Department of English

• Thursday, April 6, 2017 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall 401

In this lecture, Lisa Lowe reflects on the possibilities and limits of archives and objects in the exploration of historical links between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, observing that liberal narratives of freedom overcoming slavery often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, she contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom may be assimilated or forgotten.