“The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in Jamaica and Barbados”

Thursday, November 8th, 2012
4:30 – 6:00pm (Reception to Follow)
Alexander Library Teleconference Lecture Hall
169 College Avenue – New Brunswick, NJ

This lecture explores the possibilities of foregrounding speech rather than writing as the medium through which the cultural politics of colonialism and imperialism can be interpreted. What would it mean to start with the spoken word in practice – with different sorts of speakers and listeners – rather than with questions of textual representation? What might the outcome be of understanding empires not only as literate cultures transforming oral cultures, but as sorts of oral cultures too, invested in the spoken words of, for example, debate, conversation, promises and oaths? Acknowledging the difficulties of undertaking a history, or historical geography, of speech in and around the Caribbean world of plantation slavery various avenues are explored in order to demonstrate how the spoken word worked in different ways in relation to questions of freedom and enslavement: Enlightenment debates over language and the definition of the human; the complexities of who could give evidence against whom in the law courts of Barbados; and the different possibilities for who talked to whom about plants in eighteenth-century Jamaica.

Sponsored by the Rutgers British Studies Center and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Critical Caribbean Studies, and the Black Atlantic Seminar Series.

For more information, please visit http://britishstudies.rutgers.edu