Archives mensuelles : mai 2014

Conférences/Conferences

Conference Program: “Black Historians and the Writing of History in the 19th and early 20th century: What Legacy?” (12-13 June 2014)

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Black Historians and the Writing of History

in the 19th and early 20th centuries

What Legacy?

Thursday 12 June 2014: 9:00-6:00

Friday 13 June 2014: 9:00-6:30

University Paris Diderot

Room Pierre Albouy (685 C)

(Grands Moulins de Paris, C Wing, 6th floor)

International Conference

Project Writing History from the Margins (Sorbonne Paris Cité)

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Thursday 12 June 2014

9:00       Registration

9:30       Opening address: François Brunet (University Paris Diderot)

10:00    Plenary session: Pero Dagbovie (Michigan State University)

From the Margins to the Mainstream: Reflections on a Century of the African American Historical Enterprise

11:00    Coffee break

11:30    Writing the History of the Diaspora

Chair: Claire Bourhis-Mariotti (University of Cergy-Pontoise)

  • Patrick Rael (Bowdoin College): Slave Resistance and Antislavery Ideology: The Haitian Revolution and the Coming of the Civil War
  • Violet M. Showers Johnson (Texas A&M University): Writing Afro-Caribbean History into African American History in the 1920s and 1930s: The Claims, the Rows and the Legacy
  • Michael Benjamin (Armstrong Atlantic State University): From the Margins: Self-Taught Black Historians and the Project to Publish a Diasporic Encyclopedia

1:00       Lunch

2:30       Alternative Sources: Art(s) and History

Chair: Claudine Raynaud (University Montpellier 3)

  • James Smalls (University of Maryland): Freeman Murray and the Art of Social Justice
  • Mary Ann Calo (Colgate University): Art History, Racial Art Theory and Adult Education: Remembering Alain Locke’s Negro Art: Past and Present (1936)
  • Adena Spingarn (Stanford University): James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan and the Popular Stages of History

4:00       Coffee break

4:30       Historians or “Leaders of the Race”      

Chair: Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry (University Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3)

  • Nicole Topich (Harvard University): Black Histories and Historians in Petitions
  • Zachery Williams (University of Akron): From the Bottom to the Top: Howard University Historians and Policy History in the United States
  • Glenn Jordan (University of South Wales): A Vindicationalist Voice: George Washington Williams and History From the Margins

6:00       Cocktail party

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Friday 13 June 2014

9:00       Pre-session coffee

9:30       Plenary session: Claire Parfait (University Paris 13)

Early African American Historians: a Book History Perspective

10:30    Coffee break

11:30    The Writing of African American History: the Construction of Specific Objects and Methods

Chair: Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (University Paris Diderot)

  • John Ernest (University of Delaware): The Negro in the American Rebellion: William Wells Brown and the Design of African American History
  • Stephen G. Hall (Alcorn State University): One Hundred Years Before Woodson: Assessing the Development of African American History in the 19th Century

12:00    Race and History, Race in History

Chair: Chris Weedon (Cardiff University)

  • Martha S. Jones (University of Michigan): Who Were the “Negro Historians”?: Reading William Yates on Race and Citizenship
  • Nicolas Martin-Breteau (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales): Historian of Himself, Historian of His Race: W. E. B. Du Bois and the History of Race Oppression in the U.S.

1:00       Lunch

2:30       Incorporating Slavery into the Historical Narrative

Chair: Myriam Cottias (CNRS, CIRESC)

  • Clare Corbould (Monash University): Talking and Writing about Slavery in the Interwar Years, and the Origins of American Social History
  • Kate Masur (Northwestern University): “The Colored Side of Lincolniana”: John E. Washington and the Black History of the Lincoln Presidency

3:30     Taking up the Challenge: Publishing African American Historical Works

Chair: Claire Parfait (University Paris 13)

  • Cheryl Knott (University of Arizona): Merl R. Eppse and the Publication of The Negro, Too, in American History
  • Aaron Pride (Kent State University): Selling The Souls of Black Folk: The Legacy and Tradition of the Trotter Family in the African American Historical Enterprise

4:30       Coffee break

5:00       Roundtable with all the participants: Black Historians: What Legacy?

