Announcement from the Critical Caribbean Studies program @ Rutgers University:
Vincent Brown
Harvard University
Charles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and
African-American Studies
Monday, February 11th 2013 @ 6:15 PM
Plangere Annex – Murray Hall, Room 302
510 GEORGE STREET, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901-1167.
Tacky’s Revolt and the Coromantee Archipelago: A New Cartography of Slave Revolt
“The Coromantee Wars: An Archipelago of Insurrection” offers a major
reconsideration of the early modern African diaspora by conceiving it
in terms of its military history. Historians of colonial slavery have
been careful to show the impact of events and decisions made in Europe
on patterns of New World development, but with a few notable
exceptions, we have a much weaker understanding of how African social,
political, and military history has shaped the Atlantic world. The
scholarship that exists in this area has focused primarily on cultural
continuities between Africans and African Americans, and much less on
the influence of specific social trends and political events. By
examining the Jamaican slave revolt of 1760 in the context of a series
of insurrections between 1675 and 1775, The Coromantee Wars will show
how events in Africa reverberated through the Atlantic, thereby
joining African, European, and American history within a critical
study of popular revolt and imperial counterinsurgency.
Multi-media historian Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of
History and Professor of African and African-American Studies at
Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other
creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural
practice in the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the
early modern Atlantic world. A native of Southern California, he was
educated at the University of California, San Diego, and received his
PhD in History from Duke University, where he also trained in the
theory and craft of film and video making. Currently a Mellon New
Directions fellow, he has also held fellowships at the National
Humanities Center, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and
the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was recently a John
Simon Guggenheim fellow. Brown is the author of numerous articles and
reviews in scholarly journals and is producer and director of research
for the television documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness
(2009), recipient of the 2009 John E. O’Connor Film Award of the
American Historical Association, awarded Best Documentary at both the
2009 Hollywood Black Film Festival and the 2009 Martha’s Vineyard
African-American Film Festival, and broadcast nationally on season 11
of the PBS series Independent Lens. His first book, The Reaper’s
Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2008), was
co-winner of the 2009 Merle Curti Award and received the 2009 James A.
Rawley Prize and the 2008-09 Louis Gottschalk Prize.
Refreshments will be served
RSVP: donavanramon@gmail.com
