CFP: Ireland, Slavery, Anti-Slavery, Empire

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Ireland, Slavery, Anti-Slavery, Empire
Symposium: University College Dublin, 24-26 October, 2013

Confirmed Keynotes:

Richard Blackett, Vanderbilt University
Nini Rodgers, Queens University, Belfast
 
Call for Papers:
Nini Rodgers’ Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 1612-1865 (2007) demonstrated that slavery has had ‘a dramatic impact both on the Irish who emigrated across the Atlantic and upon the economy at home’. As significantly, for black abolitionists, Ireland occupied an important site both as a place of literal freedom and as a vehicle through which complex questions of race, freedom, equality, empire and political subjectivity might be explored. This symposium offers the opportunity to further these discussions, and also to open debate on sometimes neglected relationships between Ireland and Latin America, Brazil, Africa or India, and to the related complexities, ambivalences and contradictions that the context of empire introduces to discussions of slavery and anti-slavery more broadly.
  
‘Ireland, slavery, anti-slavery, empire’ invites papers or panels from across the humanities and social sciences, and from Hispano, luso, franco and Anglophone areas of scholarship, focused on the relationship between Ireland, slavery, and ethical culture in the context of empire(s) from the 17th into the early 20th century. We also welcome papers on the memory, representation and challenges of that relationship in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

Revolution or rebellion

Slavery in Irish literature or Ireland in Black literature
Ireland, Slavery, Empire and the periodical press

The archive
The Congo
The Caribbean, Africa, Indian, Latin America and Ireland 
Missionaries
emancipation
Collection and curation
Labour
War and military service
American slavery
Religion 
Black activism and imperial space
Death
Travel writing/Exploration
The raced/gendered body
Slavery, empire and visual culture
Whiteness
Emigration/colonisation
Kinship
Remembering or forgetting slavery, including contemporary slavery, and empire.
 
Abstracts of c 200 words, and a brief biography, should be sent to Fionnghuala
Sweeney, Maria Stuart or Fionnuala Dillane (fsweeney@liv.ac.uk;
maria.stuart@ucd.ie; fionnuala.dillane@ucd.ie)  by 16 June, 2013. Papers should
be in English and of no more than 20 minutes duration.

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