History

Inside the Kingdom of Hayti, ‘the Wakanda of the Western Hemisphere’

This post was originally published on The Conversation US.

marlene daut

An 1811 wood engraving depicts the coronation of King Henry. Fine Art America

Marvel’s blockbuster “Black Panther,” which recently became the first superhero drama to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, takes place in the secret African Kingdom of Wakanda. The Black Panther, also known as T’Challa, rules over this imaginary empire – a refuge from the colonialists and capitalists who have historically impoverished the real continent of Africa.

But fans of the box-office hit might not realize that they don’t need to look to the make-believe world of the Black Panther to find a modern-day black kingdom that aspired to be a safe haven from racism and inequality.

The fictional kingdom has a real-life corollary in the historic Kingdom of Hayti, which existed as a sort of Wakanda of the Western Hemisphere from 1811 to 1820.

The Haitian Revolution led to the creation of the first free black state in the Americas. But the world was hardly expecting a former enslaved man named Henry Christophe to make himself the king of it.

Media accounts from the era, some of which I’ve collected in a digital archive, serve as a window into a brief period of time when the kingdom stood as a beacon of black freedom in a world of slavery. Yet, like Wakanda, the Kingdom of Hayti wasn’t a utopia for everyone.

A new kind of kingdom

On Jan. 1, 1804, an army led by former enslaved Africans in the French colony of Saint-Domingue staved off France’s attempt to bring back slavery, and declared themselves independent and free forever.

The leader of the revolutionaries, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, had defeated Napoleon’s famous army and made himself emperor of the newly-renamed Haiti.

But in October 1806, Dessalines was assassinated by political rivals, leading the country to be divided into two separate states: General Henry Christophe named himself president of the northern part of Haiti, while General Alexandre Pétion governed a completely separate republic in the southern and southwestern part of the country.

‘I am reborn from my ashes’ was the motto of Henry I, the former slave who became king.Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

In March 1811, President Henry Christophe surprised everyone when he anointed himself King Henry I and renamed the northern republic, the Kingdom of Hayti. Henry I soon had a full court of nobles that included dukes, barons, counts and knights to rival that of royal England.

Haiti’s first and only kingdom immediately attracted the attention of media outlets from around the world. How could there be a republic on one side of the island and a monarchy on the other, they wondered? Was the new black king trying to mimic the same white sovereigns who had once enslaved his people, others asked?

The edicts establishing the royal order of Haiti were immediately translated into English and printed in Philadelphia, while many American and British newspapers and magazines ran celebrity profiles of the Haitian king.

One newspaper described him as “the elegant model of an Hercules.” Another described him as “a remarkably handsome, well-built man; with a broad chest, square shoulders, and an appearance of great muscular strength and activity.”

The ‘First Monarch’ of the ‘New World’

In 1813, construction of the opulent Sans-Souci Palace – meaning literally “without worry” – was completed.

The palace was partially destroyed by an earthquake in 1842; today, its remains have been designated a world heritage UNESCO site.

During its heyday, the palace dazzled.

There were the elegantly manicured gardens and a unique, domed cathedral. The structure was flanked by a dramatic double staircase leading to the entryway and two arches detailed with etchings and inscriptions. One acknowledged Henry, rather than Jean-Jacques, as the country’s “founder.”

A woman climbs the stairs on the remains of Sans-Souci Palace in 2017. Andres Martinez Casares/Reuters

There were also two painted crowns on the principal palace façade, each of which stood at 16 feet tall. The one on the right read “To the First Monarch Crowned in the New World.” The one on the left said “The Beloved Queen Reigns Forever Over Our Hearts.”

King Henry lived in the palace with his wife, Queen Marie-Louise, and his three children, Prince Victor Henry, and the princesses, Améthyste and Athénaire.

An April 1815 issue of The Gazette Royale details how the Kingdom of Hayti foiled France’s attempt to reconquer its former colony.

Newspapers around the world reprinted articles from the monarchy’s official newspaper, the Gazette Royale d’Hayti, detailing the royal family’s lavish dinners, replete with bombastic speeches and lengthy toasts to famous contemporary figures such as King George III of England, U.S. President James Madison, the King of Prussia, and the “friend of humanity,” the “immortal” British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson.

