Could you take your seats please?
Well good evening everyone and welcome. Thank you for joining
us this evening for our annual Black History Month lecture here
at the University of Oxford. My name is Tim Soutphommasane, I'm
Chief Diversity Officer here. I've been in post since January
this year and I'm so pleased to see so many of you joining us
for this evening's lecture by Dr Christienna Fryar. This is an
event organised by Oxford's BME Staff Network and the Equality
and Diversity Unit, with the support of the Mathematical
Institute. And what a great venue and spot to have our
annual lecture this evening. Black History Month is an
occasion to honour the contributions of black people
throughout history to British society and indeed to this
university. And if there's one message that people should take
out of this month, it is that black history is British
history.
This year has been poignant in light of the 75th anniversary of
the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush. As many of you would
know, the passengers of Windrush, most from the
Caribbean, were the first arrivals of many thousands of
Commonwealth citizens who helped rebuild the nation following the
end of the Second World War. It's been wonderful to see the
enormous range of events and activities that have taken place
across Oxford this past month, organised by staff
and students alike, and we culminate this month's
activities with with what will be a fascinating lecture from
Christienna. As I mentioned, this event is supported by the
Mathematical Institute at this venue. And I'd now like to ask
Professor Ian Hewitt to provide some words of welcome on behalf
of the department.
Thank you, Tim. Yeah, my name is Ian Hewitt, I'm Associate Head
of Department here in the Mathematical Institute. I'm also
the chair of our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
Committee. So it's my joy to give you a very warm welcome to
our building here today. We are really pleased to be able to
host this lecture as part of Black History Month,
and I'm really looking forward to tonight's talk. One of our
key priorities here in the Mathematical Institute is to
create a welcoming and supportive environment in which
all of our students and our staff can achieve their full
potential. And one of the ways that we're trying to do that is
by celebrating events such as Black History Month. And so it's
really great to see people here from our department, from across
the University, and from beyond the University.
I hope that you're able to stay afterwards, with the reception
outside, and take the chance to explore some of our building. We
are celebrating the 10th anniversary of this building
this term. It's a building that was created
to celebrate mathematics and to inspire new mathematics. And
there is all sorts of bits of mathematics tied up in the
design of this building that I won't bore you with [audience
laughter], but I can do that over a drink.
We've taken the opportunity of this 10th anniversary to
celebrate the people who work and study here, so you will also
see, if you wander around outside, a series of portraits
that we've commissioned to celebrate the diversity of
people who work and study here. So do take an opportunity to
look at that. We also have some intriguing pieces of geometrical
artwork, if that's more to your fancy.
I have one small piece of housekeeping. Having welcomed
you very much, I have to tell you how to leave [audience
laughter] in the event of a fire alarm. We follow the exit signs
either here or through the doors that you came through, and we
have to gather in the courtyard by the Triton fountain that you
may have come in past. We have one of the most beautiful muster
points in the university, and our building was practically
designed around it, but hopefully we won't need to do
that until much later.
So a warm welcome again. I'm going to hand back to Tim and
then look forward to the lecture. Thank you.
Thank you, Ian. And it is a magnificent building, and
there's lots of geometrical items of interest outside. So
I'm looking forward to that after the lecture. Very shortly
I'll be inviting Professor Rebekah Lee, Co-Chair of the BME
Staff Network, to introduce our lecturer for this evening. But
before that, I wanted to say a little bit about the
university's work on race equality, just to help set the
scene for this evening's event. About one year ago, the
University released its Race Equality Strategy, the result of
the work of the Race
Equality Task Force, which was chaired by Professors Patricia
Daley, Anne Trefethen and Martin Williams, and I'm pleased to see
Patricia and Anne here in the audience tonight. That strategy
outlined the University's commitment to being a diverse,
inclusive community that stands as a model for race equality in
society. As some of the objectives in that strategy
include engaging all members of the University community to
address racism, to tackle bullying and harassment, to
increase the proportions of black and minority ethnic staff
in senior academic, research and professional roles, to admit and
attract and retain students from all backgrounds, to create and
maintain a robust framework for leadership and coordination of
EDI, or equality, diversity and inclusion, it really is a
comprehensive strategy and a piece of work that has set the
foundations for the ambitions we have at the university on EDI.
