Edinburgh Centre for Global History
Annual Lecture in the History of Slavery, 21 April 2021
Professor Ana Lucia Araujo, Howard University

In this lecture, Professor Ana Lucia Araujo draws from her newest book Slavery in the age of memory: Engaging the past to discuss the ways slavery and the Atlantic slave trade have been remembered and memorialized by individuals, social groups, and societies between the middle of the nineteenth century until the present. Exploring several case studies from Britain, France, and the United States, she reviews the concepts of history, collective memory, cultural memory, public memory, official memory, and public history. She shows how these various modes of engagement with the past relate to slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in both analogous and differing ways and how sometimes they are also intertwined. Araujo emphasizes that current debates about slavery are more than simple attempts to come to terms with the past but are rather associated with persistent racism and racial inequalities which prevail in former slave societies or countries where slavery existed. Overall, the lecture illuminates how and why, over the last five decades, the debates about slavery have increasingly become so relevant in the societies where slavery existed and participated in the Atlantic slave trade.

This lecture was free and open to all. Part a series of events organised by the Edinburgh Centre for Global History.