DATE | TIME
18.03.2019 | 9:30 am

LOCAL
Room 1, CES | Alta - Coimbra, Portugal

FRAMEWORK
This initiative, within the doctoral programme on Heritage and with the collaboration of the project CROME and the doctoral programme "Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship", aimed to present the work of the historian Ana Lúcia Araújo, followed by a Q&A on the history of reparations of slavery in the long haul and from a global point of view. The conference was preceded by a roundtable discussion on "History and legacies of the colonial issue in Portuguese society", attended by CES researchers: Miguel Cardina, Bruno Sena Martins, Marta Araújo, Raquel Lima and José Pedro Monteiro. 

BIO NOTE
Ana Lúcia Araújo (Howard University)
I am a social and cultural historian, working on the history and public memory of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery and their social and cultural legacies. I was born and raised in Brazil. I completed a BA in Fine Arts in 1995 (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul) and an MA in History of Brazil in 1997 (Pontíficia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul). Trained as a historian and as an art historian, I obtained a PhD in Art History in 2004 (Université Laval, Canada) and a PhD in History and Social and Historical Anthropology (Université Laval and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in 2007.
In the last fifteen years, I authored and edited over ten books and published nearly fifty articles and chapters on these themes. I have lectured in English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, France, England, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, and South Africa. Currently, I am Professor of History at the historically black Howard University in the capital of the United States, Washington DC.
In 2017, I was honored to join the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project. I am also a proud member of the Editorial Board of the British journal Slavery and Abolition and of the Editorial  Board of Black Perspectives.  Currently, I am the editor of the book series Slavery: Past and Present, by Cambria Press and a member of the Executive Committee of the Brazilian Studies Association, the most important association of Brazilian studies in the world.
My most recent book is Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History. The book examines from a transnational perspective the history of the demands of reparations for slavery and the slave trade in the Americas, Europe, and Africa.
Over the last years, I published a number of books.  Brazil Through French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Artist in the Tropics (2015) is a revised, updated, and expanded English version of my book Romantisme tropical (2008). I explore the idea of “tropical romanticism,” a vision of Brazil with an emphasis on the exotic. I examine the travelogue Deux années au Brésil by the French artist François-Auguste Biard, by situating his work in the context of the European travel writing of the time. The book shows how representations of Brazil through French travelogues contributed and reinforced cultural stereotypes and ideas about race and race relations in Brazil.
My  book Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage and Slavery (2014) examines the processes that led to the memorialization of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the second half of the twentieth century. I explore numerous kinds of initiatives such as monuments, memorials, and museums as well as heritage sites. By connecting different projects developed in  Europe, Africa, and the Americas during the last two decades, I discuss how different groups and social actors have competed to occupy the public arena by associating the slave past with other human atrocities, especially the Holocaust. I look at how the populations of African descent, white elites, and national governments, very often carrying particular political agendas, appropriated the slave past by fighting to make it visible or conceal it in the public space of former slave societies.