A Forum on Albert Camus

Resistance, Rebellion & Death in a time of plague

A talk by Robert Zaretsky & poety reading by Major jackson

March 22, 2021 2:00-3:30 pm EST

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“Race, Regulation, and Guns: The Latest Battleground in the Debate Over the Second Amendment”

The Department of History at the University of Vermont is pleased to announce the inaugural Histories of the Present: The David Haber and Robin Edelman Annual Lecture. This is a new series, funded with a gift from David Haber and Robin Edelman, that enables the department to invite a scholar to the UVM campus to provide historical perspective on a pressing contemporary issue or important matter in the news related to the United States or the relationship between the United States and the wider world.

This year’s lecture will be delivered by Professor Saul Cornell of Fordham University. The topic for the lecture is:

“Race, Regulation, and Guns: The Latest Battleground in the Debate Over the Second Amendment”

It will be delivered on October 11th at 5:00 p.m. in the UVM Alumni House’s Silver Pavilion.

 

Saul Cornell is the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University. He specializes in early American history and legal/Constitutional history. He is the author of The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (1999); A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America (2006); and (with Gerald Leonard) The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Demise of the Founders’ Constitution, 1780s-1830s (2019), among other works. Cornell has also written widely on American history and the Second Amendment in the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post. With a dozen other leading historians, he recently filed an amicus brief in the most important Second Amendment case in the last decade, NYSRPA v. Bruen. Professor Cornell has a strong interest in pedagogy and teaching with technology and co-authored the textbook, Visions of America: A History of the United States.

 

Sponsored by the Department of History, with the generous assistance of David Haber and Robin Edelman.

SYMPOSIUM Repatriation/Restitution/Reparation: African Art in the UVM Fleming Museum

November 4-6, 2021

DRAFT SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

For more information contact Prof. Vicki L. Brennan (vicki.brennan@uvm.edu)

 

DAY 1: REPATRIATION

Thursday, November 4

Repatriation centers on the return of objects that were stolen from communities in Africa as part of European colonialism. The presence of these plundered objects in Euro-American museums contributes to ongoing imperial relationships and perspectives. The discussion will center on what has become the signal event at stake in discussions of repatriation: The Benin Massacre of 1897 in which British troops invaded Benin city, killed an unknown number of civilians and other residents of the community, and destroyed the palace. As part of this colonial violence thousands of art works—sculptures, brass plates, carvings—were taken. Many of these objects may now be found in museum collections across Europe and the United States, including the Queen Mother sculpture at UVM’s Fleming Museum. The discussions on this day will focus on WHY repatriation is necessary and HOW museums should undertake this process.

 

KEYNOTE LECTURE: Title TBD

10:00 am, Virtual Lecture [CONFIRMED]

  • Dan Hicks, Professor of Contemporary Archaeology, Oxford University & Curator of World Archaeology, Pitts River Museum

 

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION: Repatriation—Processes & Politics

3pm, Fleming Museum

 

DAY 2: RESTITUTION

Friday, November 5

Restitution is a way for communities that were harmed to remake themselves in the face of what was taken from them: for communities in Africa from whom people and objects were stolen to try to account for and move on from that loss, and for Black communities in the diaspora to reckon with and remake their connections to Africa and to each other. The discussion will center on artistic practices of memory and activism that help restore the past, present, and future of Black life in the wake of colonialism, the slave trade, and imperialism (Sharpe 2016). We will examine how Black artists reconcile with the past and look towards the future through an engagement with activism, Artificial Intelligence, performance, and other technologies and practices of remediation.

 

KEYNOTE LECTURE: Title TBD

10am, Virtual Lecture [CONFIRMED]

Peju Layiwola

Professor of Art History, University of Lagos

https://pejulayiwola.com/bio.php

email: pejulayiwola1967@gmail.com

 

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION/WORKSHOP:

3pm, Fleming Museum (additional times TBD)

 

 

 

DAY 3: REPARATION

Saturday, November 6

The final day of the symposium will explore how colonialism, racism, and imperialism are an ongoing part of the constitution of art world in Europe and America. This goes beyond the presence of stolen or plundered objects in Western museums to draw attention to how the idea of art and the institution of the museum itself is dependent on exploitation and inequality of racialized others. We will screen the film “White Cube” which focuses on how plantation workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo formed an artists’ collective in order to draw on the prestige and profits associated with the “white cube” of the art gallery to buy back land that was stolen from them. The film screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker and a representative from the artists’ collective.

 

FILM SCREENING & DISCUSSION

11am, Fleming 101

White Cube

https://www.humanactivities.org/en/iha-blank/march-2021-global-launch-white-cube-2/

 

Roundtable:

Renzo Martens, Film Maker & Artist

Representative from Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC)

Loka Losambe, Department of English, UVM