And indeed, the creation of the post I now occupy emerged out of
the work of the task force, so I will be always singing
its praises [audience laughter]. I'm pleased to report that we
are making steady progress on race, equality and EDI. In 2023,
among other things, we established a new Joint
Committee on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, which is
responsible for overseeing efforts across the collegiate
University. So this marks a step change in our work in bringing
together the university and the colleges and and taking a
collegiate University approach. We've also created new fora
this year to build and strengthen our community around
EDI, including a termly EDI roundtable that brings together
senior leaders, EDI practitioners and champions and
students from across our collegiate University. We've
been piloting various new initiatives. Just a few weeks
ago, we ran a successful pilot student induction on EDI at a
number of colleges. This academic year, we'll also be
piloting a new online report and support tool for university
staff as part of our efforts to strengthen
our prevention of bullying and harassment. In addition, the
Equality and Diversity Unit, or EDU, will be working with
Central HR to investigate action on ethnicity gaps relating to
staff, as well as explore new leadership development work to
help us meet targets for representation of BME staff at
senior levels. And indeed, I'm pleased to say we are making
progress in improving the representation of racially
minoritised staff and students. We can take encouragement from
the increasing proportions of black
staff in posts across the university, not to mention the
higher rates of black undergraduate applicants and
admitted students from the UK. So we are working hard to
deliver on the race equality strategy and the broader EDI
agenda here. But there's still much, much more for us to do.
And as someone who was formerly Race Discrimination Commissioner
working on racial equality efforts in Australia,
I'm keenly aware of the challenge involved in achieving
cultural change on race. As much as we celebrate the rich
diversity within our collegiate University, we must also
continue to push ourselves to work harder and reflect on the
legacies of the past, and the ongoing challenge of realising
racial equality.
Which brings us to this evening's main event, and I'd
now like to invite Professor Rebekah Lee to introduce this
year's Black History Month Lecturer, Dr Christienna Fryar.
Rebekah.
Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Rebekah Lee. I'm
Associate Professor in African Studies, and I'm Co-Chair,
alongside Aprajita Verma, of the Black and Minority Ethnic Staff
Network. The BME Staff Network supports and advocates on behalf
of BME academic and professional services staff within the
collegiate University.
Black History Month is a time of contemplation, reflection, and
observance for our members, and
we mark the significant - we mark and reflect on the
significant contributions of many whose lives
have made a significant contribution to society, to this
university and to the histories around us. But it's also a time
to reflect on the work that is yet to be done.
Also, Black History Month for us is a time of memory work. And
memory work is work. It is labour,
and it's hard and difficult and sometimes unseen. So I think
about that. I want to turn to introducing Dr Christienna
Fryar. It is my honour and privilege to be able to say some
words about Christienna today. Christienna is a writer and
independent historian of Britain and the Caribbean. She hails
from Virginia in the United States and is a product of Duke
University, where she did her undergraduate studies, and
Princeton University, where she completed her PhD in History.
She's taught widely at universities in the United
States and the United Kingdom, including as being Associate
Professor in History at SUNY State University of New York,
Buffalo State. She was a lecturer in the history of
slavery and unfree labour at the University of Liverpool. Most
recently, she was in the History department at Goldsmiths,
University of London,
where she was lecturer in Black British History and, more
importantly, was the founding convener of the MA Black British
History, the first taught Masters programme of its kind in
the United Kingdom.
I was witness to Christienna's work at Goldsmiths.
She brought what I can only describe as a truly inspiring
combination of intellectual rigour and bravery, a deep sense
of ethics, and advocacy that black British history
could be and should be a collective endeavour. That it's
not just about intellectual discovery. It is also many acts
of empowerment involving history makers, history custodians, and
writers
and archives beyond, well beyond the academy. Christienna was
also an inspiring mentor of many, many young aspiring
historians of
black Britain.
And that work goes on.
Christienna is also
engaged in
many acts of empowerment outside the academy, and this is
testament to this kind of collectivity with which she
undertakes this intellectual endeavour. So, she was a BBC
Radio AHRC Next Generation Thinker. She has also been
involved in consulting, historical consulting very
widely at schools on curriculum development. She's a trustee of
the Black
Cultural Archives,
her principal preoccupation, from which we will benefit
today. She is currently writing her first book entitled
"Entangled Lands, a Caribbean History of Britain," which will
be published by Penguin Allen Lane.