The Gazette also recounted the decadence of Queen Marie-Louise’s August 1816 official birthday celebration, which lasted for 12 days and had 1,500 people in attendance. On the final day of the party, 12 cannons fired after the Duke of Anse toasted the queen as “the perfect model of mothers and wives.”

A free island in a sea of slavery

There was much more to King Henry’s reign than luxurious parties.

On March 28, 1811, King Henry installed a constitutional monarchy, a move lauded by many in the British elite. The famous British naturalist Joseph Banks championed Henry’s 1812 book of laws, titled the “Code Henry,” calling it “the most moral association of men in existence.”

“Nothing that white men have been able to arrange is equal to it,” he added.

Banks admired the code’s detailed reorganization of the economy, from one based on slave labor to one – at least in theory – based on free labor. This transformation was wholly fitting for the formerly enslaved man-turned-king, whose motto was “I am reborn from my ashes.”

The code provided for shared compensation between proprietors and laborers at “a full fourth the gross product, free from all duties,” and it also contained provisions for the redistribution of any land that had previously belonged to slave owners.

“Your Majesty, in his paternal solicitude,” one edict reads, “wants for every Haytian, indiscriminately, the poor as well as the rich, to have the ability to become the owner of the lands of our former oppressors.”

Henry’s stated “paternal solicitude” even extended to enslaved Africans. While the Constitution of 1807 had announced that Haiti would not “disturb the regimes” of the colonial powers, royal Haitian guards regularly intervened in the slave trade to free captives on foreign ships that entered Haitian waters. An October 1817 issue of the Gazette celebrated the Haitian military’s capture of a slave ship and subsequent release of 145 of “our unfortunate brothers, victims of greed and the odious traffic in human flesh.”

Too good to be true?

Yet life in the Kingdom of Hayti was far from perfect.

Henry’s political rivals noted that people frequently defected to the southern Republic of Haiti, where they told stories of the monarch’s favoritism and the aristocracy’s abuse of power.

Worse, Henry’s famous fortress, the Citadelle Laferrière, was, according to some accounts, built with forced labor. For this reason, Haitians have long debated whether the imposing structure, which was restored in 1990, ought to symbolize the liberty of post-independence Haiti.

Henry’s dreams of a free black kingdom would not outlive him. On Aug. 15, 1820, the king suffered a debilitating stroke. Physically impaired – and fearing a fracturing administration plagued by the desertion of some its most prominent members – Haiti’s first and only king killed himself on the night of Oct. 8, 1820.

Illustrator Mahlon Blaine depicts King Henry on the cover of the 1928 book ‘Black Majesty.’@paulclammer/Twitter

Despite some questions about living conditions in the Kingdom of Hayti, its ruler can still be recognized as a visionary. Even one of his most ardent rivals from the south, Charles Hérard Dumesle, who often referred to Christophe as a “despot,” nonetheless praised the remarkable “new social order” outlined in the Code Henry. Dumesle appeared to lament that the king’s “civil laws were the formula for a social code that existed only on paper.”

For all those who still dream of black liberation, strong – if ultimately flawed – leaders, like both the King of Hayti and Black Panther, have always been central to these visions.

King Henry was even depicted as a sort of superhero in his time. As one article from 1816 noted of Henry,

“History demonstrates that no people has ever done anything great entirely by themselves; it is only ever in collaboration with the great men who become elevated in their midst that they raise themselves up to the glory of accomplishing extraordinary deeds.”

Marlene Daut is Associate Professor of African Diaspora Studies, University of Virginia. She is also the author of Tropics of Haiti.

 

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History, Liverpool Interest

Liverpool and the Slave Trade – In Conversation with Anthony Tibbles

Liverpool and the Slave Trade is the first comprehensive account of the city’s role in the slave trade. Drawing on recent research, contemporary documents and illustrations, it provides a detailed account of how the trade operated and was eventually brought to an end. We caught up with author Anthony Tibbles to discuss this recent publication.9781786941534

First, could you tell us a bit about Liverpool and the Slave Trade and what compelled you to focus your research in this area?

I first became interested in Liverpool’s role in the slave trade when I was asked to take charge of the development of the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery at the Maritime Museum over twenty-five years ago. In doing some initial research, it was clear that there were a lot of myths but very little academically sound published information, particularly about the scale and nature of the city’s involvement. Whilst a large amount of research has been carried and published since then on the transatlantic trade, very little has focussed specifically on Liverpool.

