Blackness, Immobility, and Visibility in Europe 1600–1800: A New Collaborative Scholarly Resource at Journal 18

Presented by Zirwat Chowdhury (UCLA) and Louis Susunaga

Online event via Zoom

This event is free of charge, but you must register to attend in advance. All registrants will receive instructions via email after registering. Click he following link to register directly with Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_10g7QhMCQlG1eEr6ba4PgQ 

Responding in June 2020 to the rallying cries of Black Lives Matter amid conditions of a nearly universal lockdown from a global pandemic, Journal 18 invited its readers to contribute to a digital timeline chronicling the representation and regulation of black bodies in Europe, c. 1600–1800. The aim was to create a digital resource that could illuminate through the spatial proximities of a timeline, blackness as lived experience, representational conventions, and colonial category, tracing across its differentials the racialization of the purportedly universal freedom to cast breath, stretch one’s legs, move of one’s own will.

Zirwat Chowdhury is Assistant Professor of 18th- and 19th-Century European Art in the Department of Art History at UCLA. She also serves as Notes & Queries editor at Journal 18, an online, open access, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the art and culture of the long eighteenth century from around the globe. She will be joined by Louis Susunaga (Class of 2021), who is double-majoring in Art History and Political Science at UCLA. Susunaga served as the Research Assistant on this project, which is supported by the UCLA Dean of Humanities Discretionary Fund and the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies.

Image: Young Black Man Carrying a Bow, Hyacinthe Rigaud,1697, oil on canvas (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dunkerque). Image courtesy of wikimedia.org