In many ways, well, I'm positive this book will be an absolutely
seminal contribution. It will put the history of the Caribbean
at the heart of the making and the becoming of Britain. And in
so many ways this is a story that needs to be told. And so I
welcome Christienna to Oxford, and her talk is entitled "Ann
Pratt,
Mary Seacole, and Questioning British History.`' So thanks
very much [audience applause].
Thank you all so much. And thank you, Rebekah, for that very
generous introduction. Thank you to the BME Staff Network, the
Equality and Diversity Unit and the Mathematical Institute for
this invitation. And then thank you to all of you for being here
at 5:00 PM on [audience laughter], I mean, it is a
Tuesday, there's a work day, but it is also Halloween [audience
laughter]. So I appreciate the fact that you are all here, and
I hope that certainly in the Q&A, but even in the talk
itself,
this feels like a collective moment to sort of think about
history in hopefully some new ways. Before I start, I also
want to give a very brief content note just to indicate
that there will be a very brief but vague description of sexual
assault that will come towards the beginning of this of this
talk.
I'd like to begin by talking about two women.
Both women were mixed race Jamaican women living in the mid
19th century. Both also wrote and published narratives about
their lives. They connected briefly, although it is hard to
corroborate that connection. Certainly one of them knew of
the other. One is very well known, the other is not. One of
these women is considered by many people to be black, while
many of the much smaller group who know about the other have
assumed she was white. Most importantly, one of these women
is considered a crucial part of
black British history, and one of them is not.
Ann Pratt was born on an estate in western Jamaica in 1830, and
she was almost certainly the daughter of an enslaved woman.
Pratt was almost certainly herself born enslaved. And
you'll note that I'm speaking in near certainties here, and
although I am fully confident that Pratt was born into
enslavement, at the moment, the archival record is tricky to
interpret, her origins extremely obscured by her own account. And
so it took me nearly eight years before I felt confident stating
what I believe about her
birth. And I'll return to this later on.
In November 1859, when Pratt was in her late 20s, she was the
victim of a crime. Three men broke into her home and one of
them, "assaulted me personally and was guilty of a felonious
act, I being a lone and unprotected female." The
subsequent trial of the men turned against her, as she was
fined for hurling abusive language at one of her attackers
in the street. Pratt was distressed by the unexpected
judgement. She experienced convulsing fits and was briefly
deprived of her senses.
Police took her first to the local female prison where the
matron there asked if she would like to go to Kingston for
change of air. She agreed, but she did not really know exactly
what that meant. By January 1860, she had been sailed to
Kingston and she was admitted to the Kingston Lunatic Asylum.
When she was released from the facility in July 1860, she
published a pamphlet titled "Seven Months in the Kingston
Lunatic Asylum and What I Saw There."
She seems to have had considerable help producing the
text from the Kingston doctor Lewis Quier Bowerbank. Bowerbank
had spent the previous three years crusading against the grim
and deteriorating conditions in the Kingston Public Hospital,
which had joined the asylum.
Many in Jamaica believed that his grudge was personal. After
all, his first pamphlet on the subject came out a few weeks
after he had been rejected for a position as the hospital's
consulting surgeon. So probably the grudge was personal.
Ignored by most of the Jamaican medical community, Bowerbank
appealed to the Governor of Jamaica to no avail. And
actually the two of them really hated each other. And it comes
across in these documents. So much so that the Colonial Office
effectively told the governor to simmer down.
Then he travelled to London in 1859 to speak with the Secretary
of State for the colonies. And this too was unsuccessful.
Pratt's pamphlet, however, gave the long running scandal over
the hospital and asylum much needed leverage. She described
in vivid detail the excruciating abuse to which the women in the
asylum were subjected, and the pamphlet is a loosely
chronological account of her experiences. The nursing staff
teased, insulted, beat, dragged and humiliated patients. And the
asylum's Matron oversaw all of this and approved. They beat
patients with umbrellas, ropes, broomsticks or whatever was
within reach.
