The weekend's programming began Friday at 4 p.m. with presentations by professors Ashraf Rushdy of Wesleyan University and Lisa Woolfork of the University of Virginia, in "A Panel on the Arts: Slavery in the Artistic and Popular Imagination." About 70 people were present in Smith-Buonanno 106, including students, professors and community members.
In his speech, "Slavery's New Narratives; Slavery's New Apologists," Rushdy focused on slavery's mode of representation in various literary forms through manipulation of time, and also on the recent influx of public apologies for slavery.
He noted the overwhelming surge in slave narratives in the last 40 years, three of which have won Pulitzer prizes, and the ways in which their authors make slavery an active, present force in their novels.
Books such as "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" incorporate narratives from several generations of life in a family to give a voice to the past, Rushdy said. Others employ anachronism - for example, a slave's escape from a plantation on a jumbo jet.
"(Anachronism) adds an element of absurdity" to a novel, Rushdy said. "It creates a more flexible sense of time. Two epochs reveal things about each other. Events that seemed disparate become connected."
Novels like Toni Morrison's "Beloved" use the technique of haunting - the presence of an actual ghost from the past - to illustrate the "intimate and intricate connection between an unresolved past and a present that is troubled because of it," Rushdy said.
Public apologies have become increasingly popular in the last 20 years. In 1998, President Clinton apologized to the presidents of Senegal and Uganda for the United States' role in the slave trade. The Southern Baptist Convention and Pope John Paul II have also issued apologies for slavery in the past.
"These are sorry displays, not displays of sorrow," Rushdy said, mentioning that at the time of the Southern Baptists' apology, at their national convention in 1995, blacks were one of their most sought-after demographics.
"We live in a guilted age. Public apologies are nothing more than a spectacle," Rushdy said - a spectacle that many people feel is either not enough or not necessary, since guilt is not collective.
"(The real aim) of public apologies should be establishing a shared truth about the crime (of slavery), preventing the cycle of violence and leading to collective healing," he said, emphasizing that novels that strive to establish a presence for slavery in modern times are "alerting us to the insufficiencies" of simple remedies like public apologies.
"Forgiveness is premised to some extent by ignoring the memory," Rushdy said, "whereas this is the very work of (most literature concerned with slavery) - reminding us of the connection between then and now; remembering, not forgetting."
Woolfork's speech, "Re-embodying American Slavery: Encountering Trauma in the Literary and Popular Imagination," dealt with the visual representation of slavery in popular culture, with a specific focus on what she called "bodily epistemology," or situations in which a present-day protagonist experiences slavery.
She mentioned the musical artist Prince's seemingly rebellious gesture of wearing the word "slave" on his cheek, and Dave Chapelle's production company's logo, which is of a black man in chains.
More serious examples of bodily epistemology include slavery reenactments, which are often marketed as Underground Railroad hands-on museums, where visitors are forced into simulated bondage to offer a better perspective on slavery.
"Bodily metaphor lends a corporeal connection to the slave past," Woolfork said, "by enabling one to conceptualize the trauma of slavery not just mentally, but through the body itself."
She urged that the idea that it is "better to learn by doing" be approached warily when it comes to teaching about slavery.
"Between 500 and 700 kids go to 4H clubs in Ohio every summer where they do reenactments like these," Woolfork said. "The risks are certainly great."
