On April 10th and 11th, Emory University’s Institute of African Studies hosted the Legacies of Slavery in Africa and Latin America Symposium. This two-day event brought together Emory and visiting faculty and graduate students to discuss new research on the afterlives of slavery from multiple perspectives.  On the first day of the symposium, Dr. Aisha Finch (Emory), Dr. Mariana Dias Paes (American University of Paris), Dr. Adriana Chira (Emory), and Dr. Pablo Gómez (UW-Madison) presented pre-circulated papers. The discussions centered, among other things, on multiple understandings of time and their relationship with labor in plantations, the corporal dimensions of debt and enslavement, and the use of legal documents to interrogate processes of land dispossession.

During the second day, graduate students in the history department participated in various panels, where the invited faculty members served as discussants. Their presentations were based on substantive archival research conducted over the summer months. The papers covered a wide temporal and geographic scope. They ranged from Early Modern Puerto Rico to twentieth-century Southern Africa. However, they shared a preoccupation with the multiple categories of forced labor, their ambiguities, and their relationship with land dispossession.

See the full program of the symposium below.