The Hunterian

Reconnecting objects and histories in the wake of colonialism

Thursday 28 October 2021
4.00pm - 5.30pm
Via Zoom - booking required

In this special online event for Black History Month, The Hunterian has invited a group made up of leading scholars, curators and filmmakers to reflect on the ways particular objects and materials reveal complex histories of colonialism.

Taking Jimmy Robert’s recent Hunterian exhibition Tobacco Flower as a point of departure, this roundtable event considers Glasgow’s relationship to the slave trade through goods such as cotton, linen, sugar and tobacco.

It will also draw out some key ideas from one of the inspirations for Tobacco Flower, the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, whose account of a ‘poetics of relation’ centred on Caribbean history offers a new way to understand how objects within a collection such as The Hunterian’s might interact and create meaning.

Contributors
Manthia Diawara (Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies, NYU)
Terri Geis (Visiting Associate Arts Professor, NYU Abu Dhabi)
Stephen Mullen (Research Associate in History, University of Glasgow)
Sally Tuckett (Senior Lecturer, History of Art, University of Glasgow)

Chair
Dominic Paterson (Curator of Contemporary Art, The Hunterian)

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First published: 18 October 2021