Date/Time: Thursday 8th February 2018, 16:00-17:00

Venue: Research Beehive 2.22 Newcastle University

Fabienne Viala, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick will be joining us in February 2018 as part of the CLACS visiting speaker series. This event is co-organised by the School of History, Classics and Archaeology. Fabienne's talk is titled Legacies of Slavery, Anti Racism and Cultural Agency in Caribbean Contemporary Art.

Caribbean societies have been shaped by the plantation system and by structural racism. In 2013, the CARICOM put forward a legal claim for reparations for slavery in the region against the former European Empires who profited from the slave trade and the slavery system. Yet, none of those countries has accepted to take neither legal nor economic responsibility for the underdevelopment of the Caribbean and for the legacy of racism which continues to condition agency in the Caribbean. Contemporary art, as a conceptual mode of relationship with its public, has been establishing in the last twenty years new paradigms for contesting the everyday racism that shapes the life and the future of Caribbean generations nowadays. My paper will explore how new strategies for remembering slavery in a multidirectional way have emerged among contemporary artists in the Caribbean and Latin America. I particularly look at how conceptual arts offers new mode of addressing historical legacies through emotional understanding and empathic vision. I will explore the works of Jeanette Ehlers, a video performer with Trinidadian origins based in Norway, Liliana Angulo Castro, a black Colombian photographer, the French Francois Piquet and his work " Reparations" in Guadeloupe, alongside Eddy Firmin, aka ANO, a black Guadeloupian artist based in Montreal.

Short Biography:

Dr Fabienne Viala (PhD Paris3 Sorbonne Nouvelle) is an Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the Director of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies and the President for the Society of Caribbean Studies UK. She has published books and articles on the post-1945 European and Latin American Historical Novel, Cuban literature, French and Anglophone Caribbean Cultures, Black literature and visual art in Puerto Rico, and the legacies of slavery in the French, English and Spanish Caribbean. Her latest monograph is The Post-Columbus Syndrome: Identities, Cultural Nationalisms and Commemorations in the Caribbean, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014.