Emancipation Day Virtual Session

YOU’RE VIRTUALLY INVITED!!! A live-stream presentation with Dr. Charmaine Nelson, Professor of Art History and a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at NSCAD University.   Please tune in and share with your networks as we continue our learning around Emancipation Day. Details below –

Date: Tuesday, August 10th

Time: 6:00 p.m. (ADT)

Location: Nova Scotia Culture Facebook page – www.facebook.com/novascotiaculture

She will discuss the complexity of slavery in Canada to help us comprehend what former enslaved people celebrated in 1834 with slavery’s demise in the British Empire. 

Have a question for Dr. Nelson? Drop in it the comments section on Facebook or send in advance to Aja Joshi at Aja.Joshi@novascotia.ca. #EmancipationDayNS

Day: Tuesday, August 10^th.

Time: 6:00pm (one hour)

Speaker: Dr. Charmaine Nelson, NSCAD

Host: Aja Joshi

Moderator: DeRico Symonds

Opening Remarks: Deputy of CCH

Title: An Introduction to Canadian and Nova Scotian Slavery

Summary:

As Nova Scotians and Canadians commemorate Emancipation Day on August 1st, 2021, it is important to pose the question – emancipation from what? Canadians are largely ignorant of any knowledge of Canadian Slavery because it is simply not a part of our normal curricula in grade school, high school, or higher education. Yet, the historical documentation of this two-hundred-year history under two empires (Britain and France) has been, for the most part, well preserved in various museums and archives across the country.

This talk contests our customary national celebration of the Underground Railroad (1834-1865) and the stories we tell ourselves about being “the good guys” who saved enslaved African Americans. Instead, it considers the nature, scale, and complexity of slavery in Nova Scotia and other parts of Canada in order to comprehend and appreciate what formerly enslaved people celebrated in 1834 with slavery’s demise in the British Empire.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Charmaine Nelsonis a Professor of Art History and a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University in Halifax where she is also the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery. Prior to this appointment she worked at McGill University (Montreal) for seventeen years (2003-2020) and at Western University for two (2001-2003).

Nelson has made ground-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 Subject in Nineteenth Century America (2007), Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (2016), and Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance (2018).

Nelson has given over 260 lectures, papers, and talks across Canada, and the USA, and in Mexico, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, the UK, Central America, and the Caribbean. She is also actively engaged with lay audiences through her media work including ABC, CBC, CTV, BBC One, and PBS. She blogs for the Huffington Post Canada and writes for The Walrus. Nelson has held several prestigious fellowships and appointments including a Caird Senior Research Fellowship, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK (2007) and a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, University of California – Santa Barbara (2010). She was recently the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University (2017-2018) and in 2021 she will be a fellow at Bard Graduate Center in New York City.