They stole patients' food, and possibly used it to feed the
Matron's pigs.
As relentless as this violence was - and I am sanitising it
here, something else I will discuss later on - Bowerbank had
essentially reported similar acts in his own campaigning, and
so this kind of violence wasn't enough to really move the
Colonial Office into action. Nor was the structural dereliction
of the site. Bowerbank had focused intently in his own
campaigning on the crumbling infrastructure, the cramped
quarters in which hospital and asylum patients lived, and the
sewage that flowed through the facilities.
There was one thing, however, that did alarm those who read
Pratt's pamphlet, and this concerned especially the
bureaucrats of the Colonial Office. And this was the
practise that came to be known as tanking.
Nurses would punish some of the women in the asylum by putting
them into the bathing tanks, which usually still held dirty
water from other inmates' baths. They would then hold them
underwater for several seconds, and repeatedly thrust the women
back under.
At least one woman died a few days after a tanking, and it
probably goes without saying, but I will still say it: The
parallels to waterboarding are perhaps quite clear.
"Seven Months" was powerful. It transformed a local controversy
into a much broader imperial scandal.
Suddenly the Colonial Office leaped into action, relatively
speaking, London bureaucrats began to ask informed questions
about asylum practises that demanded investigations, and
then used the findings from a Commission report as inspiration
for an empire wide questionnaire about colonial asylums. Ann
Pratt was responsible for changing imperial policy, albeit
very briefly. But she is mostly unknown.
Mary Seacole, on the other hand, is much better known.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1805, she described herself as a
Creole with a Scotch father. Seacole's mother, also described
by her daughter as Creole, ran a boarding house in Kingston and
was also a respected healer who used her trusted folk practises
to care for British soldiers stationed in the town.
Seacole seems to have learned techniques from her mother,
which she practised as a child.
As Seacole said herself in her autobiography, "Wonderful
Adventures of Mrs Seacole In Many Lands," she had an
affection for camp life, sympathy with the pomp, pride
and circumstance of glorious war, and a longing to travel.
She travelled to London, Panama and around the Caribbean Basin.
She put her medical skills to work during the 1850 cholera
epidemic in Jamaica and Panama, as well as the outbreak of
yellow fever in Jamaica in 1853.
Seacole is, of course, most known for the time she spent on
the Crimean War front. The British military rejected her
applications to join the British forces as a nurse several times,
and though it pained her to admit, she had to assume it was
because of her race.
Nevertheless, she funded her own trip to the Crimea, opened a
hotel and began feeding, housing and tending to British troops.
She published her autobiography in 1857 after she returned to
Britain.
I've been thinking about these two women together for some time
because of an interesting set of paragraphs in "Seven Months"
that I could not corroborate.
At one point, Pratt described the particular - one particular
patient at times received preferential treatment. "Mrs
Brannagan, as the sister of Mrs Seacole, was allowed a mattress
on her admission. They took away her shoes and stockings, also
her flannel, but she soon got them back. It was too evident
that the Crimean heroine influence was dreaded in this
place. The medical officers will sometimes condescend to go and
visit this inmate and will sit down and converse
with her. Seldom are the other patients housed - are the other
patients honoured with like favours. When Mrs Brannagan
first came in, she was placed in one of the cells, but was
subsequently removed to the sick house. When Mrs Seacole visits
her unfortunate sister, Mrs Ryan, the Matron I already
mentioned, is vastly polite and courteous, but her back turned.
The poor sufferer hears and sees and feels enough. When Mrs
Brannagan first came in,
Doctor Keech desired Night Nurse Danverson to tell myself that I
must not say anything about the treatment of the people before
Mrs Brannagan. Mrs Brannagan is allowed to remain in her room
all day if she thinks proper. Not so with the rest of us. We
must not go into the cells during the day."
So this is one of those snippets, that I'm sure actually
all historians have, where I didn't quite know what to make
of it. And so it was sitting in the back of my mind for some
time, and every now and then I would do a little bit of digging
on it. The problem was that I had a really difficult time
figuring out who Mrs Brannagan was, and exactly her
relationship to Mary Seacole. To my knowledge, Seacole had a
sister, Louisa, but Brannagan did not appear to be her married
name. So I wondered, maybe Pratt or Bowerbank
had heard Brannagan when it was instead Grant. This is not
uncommon.
