The conference aims to identify the political, historical, and aesthetic origins of slave narratives whilst also considering how neo-slave narratives re-imagine the slave narrative tradition, its tropes and its form.
Hosted by the University of Greenwich and co-organised by the University of Greenwich and the University of Liverpool
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Venue: University of Greenwich, London
Date: 16th and 17th June 2022
About the conference
The original African American and Caribbean slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (for example, those by Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass) have been revisited in the twentieth and twenty first century neo-slave narrative genre that includes works of poetry, prose, drama, film and art. Neo-slave narratives exist in many forms, including the historical novel, science fiction, memoir, and the gothic. The conference aims to identify the political, historical, and aesthetic origins of slave narratives whilst also considering how neo-slave narratives re-imagine the slave narrative tradition, its tropes and its form. At the end of her own seminal neo-slave narrative Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison writes of how the history of slavery “is not a story to pass on”, famously ambivalent words that invite us to consider why the slave narrative continues to be passed on, told in ever more diverse and imaginative forms of remembrance.
Programme - PDF Version
Thursday 16th June - Location: King William Building, Room 002
9:00-9:45 | Registration |
9:45-10:00 | Welcome, (Justine Baillie and Professor Mark O’Thomas, Pro Vice Chancellor, University of Greenwich) |
10:00-11:00 | Opening Keynote by Lucienne Loh (University of Liverpool) Representing a Gendered Economy of Transatlantic Slavery in Black British Writing |
11:00-11:15 | Coffee break |
11:15-11:45 | Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) The em-bodi-ment of wealth: Slave bodies and their material value as seen through the example of neo-slave narratives |
11:45-12:15 | Feyisitan Ijimakinwa (University of Ibadan) Unpacking the Politics of (Non)Restitution of Benin Bronze Artefacts as Another Neo-slave Narrative |
12:15-12:45 | Maiko Mine (Chuogakuin University) Literacy and Neo-slave Narratives |
12:45-13:15 | Nikky Suárez (University of Central Florida) Re-imagining Neo-Slave Narratives’ “Autobiographical ‘I’” in Douglass and Jacobs |
| 13:15-14:45 | Lunch |
14:45-15:15 | Laura Blunsden (University of Liverpool) The Exhibition and Inhibition of Mary Prince in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionist Discourse |
15:15-15:45 | Angela Mann Leeds (University of Central Florida) Genealogy-Informed Texts as Neo-Slave Narratives |
15:45-16:15 | Jee H. An (Seoul National University) The How and Why of Remembering the Past |
16:15-16:30 | Break |
16:30-17:30 | Closing Keynote by Leila Kamali (Independent Scholar) John Edgar Wideman and the Neo-Slave Narrative |
| 18:15 | Barbecue dinner in Queen Anne Courtyard |
Friday 17th June - Location: King William Building, Room 002
9:30-10:30 | Opening Keynote by Alan Rice (University of Central Lancashire) Neo Slave Narratives beyond in Literature and Beyond from Lubaina Himid to Ellen Gallagher and Jade Montserrat |
10:30-11:00 | Sienna Brown (Author) and Ben Etherington (Western Sydney University) From Slaves to Convicts: Telling the Story of Unfree West Indian Labour in Australia |
| 11:00-11:15 | Break |
11:15-11:45 | Louise Kane (University of Central Florida) “Frey Bartolomo Fetched me from the Congo”’: Neo-Slave Narratives in Caribbean Poetry |
11:45-12:15 | Lucia Llano Puertas (University of Westminster) Transatlantic Slavery and the Question of the Human: Archives and Neo-Archives in the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean |
12:15-12:45 | Liani Lochner (Université Laval) “We’ve had enough of being trapped in this derelict pondok of history”: Zoë Wicomb’s Still Life and the Neo-slave Narrative |
12:45-13:15 | Emily Miller (The College of New Jersey) The impossibility of Female Enlightenment in Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale |
13:15-14:00 | Lunch |
14:00-14:30 | Luana de Souza Sutter (University of Erfurt) Testimony, Materiality, and the Slave Narrative in Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts (1997) |
14:30-15:00 | Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka (University of Debrecen) Challenging the Lenticular Logic of Representation in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose |
15:00-15:30 | Josiane Ranguin (University of Paris XIII-Sorbonne) Navigating Antebellum Maryland as a Black Feminist in Kindred by Octavia Estelle Butler |
15:30-16:00 | Madelyn Walsh (University of Liverpool) Exaqua in Giles Terera’s The Meaning of Zong |
| 16:00-16:15 | Break |
| 16:15-17:15 | Alan Rice in Conversation with Novelist, Yvonne Battle Felton |
| 17:15 | Closing Remarks |
Useful links
Getting to University of Greenwich
Hotels in Greenwich
Organising Committee
- Dr Justine Baillie, University of Greenwich
- Dr Emily Critchley, University of Greenwich
- Dr Katarina Stenke, University of Greenwich
- Dr Anna Costantino, University of Greenwich
- Madelyn Walsh, University of Liverpool