In 2007 I helped edit Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery (Liverpool University Press), a volume of academic papers on various aspects of Liverpool’s role in the slave trade but I still felt there was a need for a comprehensive history especially one aimed at the interested general reader. In the same year, as part of the events organised to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, I was asked to give a lecture on Liverpool and the slave trade at Gresham College in London. After I retired and decided to attempt to write about the subject myself, the Gresham lecture provided me with a template for my approach to the book.

This is the first comprehensive account of Liverpool’s participation in the slave trade. Why do you think this area of the city’s history has been overlooked?

I think for many years there was a reluctance to admit that the city had been so closely involved in what was by then almost universally condemned as an horrific and disgraceful trade. It was easier and less painful to pass over what had become regarded as a shameful episode in the city’s history and concentrate on the spectacular growth of Liverpool in the nineteenth century. I know when we developed the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery there were people who said we should put Liverpool’s role in the trade ‘behind us’, effectively forget about it, and look to the future. In fact, it is only by confronting uncomfortable aspects of the past and recognising that history, that you are able to move on.

Liverpool and the Slave Trade includes the use of contemporary documents and personal testimonies and experiences to explain the topic – are there any stand-out materials which you could tell us more about?

I have made significant use of the Davenport Papers which the Maritime Museum acquired in 2002. They are part of the extensive business archive of William Davenport who was one of Liverpool’s most active slave traders, responsible for over 140 voyages. The letters between him and his captains are particularly detailed and revealing of the complexities of the trade. They show the matter of fact way that Davenport and his captains discussed the buying and selling of fellow human beings and their total lack of concern for the enslaved, unless it affected the profitability of the voyage.

Could you tell us more about the cover image and why you chose it?

The cover image is a detail from a watercolour entitled Liverpool from Seacombe Boathouse which was painted by Michael Angelo Rooker (1746-1801) in about 1768 or 1769 and was published in 1770. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1769 along with its pair A View of Liverpool from the Bowling Green. I wanted an image that related to the subject of the book and although there are one or two paintings of Liverpool slave ships, they are not immediately obvious as such. I thought it was important to show Liverpool and the Mersey and this view shows the port during the height of the slave trade.

How does this volume pave the way for further research on the topic?

This book is a general overall survey of Liverpool’s participation in the slave trade and is intended as a summary of current research.

There are still a number of questions which have not been fully answered and where historians have different opinions. These include the extent of the importance of the trade to Liverpool’s development and economy; how the slave trade related to other trades that the town was involved in; the relationship between the trade and the industrial revolution; and why Liverpool and its merchants came to dominate the trade in the late eighteenth century. More research could also be done on the merchants themselves, who they were, what were their origins, how far they were involved in other trades and how important the slave trade was to their personal wealth and prosperity.

What are you going to be working on next?

I usually have a number of projects on the go at any one time. I have been researching members of the Watt family who owned Speke Hall in the nineteenth century and whose wealth came from Richard Watt (1724-96). He made his fortune in Jamaica as a factor, a dealer in enslaved Africans and a plantation owner and in his latter years was a shipowner and trader in Jamaican produce, particularly sugar and rum. Quite separately, I am also researching Liverpool marine artists and ship portrait painters with the intention of publishing a dictionary. The port was home to some of the most prolific and talented painters in this genre from the late eighteenth century until the immediate post-Second World War years.

I’ve also become interested in the history of bell ringing in Cornwall! This started from seeing a couple of delightful eighteenth century painted boards featuring images of bell ringers and a rhyme about rules for ringing. I’ve now found more than a dozen similar boards in local churches which seem to be unique to Cornwall.

For more information on Liverpool and the Slave Trade please visit our website.

 

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History

How Battles Over Booze Shaped Modern Liverpool – In Conversation with David Beckingham

How did Liverpool transform its 19th century reputation for drunkenness? David Beckingham, author of The Licensed City explains the social impact of licensing laws in a city centred on drinking culture. 

What made you decide to study Liverpool and what did you focus on in your research?

For much of the nineteenth century, Liverpool enjoyed a terrible reputation for drunkenness. According to police statistics it was at various times the most drunken city in England. At its peak in the 1870s, there was something like 20,000 annual police proceedings for drunkenness. I was interested to find out more about why Liverpool looked so at odds with other cities.

