BLACK HISTORY MONTH SPEAKER SERIES 2024 | Lecture
Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson Lecture "Introduction to Canadian Slavery"
Photo credit: Meghan Tansey Whitton | Charmaine A. Nelson is a Provost Professor of Art History in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and Director of the Slavery North Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Black Maple Magazine, one of the only national platforms aimed at black Canadians. From 2020-2022, she was a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Halifax, Canada where she founded the first-ever institute focused on the study of Canadian Slavery. She also worked at McGill University (Montreal) for seventeen years (2003-2020). Nelson has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, Black Diaspora Studies, and Black Canadian Studies. She has published seven books including The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (2016), and Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance (2018). She is actively engaged with lay audiences through her media work including ABC, CBC, CTV, and City TV News, The Boston Globe, BBC One’s “Fake or Fortune,” and PBS’ “Finding your Roots”. She has blogged for Huffington Post Canada and written for The Walrus. In 2017, she was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University and in 2021 a Fields of the Future Fellow at Bard Graduate Center (NYC). In 2022 she was inducted as a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada and elected as a Member of the American Antiquarian Society.
Photo Credit: Jela de la Peña, 2024.
Scholarship on Canadian Slavery falls far short of the research that has been produced on the US South, the Caribbean, and South America. This neglect is due in part to Canada’s national myth of racial tolerance. However, it is also because slavery has largely come to be associated with tropical regions where plantations flourished. Although slavery looked different in Canada, it was no less brutal for the enslaved, who suffered various forms of abuse and were isolated from their ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and spiritual communities. One archive which is useful to our understanding of the experiences of the enslaved is the fugitive slave archive.
Found throughout the Transatlantic World, fugitive slave advertisements demonstrate the ubiquity of African resistance to slavery. Besides noting things like names, accents, language, and skills, fugitive notices frequently recounted the dress (hairstyles, adornment, clothing etc.), branding, scarification, mannerisms, physical habits, and even the gestures and expressions of runaways. This lecture will examine these notices to explore various dimensions of enslaved experience like dress, family, health, labour, relationships, and resistance.