And Grant was the maiden name of both Mary Seacole and Louisa. I
wondered if perhaps Mary - if perhaps Louisa had been
committed to the asylum under a pseudonym.
And I also couldn't figure out whether Mary Seacole was
actually back in Jamaica during the time in question.
A very recent biography of Seacole has actually begun to
answer some of these questions. According to Helen Rappaport,
the Mrs Brannagan in question was not Louisa but Seacole's
half-sister Amelia, of whom there is actually incredibly
faint traces in the archival record, which is why I was
having such trouble figuring this out. So Rappaport was doing
a biography of Seacole, and found the marriage record in
1843, at which Amelia the half sister was present. I was not
doing a biography of Mary
Seacole, and so did not come upon this piece of information.
But as I was struggling to piece this together and to figure out
what was going on, I began to think about these two women
together for a different reason. The specifics of this incident
became less significant to me than what the paragraphs
symbolised. Pratt and Bowerbank understood Seacole to be part of
the very same world as Pratt, both British subjects who were
part of the British world of which Jamaica was firmly a part.
Seacole is described here as having clout and authority that
everyone recognised,
as well, of course, as some expertise in this area. Her
sister reputedly got somewhat better treatment, and there was
fear that her sister might report what was happening inside
the facility.
So given that these two women were so much a part of the same
world that they were actually in the same building at a number of
points in 1860, I was wondering why Seacole is so clearly
understood to be British and part of black British history
while Ann Pratt is not. And to add to the puzzle,
these women have been racialised quite differently.
In Britain, Mary Seacole is understood to be black, which is
somewhat at odds with a tendency in the UK to consider mixed race
a separate category from black. And over the years I have heard
from students educated in primary and secondary schools in
this country that many did not actually know that Seacole was
mixed race because their teachers never allowed for that
possibility.
But Seacole is very clear on this point. She describes
herself and her mother as Creole. She never calls herself
black, at the same time as she describes many other people as
black throughout her autobiography. So it is clearly
a term that she uses and that she uses as a description of
skin colour, but she does not use it to describe herself. When
she describes the moment in her autobiography when the boys in
the street jeer at the complexions of her and a friend,
she says, "I am only a little brown,
a few shades duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire so
much. But my companion was very dark and a fair (if I can apply
the term to her) subject for their rude wit."
And when she described the rejections of her interest in
joining the Crimean War effort, she wrote, "Was it possible that
American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did
these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my
blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?"
These complexities, of course, do not move Seacole out of black
British history, but they are important nonetheless. They give
us rare insight into the ways a woman of African descent in the
Victorian era understood race and racialisation in a
historical context where too many still assume that race had
little salience.
By contrast, Ann Pratt is understood by many as neither
black nor British, and indeed confirming that she was of
African descent was was quite tricky because she never says
that she is, and I will return to this in a moment.
While Seacole is eager to establish herself as British,
Ann Pratt is unconcerned with national or colonial identities.
However, Pratt also knows that she is operating within a
British context. She insisted that her pamphlet be sent to
London, and others who read her pamphlet, like the son of a
former warden at the asylum, were also clear that part of
what made the treatment of the women in the asylum especially
unacceptable was the fact that it was happening in a British
colony.
So why is Seacole British and Pratt not? I'm gonna think
through this question with you all today by taking up a series
of ethical conundrums about the nature of writing history.
Because I believe that the answers to this question are
actually deeply knotted within the exclusions inherent in the
way British history is conceived and practised within this
country. It is not as simple as merely determining whether
Seacole or Pratt were British, whatever that term might have
meant to them or anyone else in the 1850s and 1860s.
But the ease with which historians write about them
differently, treat them differently, conceive of them
differently, suggests quite a lot about the ways that British
history has proceeded, ways, to my mind, that are wholly
insufficient for understanding either what happened in the
lives of these women or to understanding Britain itself.
Put simply, Pratt forced the Colonial Office to reflect in
1860. She should force us to reflect now. So let's begin that
reflection.
