SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Department of History

History on Film: Slavery & the African Diaspora from a Global Perspective

Our film series and panel discussions with the filmmakers propose to make visible people of African descent in India, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Brazil, Benin and along the Swahili Coast in East Africa. By including films from the South Atlantic World, Indian Ocean World and Africa, we aim to throw light on the points of origin and destination of slaves. Rarely in the history of slavery has it been possible to correlate the trajectories of the home societies of slaves and the slave regime at the destination.

Slavery has also been all too often studied in isolation from Africa. The focus has mainly been on the North Atlantic World. Indeed, the cultural dimension of Diasporas has long been observed in the North Atlantic World, but it has received only scant attention within the context of emancipated slave communities elsewhere.

By combining the two oceanic worlds, the films and the discussion panels aim at questioning these biases. They examine the processes of integration and assimilation in the different African Diasporas, and how these communities produced diasporic cultural spheres which today surely constitute memoryscapes of the history of slavery.

Organised by Dr Marie Rodet (SOAS), Dr Shihan de Silva (Institute of Commonwealth Studies), Dr Parvathi Raman (SOAS), Dr Dina Matar, (SOAS), Angelica Baschiera (SOAS).

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Forthcoming Events

• Donkey Conference