Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain
Event Details
End: November 17, 2015
Contact: walpole@yale.edu
More Info: http://www.library.yale.edu/walpole/programs/exhibitions.html#ce
Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain
opens November 17, 2015
Curated by Heather V. Vermeulen
Doctoral Candidate in African American Studies and American Studies, Yale University
and
Hazel V. Carby
Charles C. & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies, Yale University
“Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain” explores the notion of empire’s “prospects”—its gaze upon bodies and landscapes, its speculations and desires, its endeavors to capitalize upon seized land and labor, as well as its failures to manage enslaved persons and unruly colonial ecologies. It reads latent anxieties in the policing of bodies and borders, both in the colonies and in the metropole, and examines the forces that empire mustered to curtail perceived threats to its regimes of power and knowledge. In addition to the focus on material from the long eighteenth century, the exhibition features a selection of four lithographs from Joscelyn Gardner’s series Creole Portraits III: “bringing down the flowers” (2009-11), a recent joint acquisition by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. Gardner’s work mines the eighteenth-century Jamaica archive of white English immigrant, overseer, slaveowner, and pen-keeper Thomas Thistlewood, one of whose diaries is on loan from the Beinecke.
Calendar Legend
-
Awards & Fellowships
-
Exhibitions & Interpretive Resources
-
Meetings & Seminars
-
Virtual Events