Keynote
‘Subaltern Perspectives on Circulation, Encounter, and the Mutable Materialities of Gender, Race, and Class in a 19th-Century Atlantic Port: A View from Lagos’
Kristin Mann (History, Emory University, US)
8 July 2021
This keynote address will reflect on the West African port of Lagos’s transformation as a site of the circulation of people, commodities, and culture during the long nineteenth century. The analysis will root the settlement’s origins and growth in ecology and geography and stress the centrality of its interactions with peoples of the African hinterland and littoral, while focusing primarily on changes that followed from its rapid growth as a center of the slave trade to Brazil and Cuba in the age of abolition. The slave trade at Lagos ended even more abruptly than it began, and its demise coincided with the imposition of British colonial rule and development of a lucrative new commerce with Europe in vegetable oils that were essential to the rapid industrialization and urbanization then occurring there. The address will probe transformations in the encounters between Africans of different kinds and the Americans and Europeans who arrived from across the sea during a century when the commodity passing through the port changed from enslaved men, women, and children to an inanimate vegetable product. It will interrogate the changing meanings and materialities of race, gender, and class across these periods from the subaltern perspectives of enslaved and freed Africans who lived through them and themselves circulated across and in some cases around the Atlantic.
Biography
Kristin Mann is a Professor Emerita at Emory University. An historian of Africa and the Black Atlantic world, her research interests include the birth and transformation of Lagos (Nigeria) as an Atlantic port; slavery, the slave trade, abolition, and emancipation; West African commercial and agricultural transformations in the age of European empire; gender, household, labor, and domesticity; and the making of the African diaspora. She is currently completing a book Transatlantic Lives: Slavery and Freedom in West Africa and Brazil that pioneers a new approach to the recovery of enslaved Africans’ transatlantic biographies. It probes how in the nineteenth century groups of Yoruba-speakers were able to free themselves, return to Lagos and other towns on the West African coast, reconnect with kin and country folk, and create new homelands. Previous publications include books and articles on Lagos, law and colonialism in Africa, the African diaspora, and slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world.
