North American History and Institutions

History and Memory of U.S. Slavery
In the last decade, a growing conflict around history has emerged in the United States. In particular, anti-racist social movements like Black Lives Matter, in addition to demanding racial justice and the end of police violence, have started attacking traditional representations of the U.S. past as conveying an understanding of national history that concealed that concealed the oppression and erased the role of racial minorities.
Since the beginning, slavery has been at the center of this debate. In recent years, in fact, scholars, journalists and activists have been fostering a vision according to which slavery was not merely a paradox or a contradiction of American democracy, but its very foundation. In this view, slavery constituted a crucial, decisive element of U.S. history, which profoundly shaped its economic and political development, its institutional configuration, its constitutional framework, its social, racial and class relationships. The conservative reactions to this new narrative have triggered an ongoing debate over slavery and race that deeply intersects with contemporary conflicts of power in U.S. society.
In the attempt to better understand the meaning of contemporary conflicts over the U.S. past, this workshop will focus on the history and memory of U.S. slavery. In the first half, we will investigate the history of the enslavement of African Americans in the United States, analyzing how it was imposed, expanded, resisted and finally abolished. In the second half, we will study how the memory of slavery was perpetuated, falsified and represented after its abolition both by U.S. public discourse and by African Americans themselves through monuments, historiography, political thinking and popular culture. This second part will pay special attention to how the memory of slavery has been evolving between the late-nineteenth century and today in connection to U.S. social and political history.