In this seminar, we probe African diaspora history and culture to explore the ocean as a site of history, memory, placemaking, and liminality. Analyzing both sides of the Atlantic, we’ll investigate the challenges and possibilities of recovery associated with aquatic seascapes. Finally, we venture into the Pacific, discussing “a seascape epistemology” as we think through other ways of knowing. This seminar blends the historical with the phenomenological, positioning the ocean and seafaring vessels as a (de)generative space of Black Atlantic sociality and possibility.
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Re-remembering Afro-Oceanic Seascapes
Mon, Aug 16, 20216:30 pm to 8:30 pm -
Tue, Aug 17, 20216:30 pm to 8:30 pm
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Wed, Aug 18, 20216:30 pm to 8:30 pm
Dr. Justin Dunnavant is an archaeologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. His current research in the US Virgin Islands investigates the relationship between ecology and enslavement in the former Danish West Indies. In addition to his archaeological research, Justin is co-founder and President of the Society of Black Archaeologists, an AAUS Scientific SCUBA Diver, and consults for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2021, he was inducted into The Explorers Club as one of “Fifty People Changing the World that You Need Know About.” His research has been featured on Netflix’s “Explained,” Hulu’s “Your Attention Please” and in print in American Archaeology and Science Magazine.
Dawson, Kevin. “Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. African Canoe-Makers: Constructing Floating Cultures. pp. 99-118.
Dunnavant, Justin P. “Have Confidence in the Sea: Maritime Maroons and Fugitive Geographies.” Antipode, 2021, 53(3),: 884–905.
Hartman, Saidiya. “The Dead Book Revisited.” History of the Present, 2016, 6(2): 208–215.
Ingersoll, Karin A. Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. “Introduction” pp. 1-40.
Sharpe, Christina. “Black Studies: In the Wake.” The Black Scholar 44(2): 59–69.