6:00       Closing address: Pap Ndiaye (Sciences Po Paris)

Séminaires/Seminars

Compte-rendu Séminaire EHDLM – Deborah Jenson (16 mai 2014)

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La 4ème séance du séminaire du projet Sorbonne Paris Cité EHDLM (Écrire l’histoire depuis les marges : le cas des Africains Américains) s’est déroulé le vendredi 16 mai 2014 de 17h30 à 19h, en salle 16 de l’Institut du Monde Anglophone, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, 5 rue de L’école de Médecine, 75006 Paris. Nous avons reçu Deborah Jenson.

Deborah Jenson est professeur à Duke University, où elle dirige le Centre d’études latino-américaines et caribéennes, et co-dirige le centre de recherches sur Haïti. Elle est l’auteur de Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool University Press,2011, réédité 2012).

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Dans Beyond the Slave Narrative, Deborah Jenson s’intéresse à des textes révolutionnaires de dirigeants haïtiens (Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines) ainsi qu’à des poèmes de courtisanes anonymes. On a longtemps pensé que les esclaves des colonies francophones n’avaient pas laissé de traces écrites. Ceci est largement dû au fait que, dans le monde anglophone, la parole des esclaves s’exprime à travers les récits d’esclave (slave narratives). Le genre du récit d’esclave a donc longtemps empêché les chercheurs de voir qu’il existait d’autres types de témoignages d’esclaves, par exemple les documents étudiés par Deborah Jenson dans son ouvrage. Ainsi, les textes révolutionnaires et les proclamations de Dessalines circulent dans la jeune République américaine et jusqu’en Allemagne où elles ont pu influencer la conception de la fameuse “dialectique maître-esclave” de Hegel.

Lors de la révolution de Saint-Domingue, nombre d’Haïtiens, à la fois des planteurs, des esclaves et des Noirs libres, se sont réfugiés en Louisiane. Or, le paradigme de l'”Atlantique noir” de Paul Gilroy a exclu  la Nouvelle-Orléans en raison de la langue. Deborah Jenson a terminé sa présentation en expliquant les multiples influences que les réfugiés haïtiens ont exercé sur la culture de la Nouvelle-Orléans. Cette influence est tout particulièrement perceptible dans la littérature louisianaise.

 

Séminaires/Seminars

Compte-rendu Séminaire EHDLM – Nina Reid-Maroney (13 mars 2014)

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On March 13, 2014, it was our great pleasure to welcome Nina Reid-Maroney. This 3rd seminar session, a joint session with the CIRESC seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, took place at the EHESS (Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris).

Nina Reid-Maroney is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Huron University College at Western in London, Ontario. She is also a coeditor of The Promised Land: History and Historiography of Black Experience in Chatham-Kent’s Settlements. Nina spoke about her last book, The Reverend Jennie Johnson and African Canadian History, 1868-1967, which was published by Routledge in April 2013.

Reid-Maroney

Her book is a most fascinating biography of the first woman ever to be ordained as a full-time minister in Canada, a woman whose very long life, covering almost a century of history, pushes us to rethink North American history and historiography on 19th century black migration and settlement in Canada. Evidently, the story of Jennie Johnson is a story at the crossroads of race, religion and women studies, but as her life unfolds before our eyes, it becomes obvious that Jennie Johnson’s particular life is also a history of connections, where religion, migration, abolition, resistance, and women’s condition are closely intertwined. What is striking in Nina’s book is that the story of Jennie Johnson is a very “moving” story in the practical sense of the term. Jennie, but also her family, crossed the US-Canada border to and fro at many different times in their life and for many different reasons, proof that this border was a porous border, a blurred space that Blacks would cross easily as they were trying to improve their condition. Thus, more than just a “classic” biography, The Reverend Jennie Johnson and African Canadian History is a critical biography of a figure who outstripped the racial and religious barriers of her time. It offers a unique and powerful view of the struggle for gender and racial equality, and against prejudice in North America, and more particularly on the US-Canadian border.

In other words, Nina’s book offers us a very powerful and inspiring account of what life was truly like for African Canadians and African Americans in an era marked by abolition, segregation, discrimination and the fight for civil rights, in a “dangerous place” which was a “land between slavery and freedom”.