I began by considering the role of numbers in constructing municipal reputations. I was cautious of these numbers, aware that they were counting incidents of policing and not every act of consuming alcohol. But I wanted to know what that record said about Victorian Liverpool, a city whose civic ambitions betrayed a series of social anxieties.

This meant asking why the authorities in Liverpool thought that the city had such a drink problem. Because policing reflecting anxieties about largely public behaviours, I started to consider the role that drink played in the social and street life of the city. This took me on a kind of archive tour of the docksides, the slums of north Liverpool, the mercantile heart around the Town Hall, and the theatre land of Williamson Square. I focus on the regulatory mechanism for controlling the sale of alcohol through pubs. This is the licensed city of my title, a city where regulators were keen to address the links between drink and a range of social problems.

How did you go about your research for this book? Were you surprised by any of your findings?

My book grew out of a PhD in Geography. Most of my research was done in Liverpool’s Central Library, where I read the minute books of the Council, Watch Committee (which was in charge of policing) and magistrates. Newspapers were also fantastically useful. I particularly liked reading old satirical papers like Porcupine. They provide a very different angle on the sometimes rather dry tone of official minute books and, even through their criticisms, revealed the sense of civic pride and identity so central to social reform.

The archives also have some wonderful temperance material, produced by reformers campaigning against drink. This included an amazing set of maps of pubs in different parts of town, which are reprinted in the book. Being trained as a geographer, I was interested to think about what kind of political work was done by representing information in this way. They show us how tempting it can be to construct reductive moral arguments about people and places.

I really wanted to learn about the cultures of Liverpool’s pubs. We know what they looked like: plans formed part of the licensing process and there are plenty of street photographs that reflect changing branding and design. Liverpool still has some famous examples of pubs from the period. I tried to imagine what they would have sounded like as people talked over their beer about their daily concerns. The written records aren’t really set up for that, of course. Things were usually recorded when they went wrong, but by understanding this it is still possible to glimpse daily life.

Most surprising, to me, was just how detailed these records could be. They show magistrates manipulating the layout of pubs, doing away with screens or doors to cosy corners where people could get up to mischief. My favourite examples come from cases where publicans were tasked with managing women who were reputed to be prostitutes. The law didn’t ban women from seeking liquid refreshment, but it asked that they stay no longer than was necessary for ‘reasonable refreshment’. Importantly, it didn’t spell out how long this was. One London Road publican was told that if he spotted a known prostitute she should not be allowed to stay on his premises for longer than four minutes. The obvious concern was to prevent pubs being used by prostitutes to solicit for sex. To me it conjures up an image of the pub’s staff lining up clocks along the bar. I can’t imagine the magistrates’ intention was to endorse speed drinking, but this tells us a lot about their priorities. It has been really instructive to see just how these gendered moral codes ran right the way down through the social life of the city.

Photograph courtesy of Colin Wilkinson at Blue Coat Press

Why did alcohol become such a pressing political issue in the nineteenth century?

In a way, that concern with prostitution helps explain something very important about drink. It intersected with such a broad range of social issues and policy arenas, right the way from labour productivity and criminality through to health and housing reform.

It is clear to me that the problem of prostitution played a particular role in politicising the management of pubs in Liverpool, in no small part because of the political clout of some of the city’s brewers. This helped turn drink from a question of individual moral responsibility into a collective question about the city’s management to be challenged through the ballot box.

Nationally, the growth of the temperance movement also reflects a distinctive feature of drink: it made really very tangible an important and unresolved debate about the rights and reach of the state to govern individual behaviours. This is really what got me interested in drink in the first place. It is a great case study for understanding the developing governance of everyday life in Victorian Britain.

To what extent did you find that reforming licensing laws tackled the social issues that Liverpool was facing in the nineteenth century?

That’s a really important question. It is wrong to assume that the broader social changes I narrate were all down to licensing. Licensing has to be seen alongside other reforms such as slum clearance, as well as changes in prosperity and social attitudes to drink. But that’s the interesting thing about drink: it links to so many other features of urban life. The magistrates reduced the numbers of licences, particularly beerhouses in the working-class parts of town, and they really did try to address what went on in pubs. They also learnt how to use licensing to shape the world beyond the pub. In that, they showed that licensing was a useful tool of social governance, and the argument I make is that this was often directed at behaviours other than simply drinking.

