Kate Hodgson – författare

With a focus on the object and where it is situated, in time (memory) and space (mobility), Memory, Mobility, and Material Culture embodies a multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approach.The chapters track the movement of the objects and their owner(s), within and between continents, countries, cities, and families. Objects have always been considered with an eye to their worth – economic, aesthetic, and/or functional. If that worth is diminished, their meaning and value disappear, they are just things. Yet things can still fulfil functions in our daily lives; they hold symbolic potential, from personal memory triggers, to focal points of public ritual and religion; from collectors’ obsession, to symbols of loss, displacement, and violence. By bringing into dialogue the work of specialists in ethnology, art history, architecture, and design; literature, languages, cultures, and heritage studies, this volume considers how displaced memory – the memory of refugees, migrants, and their descendants; of those who have moved from the countryside to the city; of those who have faced personal upheaval and profound social change; those who have been forced into exile or experienced major personal or collective loss – can become embodied in material culture. This book is important reading to those interested in cultural and social history and cultural studies.

With a focus on the object and where it is situated, in time (memory) and space (mobility), Memory, Mobility, and Material Culture embodies a multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approach.The chapters track the movement of the objects and their owner(s), within and between continents, countries, cities, and families. Objects have always been considered with an eye to their worth – economic, aesthetic, and/or functional. If that worth is diminished, their meaning and value disappear, they are just things. Yet things can still fulfil functions in our daily lives; they hold symbolic potential, from personal memory triggers, to focal points of public ritual and religion; from collectors’ obsession, to symbols of loss, displacement, and violence. By bringing into dialogue the work of specialists in ethnology, art history, architecture, and design; literature, languages, cultures, and heritage studies, this volume considers how displaced memory – the memory of refugees, migrants, and their descendants; of those who have moved from the countryside to the city; of those who have faced personal upheaval and profound social change; those who have been forced into exile or experienced major personal or collective loss – can become embodied in material culture. This book is important reading to those interested in cultural and social history and cultural studies.

This is the first book to explore national representations of slavery in an international comparative perspective. Contributions span a wide geographical range, covering Europe, North America, West and South Africa, the Indian Ocean and Asia.

Recent years have seen a growing body of literature dedicated to memories of slavery in the Anglophone world, yet little has been done to approach this subject from Francophone perspectives. This collection responds to the urgent need to contribute to current research on slavery and memory studies by focusing specifically on the Francophone world. Featuring the scholarship of leading academics in France, Britain, the United States and Canada, the collection reflects upon contemporary commemorative practices that relate to the history of slavery and the slave trade, and questions how they function in relationship to other, less memorialized histories of exploitation, such as indentured and forced labour. The volume is set against the context of France’s growing body of memory legislation, as well as its close cultural and political connections to its former empire, all of which make it an influential player in how slavery continues to be memorialized and conceptualized in the public sphere. Contributors retrace and redraw the narrative map of slavery and its legacies in the Francophone world through a comparative understanding of how these different, but interconnected forms of labour exploitation have been remembered and/or forgotten from European, West African, Indian Ocean and Caribbean perspectives.

Recent years have seen a growing body of literature dedicated to memories of slavery in the Anglophone world, yet little has been done to approach this subject from Francophone perspectives. This collection responds to the urgent need to contribute to current research on slavery and memory studies by focusing specifically on the Francophone world. Featuring the scholarship of leading academics in France, Britain, the United States and Canada, the collection reflects upon contemporary commemorative practices that relate to the history of slavery and the slave trade, and questions how they function in relationship to other, less memorialized histories of exploitation, such as indentured and forced labour. The volume is set against the context of France’s growing body of memory legislation, as well as its close cultural and political connections to its former empire, all of which make it an influential player in how slavery continues to be memorialized and conceptualized in the public sphere. Contributors retrace and redraw the narrative map of slavery and its legacies in the Francophone world through a comparative understanding of how these different, but interconnected forms of labour exploitation have been remembered and/or forgotten from European, West African, Indian Ocean and Caribbean perspectives.

Maryse Condé and Caribbean Crossings brings together an international group of scholars to reflect on the life, work, and legacy of one of the most significant writers of the Caribbean and the Black Atlantic world, Alternative Nobel Prize-winning author Maryse Condé. The volume emerges from a landmark international symposium held in May 2024, just weeks after Condé’s passing. Organized by the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, the symposium brought together scholars to honor Condé’s life and to interrogate the crossings that define her œuvre.Taking as its point of departure Condé’s assertion that frontiers have ceased to exist, the volume approaches crossing as both a critical framework and a guiding concept. The essays explore geographical movements between the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, as well as crossings between genres, histories, and temporalities. Contributors examine the porous boundaries between fiction and autobiography, memory and imagination, and the living and the dead, while attending to how Condé’s work unsettles inherited literary paradigms and fixed identities. The volume opens with a foreword by Richard Philcox and concludes with an unedited appendix presenting Condé’s final text, Le “mentir vrai”, reproduced in its original form.