Date/Time: Wednesday 22nd November, 16:00-17:00

Venue: Armstrong 1.05

This Research Seminar, organised by the School of History, Classics and Archeology invites Peggy Brunache (University of Dundee) to talk about The Sacred and the Satiated: History, Archaeology, and the Liminal Space of Black Resistance. 

All are invited. Refreshments are served.

Traditional scholarship of the Black diaspora has predominantly focused on the examination of primary and secondary historical documents. Moreover, the historiography of slavery of the French Antilles, for example, has been weaker than other regions, especially when compared to British and American counterparts. More recent historical studies have shifted to critically engage larger questions as to how enslaved and free black communities actively participated in strategies to either escape or circumvent gendered and racialized systems of oppression. Since the late 1980s, historical archaeology has risen to the challenge to provide a unique contribution to further our understanding of past lifeways of the Black Atlantic via engendered methodological frameworks for studying artifact patterning and examining the nature of material culture. This presentation hopes to progress critical dialogue on Black agency and choices by engaging place, material culture, and space, through an alternative understanding of conceptual sites of conflict and resistance. I will consider two geographically disparate 19^th century archaeological sites, one in the French Caribbean and the other in North America, associated with the slave economy to consider new transformative theories on Black resistance as liminal space for identity formation and societal transformation. This production of knowledge serves as an exploration for re-historicising the past through an intersectionality of structurally hierarchical categories of difference in the archaeological study of enslaved Africans and their descendants.