It would also be wrong to see any successes as all their own work, however: I place great emphasis on the campaigns of social reformers. They were central to the definition of particular behaviours as problems that required intervention. For me the most telling thing is that reformers thought that licensing was working. This fed into a really useful political narrative that their social action was helping transform how their city was run. That takes us full circle back to the idea of reputation.

 

For more information on The Licensed City please visit our website.
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History

Archaeology and The Anarchy

The long-awaited paperback edition of The Anarchy is now available! We caught up with authors Oliver H. Creighton and Duncan W. Wright to discuss what archaeology can tell us about this turbulent time in Britain’s history.

Could you explain a bit about the history behind the ‘Anarchy’ and King Stephen’s reign?

The dramatic epithet ‘The Anarchy’ has been applied to the rule of Stephen, King of England, since the nineteenth century. This was one of the most turbulent reigns in English medieval history. Stephen of Blois, grandson of William the Conqueror, was crowned at Westminster in 1135 following a coup after the death of his uncle Henry I. The period until Stephen’s death in 1154 is notorious for the English crown being contested between the king and his cousin Matilda, while rebellious barons and Scottish invasions fermented the chaos. According to chroniclers the English landscape bristled with new castles while robber barons desecrated and fortified churches and ravaged the landscape, although our book tries hard to look beyond the image of the period painted by contemporary writers.

 ‘The Anarchy’ is the first ever archaeologically based study of the ‘Anarchy’ of King Stephen’s reign. Why do you think this is the case?

There is a vast body of work on Stephen’s reign written by some towering figures of English medieval history. In contrast, precious little had been written of the period’s archaeology, although we could glean enough from excavations of sites such as siegeworks (mini-castles, built to besiege other fortresses) to see that this approach had great potential. Our project was driven by deepening curiosity about what archaeology could (and could not) tell us about this bleak but fascinating period and its ‘real’ impact on society and landscape. We were keen to marshal and interrogate the full range of available archaeological evidence, from individual artefacts such as weapons and coins through to entire landscapes, and conduct fresh fieldwork to explore on a range of sites — especially castles, siege castles and settlements.

What were you able to learn about this particularly turbulent period by taking an archaeological approach?

In terms of the big question for historians — whether we genuinely see ‘anarchy’ in mid-12th-century England, or whether revisionist views that downplay the levels of chaos and violence are vindicated — what did our work show? Anarchy in the UK or business as usual? Is it playing safe to say that the material evidence of archaeology shows a bit of both? On the one hand, everyday material culture, such as pottery for example, shows precious little evidence for any Anarchy-period ‘event horizon’ in the archaeological record, and there are signs that in certain spheres, such as sculpture for instance, this was a period of experimentation and investment in the arts. On the other hand, our mapping of conflict events and portable material culture, such as coin hoards, (which can be argued to provide an index of insecurity) show that in those areas of the country where it was focused, the conflict hit the landscape hard. The fortification of churches and even cathedrals (Hereford’s had catapults positioned on its tower!) was just one indication of how the rules of war were being stretched. The focus of conflict in the Thames Valley and Wessex also shows that this was not a struggle over peripheral or separatist regions, but for the very heartland of English kingship. But the area of life brought into the sharpest focus by the archaeology is the rise to prominence of local lords and the seigneurial image —not just through castle-building, but through investment in sculpture within parish churches and through an unprecedented boom in monastic foundation. As local lords made their mark on local landscapes, this was unmistakably a period of image-making as well as war-mongering.

 How do you think this book paves the way for further research into this period of history?

We hope that our project and book can help inform and even inspire the study of other conflicts in Britain and Europe. While battlefield archaeology is a booming area of research, this project has highlighted that archaeology can help reconstruct and understand other modes and methods of conflict, especially siege warfare. Whatever form future archaeological studies of the Anarchy take, it is hoped that our work provides a useful springboard either for further investigation of other castles, siege-works and settlements or, indeed for research in other, as yet unexplored areas.

Duncan W. Wright is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology and Heritage at Bishop Grosseteste University.
Oliver H. Creighton is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Exeter.

