ARLIS/NA 49th Annual Conference

Representations of Transatlantic Slavery in most media – like Hollywood films - gives the impression that corporal punishment was the main tool of social oppression. However, the terror which slave owners sought to inspire in the enslaved was also produced through the control of information and the strategic (mis)representation of the enslaved for the legal, social, and economic ends of mainly middle and upper class whites. This lecture will explore the nature of printed and manuscript sources created in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Canadian Slavery to highlight the ways in which information was used to dehumanize and immobilize the enslaved. Concomitantly, the archive itself will be critiqued as a space through which enslaved human beings were deliberately documented as “incomplete entries”.

Speaker: Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson

Charmaine A. Nelson is a Professor of Art History and a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University in Halifax, CANADA where she is also the founding director of the first-ever institute focused on the study of Canadian Slavery. Prior to this appointment she worked at McGill University (Montreal) for seventeen years. Nelson has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, and Black Canadian Studies. Nelson 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 blogs for the Huffington Post Canada and writes for The Walrus. In 2017, she was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University.

THIS PRESENTATION WILL NOT BE RECORDED