as museums of ideas. As a consequence, apologies can play a powerful and continuing role in collegiate settings.

The Public Historian / Vol. 38 / August 2016

How the University of Cambridge cynically prostitutes its ancient brand to scam billions of pounds sterling from vulnerable citizens of developing nations via global systemic IELTS exam fraud, extortion and human trafficking crimes.