Invited Speakers
Confluence of Cultures
or
Convergence of Diasporas
An International Symposium
Marrakech, Morocco
May 20-22, 2011
Sponsored by
Fondación Tres Culturas del Mediterráno
The Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of
African Peoples
Organizing Committee
Chouki El Hamel, Research Associate, Tubman Institute, and Associate Professor of
History, Arizona State University
Mohamed Ennaji, Professer at Université Muhammad V and Associate Director of
Fondación Tres Culturas
Paul Lovejoy, Distinguished Research Professor, Canada Research Chair in African
Diaspora History, Director, The Harriet Tubman Institute, York University,
Toronto Canada, and Member of the International Scientific Committee,
UNESCO “Slave Route” Project
Participants
1. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch is Professor of contemporary history and head of the
Graduate Studies Program on the Third World and Africa at the University of Paris-7
Denis Diderot. A renowned historian of sub-Saharan Africa, she has taught at most of
the French-speaking African universities and has held visiting positions at Princeton and
Binghamton universities. Among her many publications, Afrique noire: permanences et
ruptures (Paris : Payot, 1985) which was awarded the Aumale prize of the Academie
des Sciences Morales et Politiques.
2. David Levering Lewis, Professor of History at New York University, is twice winner of
the Pulitzer Prize for Biography of W. E. B. Du Bois. Among his books: The Race for
Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in the Scramble
for Africa. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987 and the most recent is
entitled God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe. New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 2008.
3. Natalie Davis is an expert on Early Modern Europe, social and cultural history, cultural
mixture, and 16th-17th century France. Her recent books are The Gift in SixteenthCentury France (2000), Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (2000); L’Histoire
tout feu, tout flame. Entretiens avec Denis Crouzet (2004); and her new book on cultural
crossing is Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (2006).
4. Eve Troutt-Powell is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.
She is the author of A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the
Mastery of the Sudan (University of California, 2003) and the co-editor, with John
Hunwick, of The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Markus
Wiener Press, 2002). She has also written a number of articles on the history of African
slavery in the Nile valley, and on Saint Josephine Bakhita, a former Sudanese slave
canonized in 2000. She is now working on a book about the memory of slavery in the
Nile valley, which examines how slaves and slaveholders wrote, sang or talked about the
experience of servitude and its meaning in their societies. Both her research and her
teaching explore the relationship between Africa and the Middle East, and thus connect
her closely to Africana Studies and African Studies at Penn. She is a recipient of the
2003 MacArthur Foundation's "Genius" Award.
5. Michael Gomez is Chair of the Department of History at NYU and founder (and former
director) of the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). His interests
cover a wide range of themes: the African Diaspora, social and religious formations,
Islam, slavery and ethnic designations, among other things. His most recent book is
entitled Black Crescent: African Muslims in the Americas, Cambridge University Press,
2005. He is currently the president of the UNESCO Slave Route Project International
Scientific Committee.
6. Patrick Manning is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History at University of
Pittsburgh. He is trained as an economic historian of Africa, has continued to work in
that area and has also applied the lessons of African historiography to studies of the
African diaspora and world history. He directed the World History Center at
Northeastern from 1994 until its closure in 2004. He was project director for Migration
in Modern World History, 1500-2000 (Wadsworth, 2000), a CD-ROM produced at the
center. He has since published Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global
Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and Migration in World History (Routledge, 2004).
His most recent book is The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (Columbia
University Press, 2009).
7. Rina Cáceres, director of the Diaspora Studies Program at the Centro de Investigationes
Historicas de America Central at the University of Costa Rica and a Network Professor
for the York/UNESCO/SSHRCC Nigerian Hinterland Project, was awarded the National
Prize Aquileo Echeverria (History) for the special issue of Revista de Historia
(Universidad de Costa Rica), Enero, Junio 1999, No. 39. She was also named director
of the Central American Graduate Program in History at the University of Costa Rica,
and to the executive of the Center for Regional Research in Mesoamerica (CIRMA) in
Guatemala.
8. Myriam Cottias is a historian and director of the international research group on slavery
sponsored by the CNRS and based at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
Their website on slavery places a particular emphasis on francophone scholarship. She
wrote numerous books and edited collections on gender, slavery and historical memory.
Her most recent book is La question noire: hostoire d’une construction colonial (Paris:
Bayard, 2007).
