Co-hosted by the Society for Caribbean Research (SOCARE), the 2023 conference—“Competing Memories: The Politics of Remembering Slavery, Emancipation and Indentureship in the Caribbean”—will take place on March 29-31, 2023, at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) at the University of Bonn (Bonn, Germany). [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.]

Description: The Caribbean is a space of dynamic and ever-changing memories. Here, as elsewhere, socio-political disparities and power imbalances commonly impact the capacity and means to promote specific memories and historical narratives, through which the past is created, adapted and negotiated. These dynamics influence which processes and memories are included or excluded in specific histories and which versions of the past are reconstructed, selected and interpreted.

The international conference “Competing Memories” hence focuses on the politics of memory and the constructions and representations of plural and divergent memories in Caribbean contexts, especially but not exclusively in relation to enslavement, emancipation and indentureship. As understandings of ‘history’ and ‘memory’ may vary, contributors will look at the different and strategic ways these concepts are used within and in relation to the Caribbean.

The conference is going to take place on March 29–31, 2023 at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), University of Bonn, Germany. It is funded by the BCDSS and the German Research Foundation (DFG). It is co-hosted by the Society for Caribbean Research (Socare e.V.) and is organized by Sinah Kloß (Bonn), Andrea Gremels (Frankfurt) and Ulrike Schmieder (Hannover).

For more information, see http://caribbeanresearch.net/en/socare-congress-2023 and http://caribbeanresearch.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Competing-Memories_Program_Update.pdf

[Painting above: François-Auguste Biard’s “L’Abolition de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises” (Proclamation of the Abolition of Slavery in the French Colonies) 1848. Accessed via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Biard_Abolition_de_l%27esclavage_1849.jpg.]