Keynote Speakers:

Professor Catherine Hall (University College London) ‘Righting wrongs: slavery and reparatory histories’ and Professor Ben Carrington (University of Texas at Austin) ‘Show me the money!’: Freedom, Resistance and the Cultural Politics of Sport.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to build on the momentum created by the first Reparative Histories symposium held in 2014 and by the subsequent publication of a special issue of Race & Class (‘Reparative Histories: radical narratives of ‘race’ and resistance’, Race and Class, 57, 3 (2016)). That first event was interested in critically addressing the ways in which conceptions of the ‘reparative’ are currently shaped and understood, and in exploring what it means to turn to history in the appeal for recognition and redress. We set out to explore the question of how to relate the past to the present in the context of ‘race’, narrative and representation. Significant issues stemming from the first symposium concerned the importance of thinking through forms of historical interconnectedness both spatially and temporally, and ways of addressing, the dialectics of anti-colonial struggle, anti-racist resistance and mobilisation. This conference aims to further develop the concept of ‘Reparative Histories’ and to build on these concerns.

Given that racialised meanings continue to powerfully structure understandings of identity, belonging and exclusion within multiple social, cultural political and economic spaces. How might we further trace the history and politics of the making and unmaking of ‘race’? How might we connect effectively these historical formulations and to the maintenance of particular contemporary power relations? This conference aims to explore critically the ways in which processes of making, re-making and un-making ‘race’ are rooted in particular histories, politics and cultures. The conference aims to further elucidate the processes of racialization associated with histories of imperialism, colonialism, transatlantic enslavement and other forms of global labour production. It also aims to question how ‘legacies’ might be traced in the light of contemporary social and economic formations. ‘Race’ continues to signify either by glossing its historical provenance, or by drawing upon it.

At the same time, ‘race’ and its histories, offer a powerful political platform for those engaged in anti-racist, anti-colonial resistance. These traditions of struggle are currently being re-activated and re-articulated in ways that confront the power and pull of the universalism of liberal orthodoxy and they are increasingly exposing its fault-lines and occlusions. What is the role of history and indeed, memory, in relation to these resistant political processes. How might representations of the past be activated for the now?

Conference Programme

Thursday April 6th

9.30 – 10.00 Registration, Tea and Coffee

10.00 – 10.15 Welcome

10.5 – 11.45 Panel 1: Racialised Legacies Chair: Trish McManus

Joyce Hope Scott (Wheelock College, Boston) “The Political Economy of Blackness: History, Law and Narrative in Construction of the Black Body”

Brian Kelly (Queens University, Belfast) “Not all Black and White: Race, Property and the Reaction against Emancipation in the US South”

Louiza Odysseos (University of Sussex) “Prolegomena to Any Future Decolonial Ethics: Coloniality, Poetics and ‘Being Human as Praxis’”

11.45 – 12.00 Tea and Coffee

12.00 – 1.30 Panel 2: Memory and History Chair: Lucy Noakes

Lawrence Aje (University Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3, France) “Striking a Balance? Memorial Equality and Compensatory Public History in South Carolina in the context of the National Conversation about Race”

Christian Høgsbjerg (University of Leeds, UK) “Race and Revolution: The Making, Re-Making and Un-making of ‘Race’ during the Haitian Revolution”

Alan Rice (University of Central Lancashire, UK) “Vagrant Presences and Reparative Histories: Lost Children, the Black Atlantic and Northern Britain”

1.30 – 2.15 LUNCH

2.15 – 3.45 Panel 3: The ‘Colonial Indemnity’ Law and Reparations for Slavery: Making up for Past Wrongs Chair: John Watson

Winter Rae Schneider (University of California, Los Angeles)

Jessica Balguy (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)

Ary Gordien (Institut Recherche Développement, Paris)

3.45 – 4.45 Keynote Address: Catherine Hall: ‘Righting wrongs: slavery and reparatory histories’ Chair: Anita Rupprecht

5.00 – 6.30 Panel on Race & Class and Wine Reception Chair: Cathy Bergin

Avery Gordon (University of California at Santa Barbara)

Liz Fekete (Director of the Institute of Race Relations and Head of its European Research Programme)

7.30 Conference Dinner

Friday April 7th

9.30 – 0.00 Tea and Coffee

10.00 – 11.00 Keynote Address: Ben Carrington (University of Texas at Austin) “Show me the money!’: Freedom, Resistance and the Cultural Politics of Sport” Chair: Tom Hickey

11.00 – 12.30 Panel 4: ‘Race’, Representation and Culture Chair: Joyce Hope Scott

Corin Willis (Liverpool John Moores University) “Beyond Reparation?: Restoring the African American Minstrel in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000)”

Darren Newbury (University of Brighton) “’Window on the West Indies’: the photographic imagination of the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel”

Tom Hickey (University of Brighton) “ Monochrome, Memory and Melancholia: Representation and Recuperation in the Work of Kara Walker and William Kentridge

Panel 5: Racialising Spaces and Politics Chair: Brian Kelly

Miri Davidson (Queen Mary, University of London) “Colonialism and the concept of culture in Claude Lévi-Strauss and Aimé Césaire”

Jon Watson (University of Brighton) “Los Angeles and the Politics of Anti-racism in the Twentieth Century”

John Newsinger (University of Bath Spa) “Imperial Silences”

12.30 – 1.15 LUNCH

1.15 – 2.45 Panel 6: Cross cultural encounters Chair: Becca Searle

Marlon Moncrieffe (University of Brighton) “Exploring cross-cultural encounters through historical consciousness: teaching and learning for race equality in Britain”

Mark Abel (University of Brighton “What counts as ‘black music’? Disparities between Anglophone and Hispanophone constructions of musical tradition and identity in the Americas”

Panel 7: Racialising Histories Chair: Robin Dunford

Neal Allen (Wichita State University, USA) “Civil Rights for Blacks as “Unfreedom” for Whites: The 1960s Backlash Roots of Donald Trump’s America

Pandeleimon Hionidis “’Racialising’ the Modern Greeks in the 1860s: from ‘nation’ to ‘race’ in mid-Victorian Britain”

Clive Gabay (Queen Mary, University of London) “Remaking and redeeming Whiteness in Post-War British Settler Africa

2.45 – 3.00 Tea and Coffee

3.00 – 4.30 Panel 8: Representation and Reparation Chair: John Newsinger

Ekua Mcmorris (University of Brighton): “The Making and Re-making of Race through the use of photography”

Olakunle Folami (Adenkunle Ajasin University, Nigeria) & Taiwo Akanbi Olaiya (Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria) “Slavery, Dehumanisation and Reparation: Justice for the West Africans”

Anita Rupprecht & Cathy Bergin (University of Brighton) “Multicultural Resistance and Reparative Histories”

4.30 – 4.45 Closing Remarks