There's a problem I've been wrestling with for years. It's a
problem I suspect has no clear resolution because there are so
many important ethical imperatives that conflict within
it. It is also a problem for which my own thoughts will no
doubt constantly shift, and the ways I solve or handle it in one
moment may prove deeply dissatisfying to me at another.
You know, I think there is value in thinking through this
directly and out loud as a historian, because part of what
I am trying to insist is that being a historian
means sifting through certain ethical questions and reflecting
on how one solves them, perhaps even in writing, even though the
discipline's emphasis on narrative and story encourages
us to elide these issues. I think that's only a disciplinary
encouragement, it is not a requirement. Nor am I convinced
that if we pause within our own work to ask "what am I doing
here?"... That doesn't have to move us away from narrative or
story. And more pointedly, I think that this kind of writing
and thinking and wrestling
is especially essential within Britain, where the discipline of
history has developed within universities in ways that have
proved fundamentally unsuitable for certain kinds of historical
investigation.
And we're after a fleeting moment that we all recognised,
in which universities pretended to care about certain fields of
study and certain people, they are once again proving
themselves to be among the institutions most invested in
suppressing certain modes of history.
So let me move out of the abstract. The problem or
question that continues to leave me flummoxed is how to write
about extreme violence, the kind that Pratt witnessed and
experienced so much of. And the context in which I consider that
question, the history of slavery and emancipation, is also the
field where I believe the modes and practises of history within
British universities and academia are fundamentally ill
suited.
If you read deeply in the field of slavery studies, and for my
purposes today that is going to include comparative
emancipation, something stands out if you know what to look
for,
and that is that the history of slavery is researched and
written very differently in Britain than it is in the
Americas, regardless of the place under investigation.
Speaking in very general terms, historians of slavery based in
the Americas, again regardless of the region they study, tend
to be considerably more focused on and concerned with excavating
as much of the lives of enslaved people as possible.
I think there are a lot of explanations for this, some of
which are structural.
In the US in particular, social history emerged in the 1960s in
large part as a promising method for rewriting the history of
slavery itself so that it was centred around enslaved people.
And when social history emerged at the same time in Britain, it
was put to other purposes.
Second, there are so many more historians of African descent
working in universities across the Americas, Canada, the United
States, the Caribbean, Latin America. Well, we know, and
we've just heard, that the situation here in Britain is
especially dire.
Now, certainly black scholars are not the only scholars who
can do this work.
Among those leading the charge in the 1960s in the US were
Jewish scholars.
Yet it is also the case that black scholars are often more
tuned to what the absence of enslaved people looks like
within historical scholarship that should be ostensibly
dedicated to them.
Third, piercing together enslaved people's stories from a
severely compromised archive is very slow, painstaking, and
interdisciplinary work, and a lot of the structures around
promotion and hiring in this country make it impossible to do
that kind of slow, painstaking and interdisciplinary work. So
these are some of the structural explanations, but they also
combine with some other factors.
There seems to be a tendency to see slavery within British
history as primarily a matter of economics and trade. Since the
actual holding of human beings as slaves largely, though not
exclusively, happens thousands of miles away from this island,
there has been a temptation to see the aspects of slavery that
are part of British history as being solely economic or
commercial concerns first, and then, second abolition.
There is a geographic sleight of hand at work here,
and I think we also see this in the different ways that Pratt's
story and Seacole's story have been taken up.
Now, to be sure, I want to acknowledge that the
constitutional status of British colonies was a complex question
that changed over time. So I'm just going to stipulate that
here. But Britain's colonies in the Americas were British. They
saw themselves as British, or perhaps English - again it's
complicated - until 13 of them didn't.
White settlers in these colonies conducted themselves at least in
partial accordance with British laws, recognised the British
throne, expected representation within Parliament, even as they
insisted upon colonial legislatures, called upon the
British military for defence when necessary, travelled back
and forth as their resources allowed, and built country
estates, civic careers and family dynasties in Britain,
drawing on the power that their new wealth gave them. As
historians have noted in great detail, the British state itself
changed dramatically from the late 17th century
onward, because of the demands its growing empire placed upon
it. So we know that these places were British if we, you know,
put this whole picture together. And yet, when it comes to
slavery itself, not the trading relationships or the businesses
or the wealth, but the actual horrendous experience of being
enslaved in a British colony, suddenly that is beyond the
purview of British history and the slow methods required to eke
something, anything, out of documents whose entire purpose
was to render humans as goods, as livestock, and as assets.