9. Mariana P. Candido is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. She
specializes in the history of Angola during the 18th and 19th centuries. Her current
research examines the social and political effects of the transatlantic slave trade in
Benguela and its hinterland. More broadly her interests include the history of slavery;
forced migration and slave trade; the South Atlantic world; and the African diaspora.
She is the author of Las redes de esclavitud en un puerto del Atlantic Sur: Comercio e
Identidad en Benguela,1780-1850 (El Colegio de Mexico Press, forthcoming) and the
co-author of Crossing Memories: Slavery and African Diaspora with Ana Lucia Araújo
and Paul Lovejoy (Africa World Press, forthcoming).
10. Cynthia Becker is a scholar of African arts specializing in the arts of the Imazighen
(Berbers) in northwestern Africa, specifically Morocco, Algeria, and Niger. Her
research has been supported by a Fulbright grant and several grants from the American
Institute of Maghreb Studies. Professor Becker has served as a consultant for numerous
museum exhibitions and published articles on the visual and performing arts of the
Imazighen as well as the trans-Saharan slave trade. Her book Amazigh Arts in Morocco:
Women Shaping Berber Identity was published by the University of Texas Press in July
of 2006. She is currently working on a book about the Afro-Islamic aesthetics and
ceremonial practices of the Gnawa that considers the history of the trans-Saharan slave
trade and its implications on material culture in both western and northern Africa. Other
projects include the visual expression of Amazigh consciousness by contemporary
painters/activists, the influence of Sufism on contemporary Moroccan art, and the visual
culture and history of the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans.
11. Yacine Daddi Addoun received his bachelor’s degree in political science at the
University of Algiers and his master’s degree in sociology from the Institute National
des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris. He has just completed his PhD thesis
on the abolition of slavery in Algeria in the 19th century. He wrote “Muhammad Kaba
Saghanughu and the Muslim Community in Jamaica”, with Paul E. Lovejoy, in P.
Lovejoy (ed.) Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam (Princeton: Marcus Wiener, 2004) and
“The Arabic Manuscript of Muhammad Kaba Saghanughu of Jamaica, c. 1820” in
Annie Paul, (ed.), Creole Concerns: Essays in Honour of Kamau Brathwaite. Kingston:
University of the West Indies Press, 2007).
12. Bruce Hall is Assistant Professor at Duke University. His first book is about the
development of ideas about racial difference along the West African Sahel. The
research for this project was focused in and around the Malian town of Timbuktu. His
current research centers on a nineteenth-century commercial network that connected
Timbuktu with Ghadames (Libya), and which involved a number of literate slaves as
commercial agents.
13. Gwyn Campbell is Canada Research Chair in Indian Ocean World History at McGill
University. He served as an academic consultant for the South African Government in a
series of inter-governmental meetings which led to the formation of an Indian Ocean
regional association in 1997. He has published extensively on aspects of the economic
and social history of the western portion of the Indian Ocean world, including An
Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750-1895: The Rise and Fall of an Island
Empire. African Studies Series (Cambridge University Press, 2005). He is currently
completing Africa and the Indian Ocean World for Cambridge Univ. Press.
14. Michele Johnson is associate Professor at York University. Her focus is Cultural and
Social History of the Caribbean. Her recent publication is Neither Led Nor Driven:
Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865-1920 – with Brian Moore
(University of the West Indies Press, 2004).
15. Stanlie M. James is Professor with a joint appointment in the Afro-American Studies
Department and the Women’s Studies Program, is also affiliated with the African
Studies Program. From 1996-2000 she served as Director of the Women’s Studies
Research Center. Professor James works within the field of Black Women’s Studies to
centralize the stories of women of color to the intellectual arenas of the academy. Her
teaching endeavors and research agenda have focused on interdisciplinary areas of Black
Feminisms and Women’s International Human Rights. Through the matrix of gender,
race and class (as well as other forms of oppression based on sexuality, age etc.) she has
explored the theorizing and activism of U.S. Black women and other women of color at
the local and national levels and within the global context. Additionally she works to
articulate and examine the reciprocal linkages between Black women and Women’s
International Human Rights.
