Related Events

Out of Sightis a series of events marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. In addition to the conference, a reading, web-based project, book, exhibition, courses, and a summer program will provide an in-depth and multidimensional consideration of the issue of slavery and visual representation.

• Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, March 2007. Saidiya V. Hartman, author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), discusses her latest book with members of the Humanities Institute's Critical Race Studies Faculty and Graduate Student Reading Group. Thursday, March 1st, 3-5PM African American Studies Conference Room, 2-425 Kresge Hall.
• Big House / Disclosure, March 2007. Produced by artists Mendi+Keith Obadike in collaboration with Northwestern students and faculty for this year’s Pick-Laudati Grant, Big House is an intermedia work exploring Chicago’s role as the first US city to adopt a Slavery-Era Disclosure Ordinance, which requires institutions doing business with the city to disclose whether they have profited from slavery.
• A publication of conference proceedings.  Involving scholars from various locations impacted by the slave trade, as well as from different disciplines, the conference and book will provide comparative perspectives and theories on the visual representation of the slave past in colonial and postcolonial societies throughout the Atlantic world. As communities globally reappraise their roles in the slave trade and its legacy, this conference offers a comparative analysis of the part visual images played in representing, remembering, and refiguring slavery in different societies and diverse constituents therein.
• An art exhibition by Fred Wilson at the Institute of Jamaica, July 2007.  Wilson is invited to reinstall objects from the Institute of Jamaica collection, some of which relate to slavery.  While Wilson has previously “mined” the hidden histories of African Americans in museum displays in the United States, he has never explored these issues in the Caribbean context.  Through the exhibition, we will interrogate the meaning of material objects of slavery in the postcolonial Caribbean.  For more on the Institute of Jamaica, visit http://www.instituteofjamaica.org.jm
• A summer abroad program on slavery for advanced graduate students from Northwestern University, Summer 2007.  Students will explore the history of representations of slavery in their respective societies through lectures, art workshops with Fred Wilson, tours to slavery-related monuments and discussion sessions. The three-week summer course examines the meaning of the archive and museum in contemporary Jamaica and in postcolonial nations more generally.  The Caribbean island provides a unique environment through which to consider the significance of institutional archives and museum collections in popular memory, history, and national discourse in postcolonial societies.  Islands throughout the Caribbean, especially the Anglo-Caribbean, have been characterized precisely as places devoid of material traces of the past. The decimation of the indigenous population and landscape, the lack of ruins, and the absence of museums all resulted in what Caribbean theorist Michel-Rolph Trouillot describes as actively created silences in the historical (and art historical) record.  Through readings, fieldtrips to Jamaica’s extensive system of national monuments and by visiting contemporary museums throughout the island, students will develop a complex understanding of the fraught consequences of these silences on the production of postcolonial memory and sites of memorialization.
  
  The class, which will be taught as Jamaica and many parts of the world mark the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, will place a special emphasis on museum displays, state commemorations, and popular discourses surrounding the memorialization of slavery. Specifically they will conduct research with the archives and collections at the Institute of Jamaica.  The students will work with artist Fred Wilson, the MacArthur award-winning artist best known for his excavations of North American and European museums.   Wilson will curate a new project at the Institute of Jamaica drawing on its collections but will address new questions about the meaning of objects collected in the colonial era on predominately black postcolonial societies.
• A graduate seminar on slavery in the visual imagination by Professors Krista Thompson and Huey Copeland, Winter 2007. This graduate seminar examines the constitution of slavery in the modern visual field.  What signs, memorials, and technologies have been mobilized to signify what has often been deemed an unsignifiable experience?  How did visual markers or the lack thereof inform the memory of slavery or its willful forgetting centuries after abolition?  What visual resources remain?  What evidence do they provide?  How might we begin to frame and interpret them, and how have various interested parties—whether artists, activists, scholars, or institutions—made use of them?  How can an exploration of efforts to create a visual account of slavery add to wider art-historical considerations of the relation between trauma and representation, absence and memorialization?  Moreover, this class will explore how issues central to aesthetic production within modernity—the status of the object, the position of the viewing subject, and indeed, the meaning of seeing itself—are productively complicated both historically and theoretically when examined from the perspective of the “peculiar institution.”  We will read texts ranging from Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Small Place” to Marcus Wood’s Blind Memory and examine a variety of objects, from 19th-century photographs to 21st-century art installations.  Students are required to write a seminar paper and present their work in class.
• An undergraduate seminar on race and representation taught by Professor Krista Thompson, Winter 2007. Students will, in part, examine how representations of the institution of slavery influenced subsequent ways of imagining race throughout the Atlantic world.
• An undergraduate course taught by Huey Copeland, Winter 2007.  This course will aim to deploy “blackness” as an analytic framework that both accounts for a wide range of African-American cultural practices and reframes our conception of modernism in the twentieth century.