Guest Lecture by Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson  (Provost Professor of Art History, Department of History of Art and Architecture and Director of the Slavery North Initiative, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)

June 17 (Tue.), noon-1:30 p.m. (Building 100/VIIb)

Transatlantic Slavery was an institution that sought to turn human beings into chattel. This race-based slavery spanned four hundred years and was characterized by physical brutality, psychological torment, material deprivation, cultural prohibitions, and terror. However, the enslaved did not submit meekly to their racial debasement and institutionalized brutality. Despite all the dimensions of enslaver control, the enslaved sought actively to maintain their dignity and humanity, and to seize their liberty. Therefore, although slavery was a product of white brutality, it was also characterized by ongoing black resistance. Enslaved Africans and their descendants often resisted through work slow-downs, feigning illness, damaging, or burning the enslavers’ property, practising their cultures, preserving kinship bonds, and demanding the right to independently access economic markets. Working comparatively with examples from Canada, the USA, and tropical regions, this lecture explores the profound obstacles that the enslaved faced in securing their freedom and in resisting the everyday indignities and onslaughts of slavery.

Charmaine A. Nelson, Dr., is a Provost Professor of Art History in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and Director of the Slavery North Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Black Maple Magazine, one of the only national platforms aimed at black Canadians. From 2020-2022, she was a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Halifax, Canada where she founded the first-ever institute focused on the study of Canadian Slavery. She also worked at McGill University (Montreal) for seventeen years (2003-2020). Nelson has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, Black Diaspora Studies, and Black Canadian Studies. She has published seven books including The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (2016), and Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance (2018). She is actively engaged with lay audiences through her media work including ABC, CBC, CTV, and City TV News, The Boston Globe, BBC One’s “Fake or Fortune,” and PBS’ “Finding your Roots”. She has blogged for Huffington Post Canada and written for The Walrus. In 2017, she was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University and in 2021 a Fields of the Future Fellow at Bard Graduate Center (NYC). In 2022, she was inducted as a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada and elected as a Member of the American Antiquarian Society.

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