16. Edward A. Alpers is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at UCLA. He
has taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (1966-1968), and the Somali
National University, Lafoole (1980); in 1994 he served as President of the African
Studies Association. His major publications include Ivory and Slaves in East Central
Africa (1975); Walter Rodney: Revolutionary and Scholar, co-edited with Pierre-Michel
Fontaine (1982); Africa and the West: A Documentary History from the Slave Trade to
Independence, with William H. Worger and Nancy Clark (2001); History, Memory and
Identity, co-edited with Vijayalakshmi Teelock (2001); Sidis and Scholars: Essays on
African Indians, co-edited with Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy (2004); Slavery and Resistance
in Africa and Asia, co-edited with Gwyn Campbell and Michael Salman (2005); Slave
Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeastern Africa, co-edited with Benigna Zimba and
Allen F. Isaacman (2005); Resisting Bondage in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, coedited with Gwyn Campbell and Michael Salman (2007); and Cross-Currents and
Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World, co-edited with Himanshu
Prabha Ray (2007).
17. Jane Landers is Professor of History and former Associate Dean of the College of Arts
& Science and Director of the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies at
Vanderbilt University. Her research has been supported by grants from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Conference on Latin American History, and the
Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United
States’ Universities. She is the author of Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions
(Cambridge, 2009), Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, 1999), editor of Colonial
Plantations and Economy of Florida (Gainesville, 2000) and Against the Odds: Free
Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas (London, 1996) and co-editor of Slaves,
Subjects and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque, 2006) and
The African American Heritage of Florida (Gainesville, 1995). She has published essays
on the African history of the Americas in The American Historical Review, Slavery and
Abolition, The New West Indian Guide, The Americas, and Colonial Latin American
Historical Review. Landers is past president of the Forum on European Expansion and
Global Interaction and is on the International Advisory Board of the Harriet Tubman
Center for Research on the African Diaspora. She serves on the editorial boards for
several historical journals, including Slavery & Abolition and has consulted on a variety
of archaeological projects, documentary films, web sites and museum exhibits.
18. William Gervase Clarence-Smith is Professor of the Economic History of Asia and
Africa at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His
latest book is Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (Hurst, 2006). He co-edited (with
Ulrike Freitag) Hadhrami traders, scholars and statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s to
1960s (Brill, 1997), edited The economics of the Indian Ocean slave trade in the
nineteenth century (Frank Cass, 1989), and authored The third Portuguese empire, 18251975, a study in economic imperialism (Manchester University Press, 1985), and Slaves,
Peasants and Capitalists in Southern Angola, 1840-1926 (Cambridge University Press,
1979). He is chief editor of the Journal of Global History (London School of Economics
and Cambridge University Press). In addition to publishing on slavery and Islam, he has
written on colonialism, Middle Eastern and Indian diasporas, equids and elephants, and
beverages and masticatories. His teaching includes a course on Islamic reform in
Southeast Asia from the late eighteenth century.
19. Tim Cleaveland is Associate Professor at the University of Georgia. He is an expert on
slavery in Mauritania. His first is entitled Becoming Walata: A History of Saharan SociFormation and Transformation. Heinemann Press, 2002.
20. Karla Holloway is James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University. She also
holds appointments in the Law School, Women's Studies and African & African
American Studies. Her research and teaching interests focus on African American
cultural studies, biocultural studies, gender, ethics and law. She has served as Dean of
the Humanities and Social Sciences and she is founding co-director of the John Hope
Franklin Center and the Franklin Humanities Institute. She is the author of eight books,
including Passed On: African-American Mourning Stories (2002) and BookMarks-Reading in Black and White, A Memoir (2006) completed during a residency in
Bellagio, Italy as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. BookMarks was nominated for the
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for non-fiction. The book she completed recently is
entilted Private Bodies/Public Texts: Race, Gender, & a Cultural Bioethics will be
published in 2010 by Duke U Press.
21. Ibrahima Thioub is a historian and director of the History Department at Cheikh Anta
Diop University in Dakar. He is a specialist on the history of confinement and prisons
in colonial and postcolonial Senegal. He is also interested in African historiography
which is evidenced in his recent article on a critical review of the African historiography
of slavery and Atlantic slave trade. He teaches history of Islam and modern and
contemporary political history of Senegal.
22. Ibrahima Seck is Assistant Professor at the History department, Cheikh Anta Diop
University, Dakar. He has participated in many American Programs including
whorkshops which he organized and led. He has additionally given lectures on the
African diaspora at many different United States Universities including the University of
New Orleans and the University of Mississippi. He has been awarded many fellowships
from research organizations and programs including WARA/WARC, USIS,
CODESRIA, and the Fulbright Foundation.
