'FREE AT LAST' - CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
The Conference will take place in the Humanities Building (ground floor), University of Warwick.
Wednesday 11 July
Registration from 16.00 in Rootes Building
18.00 Welcome (Dr. Cecily Jones) Room H052
18.15 KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Dr. Akosua Perbi (H052) ‘Slavery, our story, our legacy’Chair: Dr. Cecily Jones
19.00 Buffet Dinner – 1st Floor, Rootes Building
20.30 Poetry reading and music in Room H052
Thursday 12 July Registration from 9.30 in Humanities H052 (entrance)Jean-Pierre LeGlaunec: Unfinished stories: (re)Reading the fugitive slave advertisements published in the Atlantic world at the time of Abolition
Miranda Kaufmann: Runaway African slaves and their Palenque settlements in the Spanish Caribbean 1550-1650
11.00 Break
11.30 KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Prof. Gad Heuman (H052) ‘Dismantling Slavery: The Apprenticeship System in the Caribbean’ Chair: Dr. Cecily JonesDaniel Livesay: Imagining difference: abolition and mixed race in the British Atlantic.
Dayo Mitchell: The limits of slavery in the British Caribbean
13.00 Buffet lunch
I.J. Barrett: The meaning of liberty: Benjamin Vaughan and the dilemma of slavery in 1790s Britain
John Coffey: ‘Must we not tremble?: the fear of God and the abolition of the slave trade.
Geoffrey Plank: Ships as emblems of the British Empire and the slave trade: Eighteenth-century Quaker perspectives
Daniel Laqua: Representing the African slave trade, 1888-1914
14.00 Plantation Economies Chair: Dr. Cecily Jones (0H60)
Sasha Turner: White women and emancipation: exploring female proprietorship and management on a Jamaican sugar estate, 1834-1842
Simon D. Smith: A visiting attorney in the Leeward Islands: John Johnson’s reports of slavery (1824-6)
John McNish Weiss: Apprenticeship in the 1807 Slave Trade Act: a novelty and its development (PARALLEL SESSIONS)15.45 Break
16.00 Slavery and literature – Chair: Prof. David Dabydeen (H052)
Georgia Axiotou: Ayi Kewi Armah’s Fragments: Resisting forgetfulness, re-staging slavery
Patricia Noxolo: Freedom and Fear: Foucauldian perspectives on abolitionism
J. Antoine-Dunne: Literary and filmic representations of the abolitionist struggle.
17.30 Break
18.45 Rum punch reception – EAT Restaurant
19.30 Conference Dinner – EAT Restaurant
10.00 Anti slave trade writings – Chair: Dr. Lynne Macedo (H058)
Dee E. Andrews: ‘Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade: A reappraisal of its significance from the original manuscript.
Judith Jennings: Gender, religion, liberty and abolition: Mary Morris Knowles and Jane Harry Thresher speak out.
Ulrich Pallua: Anti-slave trade propaganda in 1788/89: The African’s complaint in contrast to Britain’s vision of liberty.
10.00 African responses to slavery – Chair: Dr. Cecily Jones (H060)
M. Thomas-Bailey Ellis: The Afro-West Indian anti-slavery movement after 1838
Jacinta Chiamaka Nwaka and Akachi Odoemene: Slavery, its abolition and the politics of reparation
(PARALLEL SESSIONS)11.15 Break
11.30 KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Prof. Verene Shepherd (H052) ‘From Text to Public Space: Reckoning with 1807 in 2007’ Chair: Prof. Gad Heuman12.15 The Haitian revolution – Chair: Prof. Gad Heuman (H058)
Christian Hogsbjerg: ‘There is no drama like the drama of history’. C.L.R. James’ Toussaint L’Ouverture.
Claudius Kelvin Fergus: Emancipation and ‘military necessity’ during the Haitian revolution: challenging the hegemonic paradigms of slavery and freedom.
12.15 Memory and Commemoration – Chair: Dr. Michael Niblett (H060)
Henrice Altink: ‘After Darkness to the Light’: the commemoration of one hundred years of freedom in Jamaica
A.M. Leonard: Preserving for public memory the Black presence in the UK.
(PARALLEL SESSIONS)13.00 Buffet lunch
14.00 A new social order – Chair: Prof. Trevor Burnard (H052)
Margaret Jones: ‘The most cruel and revolting crimes’: the treatment of the sick and mentally ill in mid-nineteenth century Jamaica
D. Soares and V. Clarke: ‘Unshackled’: the struggle for land and patterns of land ownership among the newly emancipated Negroes 1838-1900.
15.00 Break
15.30 KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Prof. James Walvin (H052)‘Two Hundred Years On: Why Have the British Paid So Much Attention to Abolition?’
Chair: Prof. David Dabydeen 16.15 Conference ends