Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

This academic seminar is open to UF faculty, graduate students, and enrolled advanced undergraduate students.

Please RSVP by October 23^rd to: humanities-center@ufl.edu. An email reply confirming your participation will include a draft of the chapter under discussion.

This seminar will discuss “Battles of Public Memory,” chapter 3 of Ana Lucia Araujo’s book manuscript Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past. In this chapter, Araujo argues that public memory is a political and racialized mode of engagement with the slave past. Analyzing examples from England and the United States, she explains how activists, associations, individual citizens, and sometimes academics occupy the public sphere to demand public powers to give visibility to slavery in the public space. These demands certainly addressed the need of recognizing the deep involvement of Britain and the United States in the slave trade and slavery. Yet, in due course, these social actors exposed the pervasiveness of white supremacy, deeply embedded in the urban landscapes of these societies, by also fighting the persistence of racism and racial inequalities.