Black Family Archives: Theorising on Death, Mourning and Discomfort

On 9 April, the workshop Black Family Archives: Theorising on Death, Mourning and Discomfort brings together Black Studies scholars at the University of Amsterdam, Jan Mendes, Nawal Mustafa, and Wigbertson Julian Isenia, with local Black feminist artist Camille Sapara Barton. It aims to examine questions of Black death, grief and mourning through methodologies that use familial narratives and oral histories as empirical materials to understand legacies of anti-Black racism.

During the programme, emotions are pursued as a lens by which the archival material of Black family histories can be explored and complicated, as part of meditating on contested terrains where hope and its absence are continuously theorised.

Mendes, Mustafa and Isenia examine what the Black refusal to hope amid relentless anti-Black racism entails, recasting what might be understood as hopelessness as a deliberate stance of resistance. Second, they scrutinise the selective rewriting or forgetting of histories steeped in and shaped by racialised violence and the enduring legacies of colonialism, slavery, and painful racial oppression.

By addressing Black death at the European borders – where the demarcations of space itself lay bare the lethal consequences of racialised mobility, exclusionary and restrictive migration policies, and historical amnesia – they explore the structural mechanisms that produce the conditions that might lead to the refusal to hope.

Register here.

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This event may be photographed and filmed. Kindly let us know in advance if you prefer not to have your picture taken.

Framer Framed is supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; Amsterdam Fund for the Arts; Municipality of Amsterdam; and VriendenLoterij Fonds.