Concordia Lecture: Dr. Nelson "Intro to Canadian Slavery"
CUJAH's Black History Month Speaker Event: Introduction to Canadian Slavery by Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson. This event will be held in-person at Concordia University and over Zoom on February 20, 2024, at 6:30 p.m.
This lecture is only available to Concordia University students and UMass students in the History of Art & Architecture or African-American Studies departments.
Scholarship on Canadian Slavery falls far short of the research that has been produced on the US South, the Caribbean, and South America. This neglect is due in part to Canada's national myth of racial tolerance. However, it IS also because slavery has largely come to be associated with tropical regions where plantations flourished. Although slavery looked different in Canada, it was no less brutal for the enslaved, who suffered various forms of abuse and were isolated from their ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and spiritual communities. One archive which is useful to our understanding of the experiences of the enslaved is the fugitive slave archive.
Found throughout the Transatlantic World, fugitive slave advertisements demonstrate the ubiquity of African resistance to slavery. Besides noting things like names, accents, language, and skills, fugitive notices frequently recounted the dress (hairstyles, adornment, clothing etc.), branding, scarification, mannerisms, physical habits, and even the gestures and expressions of runaways. This lecture will examine these notices to explore various dimensions of enslaved experience like dress, family, health, labour, relationships, and resistance.