This talk will explorethe drawings, paintings, prints, andsculpture created by African American, African Caribbean, and Black British women and men, enslaved and free, living and working across the Black Diaspora over the centuries. Living and dying against a white racist backdrop that sought to destroyBlack bodies and souls, they generatedalternativeart-making traditionsand practices that constitute nothing less than“declarations of independence.”As artists and activists, they workwith every means necessary to image slavery and imagine freedom andnot only to visualize back to white dominant systems of oppression butto carve out an alternative blueprint for freedom and usher ina new“lexicon of liberation.”
Celeste-Marie Bernieris personal chair in English and professor of Black studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is also Co-Editor-in-Chief with Bevan Sewell of ٳJournal of American Studiespublished byCambridgeUniversity Press. Bernier’s wide-ranging research encompassesthe literatures, histories, politics, visual cultures, and philosophies of women, men, and children living in the African Diaspora over the centuries, and her published work reflects the breadth of her interests, includingher single-authoredbooksAfrican American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present(2008),Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination(2012; winner of the 2013 British Association for American Studies Book Prize and co-winner of the 2014 European American Studies Network Book Prize),Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin(2015) (winner of a Terra Foundation International Publication Grant) andthe forthcomingStick to the Skin: Representing the Body, Memory and History in Fifty Years of African American and Black BritishArt (1965-2015). She is currently working onLiving Parchments: Artistry and Authorship in the Life and Works of Frederick DouglassandStruggle for Liberty: Frederick Douglass’s Family Letters, Speeches, Essays, andPhotographs.