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Jerome Branche in conversation with Marcus Wood: Exploding Archives (8 March 2023)

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

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Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, Professor Branche is a Leverhulme Visiting Professor in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Applied Linguistics at Birkbeck in 2022-23.

Marcus Wood is a painter, performance artist and film-maker. In 2003 he became Professor of English and Diaspora Studies at the University of Sussex, and since 2021 he has been Emeritus Professor.​

Marcus is currently working on a big project Exploding Archives: Meditations on Slavery, Brazil, America and the limits of cultural memory. The project will result in a monograph, various performances and installations and a film. This work fuses both the academic work and visual art which Marcus has been producing for over three decades on the subjects of Racism, Atlantic Slavery, and the lying construction of the crime of Slavery by the slave powers. This project is important for the following reasons. Firstly it violently denies the adequacy of the extant archive of slavery, and demands that we address ways of incorporating the records and art left by the cultural legacy of the slaves themselves. Secondly it demands the physical and ideological expansion of the parameters of slavery’s memory into syncretic religions of the Diaspora. Thirdly it exposes the falsity and bad fictions encoded within the extant Colonial archive of slavery. Wood’s new slavery archive warmly embraces pets, cooking, beads, dancing (batucada, jongo, samba, frevo) dolls, dried coprolites, wigs, walking sticks, Frederick Douglass thongs and boxers. This cultural gallimaufry exists outside what might be termed the proper, the paper, or the White Male archive. Exploding Archives is out to celebrate a new inclusive-anarcho-democratic-expanding-slavery-museum.

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Speakers
  • Dr Jerome Branche