This talk will explore听the drawings, paintings, prints, and听sculpture created by African American, African Caribbean, and Black British women and men, enslaved and free, living and working across the Black Diaspora over the centuries. Living and dying against a white racist backdrop that sought to destroy听Black bodies and souls, they generated听听alternative听art-making traditions听and practices that constitute nothing less than听鈥渄eclarations of independence.鈥澨鼳s artists and activists, they work听with every means necessary to image slavery and imagine freedom and听not only to visualize back to white dominant systems of oppression but听to carve out an alternative blueprint for freedom and usher in听a new听鈥渓exicon of liberation.鈥
Celeste-Marie Bernier听is personal chair in English and professor of Black studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is also Co-Editor-in-Chief with Bevan Sewell of 迟丑别听Journal of American Studies听published by听Cambridge听University Press. Bernier鈥檚 wide-ranging research encompasses听the literatures, histories, politics, visual cultures, and philosophies of women, men, and children living in the African Diaspora over the centuries, and her published work reflects the breadth of her interests, including听her single-authored听books听African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present听(2008),听Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination听听(2012; winner of the 2013 British Association for American Studies Book Prize and co-winner of the 2014 European American Studies Network Book Prize),听Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin听(2015) (winner of a Terra Foundation International Publication Grant) and听the forthcoming听Stick to the Skin: Representing the Body, Memory and History in Fifty Years of African American and Black British听Art (1965-2015). She is currently working on听Living Parchments: Artistry and Authorship in the Life and Works of Frederick Douglass听and听Struggle for Liberty: Frederick Douglass鈥檚 Family Letters, Speeches, Essays, and听Photographs.