Alan Rice (University of Central Lancashire) and Fionnghuala Sweeney (University of Liverpool) organised a three-day symposium focussed on the legacy of the 150th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s second tour of Great Britain and Ireland, along with similar tours made by other African American abolitionist speakers during the 1850s. Participants included academic researchers from institutions throughout Great Britain, Ireland, the United States and Canada, along with independent scholars and archivists. The English Subject Centre sponsored a panel which opened the symposium and the large attendance and spirited debate showed how excited folk were about pedagogic debates in the teaching of black Atlantic literature, history and culture. The panel was truly transnational and interdisciplinary.
Bill Lawson (University of Memphis) kicked the session off with his paper, ’Teaching Social and Political Philosophy and Teaching about Frederick Douglass’ about the way Douglass can be taught in the context of social and political philosophy to give students a wide variety of interesting ideas that critique American constitutional verities from a subaltern perspective. Douglass’s pragmatic and radical ideas are clearly defined and make political philosophy easy for students by the use of dynamic similes and metaphors. Lawson outlined the way Douglass is used in the curricula in Philosophy, Political Science as well as in the more traditional spheres of history and literature.
Keith Hughes (University of Edinburgh) used his paper, ’Practical Approaches to Teaching the Black Atlantic through the work and Life of Frederick Douglass’ to discuss how Douglass is an extremely useful figure to teach, in a Scottish and Transatlantic context, as his highly charged visit to Scotland in 1846 established a pattern of radical interventions by African American visitors that was to be followed by Paul Robeson in the 20th-century. Hughes outlined how his courses use vernacular literatures from Scotland, including Irvine Welsh and James Kelman in contradistinction to modern African American vernacular writers such as Chester Himes to create Transnational courses that establish ‘minority’ writers as actually central to Transatlantic literary discourse.
Alan Rice rounded off the session with approaches to ’Commemorating Abolition in the Classroom through Drama and Dummy Curating’. Rice highlighted the way that new developments in British academia around employability and research-informed teaching means there are sometimes resources for students to do live project work in the field of Transnational Black Studies. He discussed innovative pedagogic techniques such as dummy curating (students in teams curating an exhibition in a time-limited experiment) and demonstrated his dramatic tableau of the slave trade that foregrounds inquiry-based learning. He outlined the way his Commemorating Abolition module enables him to lead field studies to museums and archives for students who then produce projects which use primary documents. His students helped at the conference and displayed their final posters, which included new materials on Henry Box Brown, an abolitionist activist, that were not familiar to any of the experts present.
Alan Rice
University of Central Lancashire
Gary Cape
The University of Stirling
