Call for Contributors: A Guide to Slave Route Sites of Memory in the Caribbean

 

Call for Contributors: A Guide to Slave Route Sites of Memory in the Caribbean

 

In 1994 UNESCO launched the Slave Route Project focusing on the transatlantic, Indian Ocean and Mediterranean slave trades. Its purpose was to break the silence surrounding the slave trade and to make universally known its causes, implications and modalities, by means of scientific and multidisciplinary research about the realities and brutalities of the African slave trade and slavery, in which more than 11 million Africans in the trans-Atlantic slave trade alone were sold into bondage in the Americas. Moreover, it aimed to highlight the profound consequences of this enforced dialogue on the cultures of the world, in particular those of the Americas and the Caribbean.

This publication is part of an effort to ensure that the slave trade and Africa’s cultural heritage more generally, assume their rightful place in the global heritage of humanity. It aims to demonstrate the often uncovered relationship of relationship of sites, usually valued on account of their architectural, artistic and aesthetic values, to slavery and the slave trade. Many Caribbean sites, alongside those in Europe, Africa and the Americas, played essential roles in the slave trade as centres of black presence, slaving ports and intellectual breeding grounds for ideas of racism and divinely ordained slavery as well as for equality and freedom. They served as homes of financiers and patrons and benefited greatly from the slave trade’s revenues, which in turn allowed for the construction of grandiose buildings and monuments. Furthermore, Africans, both freed and enslaved, often worked as artists or craftsmen and “exotic” artistic motifs can be identified in monuments, buildings and historic towns. These relationships, which up until now have only discreetly revealed themselves to an informed eye, must be openly acknowledged and identified.

 

The scope of this publication seeks to build on various past Slave Route Project initiatives to develop a working tool for cultural resource managers and interested members of the general public to identify slave route sites across the Caribbean.

 

This encyclopaedic guide to Slave Route sites of memory that have been identified around the region will provide a range of readers access to insightful information about each site in its historical context. It will be accessible to both academic and popular audiences which are interested in having a comprehensive picture of slave route heritage sites so they may develop a good understanding of the complexities and nuances of the slave trade and slavery throughout the region.

 The Editors of this new publication now invite Expressions of Interest from potential contributors to the publication. Please send an e-mail with your name and institutional affiliation (if any) to slaverouteguidecaribbean@gmail.com if you wish to receive more information about this publication. The deadline for Expressions of Interest is December 10, 2013.