The conference will explore questions around the heritage of slaveries andother forms of strong asymmetrical dependency in history, such as peonage, indentured servitude, bondage, and serfdom in and beyond German global history since the 1450s.

For the longest time knowledge production has mainly considered primary sources that often comprise authoritative texts, criminal records, court documents, company archives, and life writings by those who enslaved and exploited men, women, children and who – as merchants of goods and humans – grew rich. Other sources, that is, texts produced by enslaved or bonded people, material remnants, medical and spiritual knowledge, and oral culture as remembered and kept alive in music, dance, and oral literature, were often ignored by western historiography. For this reason, questions pertaining to the agency and resistance of enslaved and dependent people will be of primary importance.

Please register for the conference by July 1st, 2022 at: newperspectives@dependency.uni-bonn.de.

Programm

WEDNESDAY, JULY 6 2022

03:00 pm. Opening

03:30 pm. Keynote I
JENNIFER MORGAN (NYU): The Measure of their Sadness: Slavery, Kinship and the Marketplace in the Early Black Atlantic (Chair: Claudia Jarzebowski)

04:30 pm. COFFEE BREAK

05:00 pm. Panel I: Long Legacies and Political Engagements, Chair: Susanne Lettow
Bernadette Brooten (Brandeis University): Christian and Jewish enslaved Persons and Enslavers: Long Legacies

Veronika Detel (Universität Hamburg): Beyond Slavery and Freedom? Conceptions of Dependency in Abolitionist and Proto-Feminist Political Thinkers, 1780–1850

06:30/07:00 pm. Reception

THURSDAY, JULY 7 2022

09:30 am. Keynote II
KEYNOTE II: REBEKKA VON MALLINCKRODT (UNIVERSITÄT BREMEN): Just burn it? Visual Representations of Slavery in Early Modern Germany – Historical and Contemporary Approaches (Chair: Heike Raphael-Hernandez)

10:30 am. Coffee Break

11:00 am. Panel II: Belonging and Community Building, Chair: Claudia Jarzebowski

Özgül Özdemir (Stanford University) and Yıldız Yılmaz (Boğaziçi University): Glimpses into Lives of Black Eunuchs in the Nineteenth-Century-Ottoman Harem: Histories of Race, Violence, Emotions

Télio Cravo (European University Institute): Neither a History of Slaves in the Atlantic nor a History of Captives in the Mediterranean: Towards a Global History of Enslavement in the early Nineteenth-Century

Ludolf Pelizäus (Université de Picardie Jules Verne): Exposing People: Persecution, Exposition and Animalization of People of Color in Eighteeth-Century Germany reflected in Material Culture

Michael Zeuske (BCDSS): Seeing Slaves? Alexander von Humboldtʼs Travels to the Americas (1799–1804)

01:15 pm. Lunch

02:15 pm. Panel III: Contemporary Challenges of History and Memory, Chair: Heike Raphael-Hernandez

Veronica Jackson (Artist, Bedford, Virginia): Interpreting the Fugger and Welser Manillas: The Language and Currency of Slaveryʼs Global Industry

Jan Hüsgen (German Lost Art Foundation): Colonial Collecting for the ʻPeripheryʼ – the Saxon African Expedition (1731–1733)

Hans Fässler (Independent Scholar, St. Gallen): A Zurich Monument Toppled: The (Post-)Colonial Case of Swiss Industrialist and Entrepreneur Alfred Escher (1819–1882)

04:00 pm. Coffee Break

04:30 pm. Keynote III
MANISHA SINHA (UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT): Slave Resistance in the Making of Abolotion (Chair: Pia Wiegmink)

FRIDAY, JULY 8 2022

09:30 am. Keynote IV
RENATE DÜRR (UNIVERSITÄT TÜBINGEN): The Silence of the Sermons, or What happened to Abraham before his Baptism at the Age of Seventeen? (Chair: Susanne Lettow)

10:30 am. Coffee Break

11:00 am. Panel IV: Slavery and Dependency in German Global History, Chair: Eva Lehner

Klaus Weber (Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder) and Tobias Skowronek (Universität Bochum): Labor and Commodity Chains behind the Currencies and Barter Goods in the West African Slave Trade (Between Eleventh and Nineteenth Centuries)

Josef Köstlbauer (BCDSS): Subjugation by Labelling: Semantics of Slavery and Coercion in the Eighteenth-Century Moravian Church

Monica Ginés-Blasi (Open University of Catalonia/BCDSS): Providing ʻCooliesʼ to Deli: German Transportation of Chinese Labour Migrants to Dutch Colonial Plantations (1866–1910)

12:45 pm. Lunch

01:45 pm. Panel V: Narratives of Slavery and Dependencies, Chair: Marion Gymnich

Dominique Haensell (Independent Scholar, Berlin): ʻWie sie gerade Lust hattenʼ – Plantation Memories, Idleness and Insurrection

Mary Aderonke Afolabi-Adeolu (BCDSS): Reclaiming the Muted Voices in German Colonial East Africa through Historical Fiction: An Examination of Asymmetrical Dependency between the German Colonial Army and ʻAskariʼ in Abdulrazak Gurnahʼs ʻAfterlivesʼ

Rita Maricocchi (WWU Münster): Colonial Entanglements in Abdulrazak Gurnahʼs Fiction: Establishing Frameworks for German Postcolonial Studies in ʻAfterlivesʼ

03:00 pm. Coffee Break

03:30 pm. Panel VI: The “German” Pacific, Chair: Pia Wiegmink

Deirdre Coleman (University of Melbourne): ʻTreasure Island is not in the Pacificʼ: Robert Louis Stevenson, Samoa, and the Pacificʼs ʻLabour Trafficʼ

Emma Thomas (UNSW): From Beaches to Plantations: The Recruitment of New Guinean Laborers under German Colonial Rule

Emma Christopher (UNSW/BCDSS): ʻKidnapping Cannibalsʼ: The Scandal Over Recruitment and the British/German Division of New Guinea

https://www.dependency.uni-bonn.de/en/news/news-bcdss/new-perspectives-on-cultural-heritage-and-german-global-history