2005-06 « Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender

Deb Willis: “Imaging Black Culture” – October 4, 2005

In this lecture, Prof. Willis explores the transformation of the black image in photography. At the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans created a new and revised self-image through the medium of photography, challenging predominantly negative representations. Prof. Willis examines the phenomena of racial uplift in imagery, the body as an art subject, the black female body, and the works of contemporary black photographers. Deborah Willis has pursued a dual professional career as an art photographer and as one of the nation’s leading historians of African American photography and curator of African American culture. In 2001, she was selected […]

Janice Mann: “Transforming Barbados into Bimshire: The Building Projects of Bishop William Hart Coleridge (1789-1849)” – October 19, 2005

When William Hart Coleridge arrived in Barbados in 1825, the Bishop immediately embarked upon a campaign of building churches, hiring clergy, and educating both whites and blacks. The new churches constructed by the Bishop, evoked the architecture of the English middle ages, creating a sharp contrast with the earlier edifices. By building churches and schools with features that conflated Christian faith with cultural enrichment, architectural beauty with the Motherland, and piety with Englishness, the Bishop did more to entrench Englishness on Barbados than to further the position of the emancipated slaves.

David Del Testa: “From concubinage to indochinoise: reading the Beaucarnot diary for new creole identities in French Indochina” – November 10, 2005

In colonial Southeast Asia during the late 19th and early 20th c., important populations of people of mixed-race background began to develop and assert hybrid identities that superceded identification with either local or European cultures. In this talk, David Del Testa examines the case of one such mixed-race individual, Ms. Claudie Beaucarnot, whose colonial-era diary and contemporary interviews reveal the intimate edges of a creole identity, arguing against stereotypes of “mixed-race” people as universally oppressed, self-hating, and rootless, and for a reconsideration of them and their voices in the context of modern colonialism.

Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender

Archive for the 2005-06 Category

Deb Willis: “Imaging Black Culture” – October 4, 2005

Janice Mann: “Transforming Barbados into Bimshire: The Building Projects of Bishop William Hart Coleridge (1789-1849)” – October 19, 2005

David Del Testa: “From concubinage to indochinoise: reading the Beaucarnot diary for new creole identities in French Indochina” – November 10, 2005

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