 

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History

The portrait of Frederick Douglass – In conversation with Celeste-Marie Bernier

February marks the bicentennial of the birth of Frederick Douglass. To celebrate this, we’re exploring the life of the compelling orator, abolitionist, and activist. Alongside the recent release of Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass 1818-2018, editor Celeste-Marie Bernier discusses the relationship Douglass perceived between activism, authorism, and artistry.

Celeste-Marie Bernier explores the life of Frederick Douglass further on the BBC ‘In Our Time’ podcast

Pictures and Power investigates Frederick Douglass as the subject of visual culture, could you tell us why you chose to focus on Douglass?

We edited this collection on Frederick Douglass in light of the fact that he is the most photographed American, black or white, in the nineteenth century. This collection came from a previous co-edited volume, Picturing Frederick Douglass, in which we gathered the entire archive of Douglass’ portraits. For Douglass, who was a formerly enslaved man, photography was a way to fight back against racist caricature and we wanted to do justice to the question in this collection of how art is a means to self-representation and to self-liberation.

The book is being published alongside the bicentenary of Douglass’ birth. How and why do you think work of Douglass is still impactful today?

Douglass as a figure is committed to social justice on the grounds that he held the belief that the fight for freedom had no colour, creed, nation, sex, or class. He lives on to teach us how to continue the fight for self-representation, for equality, and for human rights and his language has a power that lives on. Douglass was interested in what he described as writing as a power, and he also used images as a power. He found that through images he was able to speak and tell his story in different ways. For Douglass, the question of the fight for social justice is all about how you control your own self-representation, a notion that is still really pressing today in how you fight back with regards to white supremacy and police brutality. He’s was very much about grassroots campaigning which is at the heart of Black Lives Matter radicalism.

Did you find any of the images particularly striking or memorable?

Douglass’ view in creating his own image or portrait is a really powerful one. You see, across all of his images, his belief that the image is a touchstone not for his own self-representation but for the representation of enslaved people. Douglass, in his photographs and his portraits, is representing not an individual experience but the experiences of enslaved people generally. He spoke in an interview himself about how he was trying to show the inner via the outer man. His portraits are mesmerising and powerful because they captivate you with this pained, powerful, difficult expression and in that he is trying of speak to the suffering of those who didn’t survive slavery.

The book draws upon previously unseen archival material. How did you go about conducting your research? Did you learn anything particularly surprising from the unpublished material?

That there are SO many Douglasses! The book is really about the fact that we have Frederick Douglass, and we have the great myth, we have a great freedom fighter, we have the big American hero, but we also have the Frederick Douglass that is harder to find. He’s much more located in the life of Frederick Bailey (the name of Douglass when he was born into slavery). The big idea is that when you move from slavery to freedom you move into a new world of self-representation and liberation. Douglass’ archives and especially his unpublished archives show us that he took the traumatised self with him into freedom. A surprise of the archive is one letter in which he writes, I looked so ugly, I hated to see myself in the glass, they want no living for me. Douglass had a real struggle with his sense of his memory of slavery, and you see that pain of the memory of slavery in the photographs. That’s probably the most powerful experience in looking behind the myth of Frederick Douglass.

Why do you think this is the first book on Frederick Douglass? How do you think it will pave the way for further research into his life and work?

The big question in slavery studies is often historical, political, socio-cultural, and is rooted in bodies of evidence, finding historiographical proof and finding factual material. The life of Douglass, and thousands of enslaved individuals has often been located around finding the biographies of their lives, trying to establish the facts of their existence which are really difficult to find given that they live in enslaved records. The focus on discovering their narratives, stories and experiences means that there has been less attention on trying to understand their use of images and how they used visual culture to communicate their experiences. Increasingly, scholars are starting to do this, and our hope with the book was to create a body of work, essays by folks working across academia, activism, museums and archives and to include a large number of photographs so that people can go on and do closer readings and begin to sift through real detailed ideas of how he’s using photography.

Celeste will be giving talks on Douglass on the following dates:
Friday 23rd February – The Legislative Services Building, Annapolis Maryland
Sunday 25th February – The National Gallery of Art

Listen to Celeste-Marie Bernier discuss Frederick Douglass on BBC In Our Time

Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass 1818-2018 is the latest in our Liverpool Studies in International Slavery series.

Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor of Black Studies and Personal Chair in English Literature, University of Edinburgh. Her co-editor, Bill E. Lawson, is Emeritus, Distinguished Professor in Philosophy at the University of Memphis.

 

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