23. Suzanne Schwarz is Associate Professor of History at Liverpool Hope University. She
is a specialist on Sierra Leone and has published Slave Captain: The Career of James
Irving in the Liverpool Slave Trade. Suzanne Schwarz <schwars@hope.ac.uk>
24. Carolyn Brown is professor at Rutgers University. Her primary research interests are
in West African labor and social history. Her current book project is a social history of
the nationalist movement in Nigeria in Enugu, Nigeria ('Red' Enugu} which focuses on
several social groups who give the colonial city its cultural and contested nature.
Tentatively entitled, “Cowboys’, Letter Writers and Dancing Women: Identity and
Struggles over Space, Leisure and Time in a West African City: Enugu, Nigeria 19141955”, the project looks at how race, class and gender identities are shaped in the
colonial city and how these identities impact upon the 'popular classes' response the
nationalist discourse. She is directing a project w/ colleagues in Nigeria interviewing
people in villages in southeastern Nigeria on video and documenting how the slave trade
is remembered. This is called 'Memories of Sorrow and Loss, - the Slave Trade and
Southeastern Nigeria’, and is sponsored by Rutgers, the Harriet Tubman Resource
Center for Diaspora Studies [http://www.yorkuca/nhp/]at York University, Canada , the
Enugu Historical Society and the Schomburg Center of NYPL.
25. Vanessa Oliviera, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, York University, and
associate, Harriet Tubman Institute; specialist on Angola.
26. Renee Soulodre-La France, her research interests are the history of Nueva Granada,
present-day Colombia, in South America. Her more recent work focuses upon the social
and cultural history of the enslaved in Latin America and the inter-racial relationships
that developed within the colonial world when Indigenous, African and European
populations were brought together.
27. Salah Trabelsi, maître de conférences, Université Lumière Lyon 2, CIRESC et
GREMMO, France.
28. Martin Klein, his research has been on Francophone West Africa, mostly Senegal,
Guinea and Mali. I have been working on slavery, but also have an interest is peasants,
workers, Islam and colonial administration.
29. Maria Elisa Valezquez, Mexico.
30. Stéphanie Pouessel est Docteur en anthropologie de l’École des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales (EHESS) et ATER à l’université Paris X-Nanterre. Sa thèse (2007)
analyse les rapports entre identité, culture et mouvements sociaux au Maghreb sous
l’angle de la revendication culturelle berbère au Maroc. Chercheuse associée au Centre
d’Études Africaines (CEA), Stéphanie Pouessel mène actuellement des recherches sur
l’identité berbère au Maghreb et en diaspora (France). S’inscrivant dans le champ de
l’anthropologie politique, son regard porte sur les identités perçues comme
« minorisées » et politiquement revendiquées (“identité berbère”, “identité noire”), et sur
le nationalisme et la mise en exergue des différences culturelles (émergence de la notion
de “diversité culturelle”).
31. Carlos Liberato teaches at Universidad Federale Sergipe, Brazil, and Ph.D. candidate,
Department of History, York University, Associate of the Harriet Tubman Institute ;
specialist on Maranhao and the upper Guinea coast.
32. Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at the
Department of Anthropology and Director of the Institute of African Studies at
Columbia University. Mahmood Mamdani’s reputation as an expert in African history,
politics and international relations has made him an important voice in contemporary
debates about the changing role of Africa in a global context. His book Citizen and
Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton University
Press, 1996) has been hailed as one of the best scholarly works on Africa published in
English, and won the prestigious Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association
of the USA (1998).
33. João José Reis is Professor of History at the Universidade Federal de Bahia (UFBA) in
Brazil. He is the author of Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in
Bahia (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), and Death is a Festival: Funeral
Rites and Popular Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (University of North Carolina
Press, 2003), which earned the 1996 Clarence H. Haring Prize from the American
Historical Association. From 1996 to 2004, he served as editor for the Afro-Ásia journal
published by UFBA’s Centro de Estudos Afro-Orientais.
34. David Trotman is Associate Director and Associate Professor at York University. He
specializes in Caribbean Studies. He is the author of Crime in Trinidad: Conflict and
Control in a Plantation Society, 1838-1900 (University of Tennessee Press, 1987) and
Africa and Trans-Atlantic Memories: Literary and Aesthetic Manifestations of Diaspora
and History, (Trenton,N.J: Africa World Press, 2008) – with Naana Opoku-Agyemang
and Paul Lovejoy.