20-21 September 2024 – Online and free
The conference will stream live on the Early Caribbean Society’s YouTube channel beginning with its initial premiere on 20-21 September 2024. Participants who have registered will receive a Zoom webinar link for the live events during the conference.
Global Equiano opens fresh conversations about enslaved and free Black people as they navigated spaces dominated by violent, colonial forces, and considers the Black Atlantic futures they imagined.
This event has been organized by Kerry Sinanan, Désha Osborne, Alex Milsom, and Kate Singer with support from the University of Winnipeg, The University of Edinburgh Futures Institute, Mount Holyoke College, Amherst College, and the Keats-Shelley Association of America.
Virtual Land Acknowledgement
In this virtual, global event, many of us are speaking and participating from colonized lands where Indigenous peoples have been subjected to genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced removal from the African Continent to Turtle Island. We acknowledge that these genocides are ongoing and that Indigenous, peoples continue to be removed from their lands and brutalized by the carceral state. Across Turtle Island, but also globally, policing, starvation, and deprivation remain systematic tools of settler colonialism.
We acknowledge the material benefits that accrue to us as scholars, writers, and artists from the dispossession of others. In a virtual world, Indigenous dispossession is still material: the very minerals that power our technologies are extracted via new forms of slavery, child slavery and genocide as we see in the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere. The cables and networks that connect us are also extensions of neocolonial power and are more frequently being used in the same way as borders to exclude and police. The very corporations that own the technologies we are using are often direct contributors to war, dispossession, and genocide.
In acknowledging this we commit to honouring and supporting movements of self-determination, and wellbeing , led by Indigenous guardians, stewards, and protectors of this land. Ultimately, we commit to work for, land back, which The Yellowhead Institute describes thus: “land back is about reclaiming Indigenous jurisdiction: breathing life into rights and responsibilities”.
Early Caribbean Society 