08/06/2022
The Sixth Annual King’s Gollancz Lecture: Marisa J. Fuentes
Monday 13 June, 5.30pm BST
Council Room, King’s College London
The sixth annual King’s Gollancz Lecture will be delivered by Professor Marisa J. Fuentes.
Buried ‘Without Care’: Social Death, Discarded Lives, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Reading through select documents from early Portuguese and English “slave trading,” this talk thinks through the concept of “social death” that historians and critical Black studies scholars employ or challenge to understand slavery and its afterlife. With particular attention to the category of “refuse slaves” attached to African captives who sometimes did not survive the arrival and sale in Atlantic ports, I consider the limits of language, narrative, and disciplines in attending to those who lingered towards and succumbed to the violence of the transatlantic slave trade.
Marisa J. Fuentes is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and History; and Presidential Term Chair in African American History, 2017-2022, at Rutgers University. Her scholarship brings together critical historiography, historical geography, and black feminist theory to examine gender, sexuality, and slavery in the early modern Atlantic World.
The annual King’s Gollancz Lecture celebrates the life and work of former King’s Professor of English Sir Israel Gollancz, medievalist, Shakespearean and founding member of both the British Academy and the English Association. The lecture is organised by the Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS), the London Shakespeare Centre (LSC), and the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies (CLAMS) in rotation. This year it is the turn of CEMS.
For more information and to register:
Buried ‘Without Care’: Social Death, Discarded Lives, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
