In this seminar Dr Christensen will examine a 1993 public art movement that took place in Sierra Leone as the country teetered on the edge of state collapse in the face of both a recent military coup and an incipient civil war.  Inspired by the successful coup and the expectation that the war’s end was imminent, the proponents of the arts movement believed that the conditions for the radical transformation of Sierra Leonean society were ripe.  For them, state collapse offered not so much a spectre of violence as it did an opportunity to radically reimagine (and re-image) citizenship and subjectivity in ways that might “renovate,” to use one artist’s language, the dreams of decolonization and the nation-state as the vehicle of liberty and security.  One of the primary sites where the different painters contested and worked out the contours of this future citizenship was in their rendering of the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, particularly the 1839 Amistad shipboard slave rebellion. Dr Christensen will explore some of the implications of the artists’ use of the history of trans-Atlantic slavery to image utopian collectivity and of the possibilities and limits of transnational identification as a means of decolonization generally.

Matthew Christensen is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas-Pan American, located on the U.S.-Mexico border, where he teaches African, postcolonial, and comparative world literature.  He is completing his first book, Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Rebellion, Black Transnationalism, and Modernity in Sierra Leone and the United States, which examines the cultural afterlives of the 1839 shipboard rebellion as it has been deployed to confront the legacies of Atlantic capitalism.