The Trans-Atlantic Slave-Trade Before 1619:
Black Life and the Fallibility of Origins
We will examine the idea of Black life in the wake of slavery in order to think through the meaning of 1619 as a marker of beginnings. At the center of our understandings of 1619 and the four hundred years discourse it evokes is a historical imagination that speaks through “nation.” What the historical record produces, however, is nothing resembling the natural evolution of a society called the United States. Black life on these shores then is much more expansive, much more complex than a “national” unfolding. This lecture takes up the question of that historical record but also seeks to unwrap an alternative historical and cultural framework for thinking with Blackness—the enslavement of our African ancestors and the ways in which they generated resistance—beyond the historical marker we have been giving as “the origin.”
Presenter: Prof. Josh Myers, Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University and a member of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC)