Slavery, Memory and Reparations

PART OF OUR BLACK HISTORY MONTH SERIES

Using memory scholarship, this talk will examine how the history and memory of enslavement shaped questions of identity and citizenship in Europe. 

In Africa, debates about the origins of exclusion in stratified post-slavery societies have been challenging the mechanisms of marginalisation of people of slave descent. In those contexts, the notion of collective memory is a useful tool to understand demands for reparatory justice, and how these can contradict regional or national policies  based on the commodification of the colonial past ('dark tourism' in particular).