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UID:event_1256@www.bgc.bard.edu
DTSTAMP:20260720T225942Z
DESCRIPTION:Charmaine A. Nelson will give a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on
  Tuesday\, May 4\, at 12:15 pm. Her talk is entitled “Joe the Pressman: Et
 hnicity\, Labor\, Literacy\, and Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Quebec S
 lavery.”Transatlantic slavery was built upon physical brutality. But it wa
 s also premised upon cultural prohibitions\, social deprivation\, and the 
 pervasive practice of overworking the enslaved\, sometimes to death (Ghach
 em\, 2012). The resulting lack of leisure time\, material impoverishment\,
  and prohibitions on literacy prevented the enslaved from documenting thei
 r own lives. Lamentably\, fugitive slave advertisements are today “the mos
 t detailed descriptions of the bodies of enslaved African Americans availa
 ble” (White and White\, 1995\, p. 49). This powerful assertion extends to 
 enslaved populations across the Americas\; particularly regions\, like Can
 ada\, where abolition predated photography. The fugitive slave archive whi
 ch the co-founder of the Quebec Gazette William Brown (five ads) and Quebe
 c City Sheriff James Shepherd (one ad) produced for the enslaved African-b
 orn man named Joe\, reveals the complex physical\, cultural\, and politica
 l dimensions of Canadian slavery which have yet to be fully explored. Thei
 r use of the printing press in Quebec City to hunt Joe—when he ran away mu
 ltiple times across at least nine years—aligns with its exploitation acros
 s the Americas and Europe as a tool to sustain slave owner power. By runni
 ng away\, Joe participated in a common form of slave resistance. But what 
 made Joe decidedly uncommon was his African birth in a province full of Bl
 ack Creoles (born in the Americas)\, the duration and frequency of his esc
 apes\, and the nature of his highly skilled labor as the bilingual pressma
 n (English and French) of Brown’s Quebec City printing shop. This talk wil
 l explore Joe’s life as an enslaved male in Quebec through the complex int
 ersecting lenses of his ethnicity\, labor\, literacy\, and resistance. Cha
 rmaine A. Nelson is a professor of art history and a Tier I Canada Researc
 h Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at N
 ova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University in Halifax\, Canad
 a where she is also the founding director of the first-ever institute focu
 sed on the study of Canadian slavery. Prior to this appointment she worked
  at McGill University (Montreal) for seventeen years. Nelson has made grou
 nd-breaking contributions to the fields of the visual culture of slavery\,
  race\, and representation\, and Black Canadian studies. She has published
  seven books including The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subj
 ect in Nineteenth-Century America (2007)\; Slavery\, Geography\, and Empir
 e in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (2016)\;
  and Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art\, Memory\, and Resistanc
 e (2018). She is actively engaged with lay audiences through her media wor
 k including ABC\, CBC\, CTV\, and City TV News\, The Boston Globe\, BBC On
 e “Fake or Fortune\,” and PBS “Finding your Roots.” She blogs for the Huff
 ington Post Canada and writes for The Walrus. In 2017\, she was the Willia
 m Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard Un
 iversity. This event will be held via Zoom. A link will be circulated to r
 egistrants by 10 am on the day of the event. This event will be live with 
 automatic captions.
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20210504T121500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20210504T131500
SUMMARY:Bard Graduate Center: Joe the Pressman
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