Suddenly that slow
work has no place here unless it can be sped up.
But I don't think it can be sped up. And while there are many
reasons why, as Rebekah mentioned, I left academia in
April, among them was the deep realisation that I could not do
the research and writing that I wanted to do within the confines
of British academia. In other words, I am not willing to speed
this work up. And part of why I'm not willing to speed it up
is because writing about slavery requires a level of ethical care
that I'm not willing to compromise. Thinking through
this question of how to handle extreme violence will, I hope,
give some sense of that
ethical terrain. And then hopefully in the Q&A we can
discuss this a little bit further. And in particular, this
question of whether there is room for this work within
British academia right now, especially as we are seeing a
real backlash, a real post 2020 backlash ramping up nationally
and internationally.
So I found Ann Pratt's case in 2007 when I was doing
preliminary dissertation research, scoping out the
archives to see what kind of project I might be interested in
doing. And although this was an exciting discovery to me, I did
not actually discover this case. A few other scholars had written
about it or were writing about it. And in fact, this is the
only - working on this is the only moment in the archives, and
it's actually kind of
it's fine for me now, but at the time it was kind of a horrible
moment where actually my - I was at the National Archives. I went
back after lunch to retrieve the bundle that I was working on,
and it had been removed from my cubicle because there was
another scholar using it. Of course, we then had to do the
thing of talking over coffee, as though this was not, like,
personally devastating to me [audience laughter]. It all
worked out. But this is the only time that this has actually
happened.
But what I came later to realise is that although there were a
few scholars working on Ann Pratt's case, there was actually
some uncertainty about her race. Now in some senses, perhaps her
racialisation didn't matter. My reading of the documents doesn't
suggest that Colonial Office bureaucrats responded in the way
that she did because she wasn't white. Nor have I seen anything
to suggest that they even gave her race much thought. Certainly
many of the patients that Bowerbank had been advocating
for were black,
and his pleas were ignored. And something that I've argued
elsewhere is that this scandal came at a particular moment when
people of African descent in the Caribbean were falling out of
the groups which British imperial supporters believed
were due the protection of the realm.
So in that sense, the fact that it had been a woman who was
almost certainly of African descent who had experienced such
violence, doesn't seem to have had any bearing on Colonial
Office decision making.
It's - except that it mattered to me.
And ultimately, I think it matters to how we understand
this series of events.
For those of us who study the history of slavery and
emancipation in the British Caribbean, we do not have nearly
as much direct testimony from black people as we would like.
There are far fewer slave narratives.
There's certainly no equivalent to the Works Progress
Administration interviews - and for those of you who aren't
familiar with that, this is a body of interviews conducted in
the 1930s as part of the New Deal in the United States, in
which interviewers travelled around the entire United States
south interviewing elderly African American people and
learning about their childhoods in slavery. This is just a an
incredibly rich set of materials that historians of the United
States have to work with. There is no equivalent
in the - for the British Caribbean.
Whereas enslaved people in Spanish America and Brazil were
able to testify in church courts, and some of their
testimonies are found there,
enslaved people in British colonies had no legal personhood
and were only rarely allowed to serve as witnesses. And often
when they did serve as witnesses, it was usually in the
aftermath of uprisings and conspiracies. Which means that
these materials are particularly fraught to interpret because of
the levels of coercion that likely went into their
production. So to have a text, one that followed the kind of
genre conventions of a slave narrative written by a woman
whose heritage was unclear,
that to me needed more investigation.
And one of the difficulties about writing, or one of the
difficulties of writing about post emancipation Jamaica in the
19th century is that at times there actually surprisingly few
racial descriptors. And to this point I have not found a clear
description of Pratt. And of course this is before
photographs are a common thing, so there's no photo of her
either.
Of course it is an important practise to get out of, to
assume that without a racial descriptor that a person is
white. But I also had reason to believe that Pratt was not
black, at least as the term was understood in 1860s Jamaica.
But if she was of African descent, the implications were
significant.
The possibility loomed that a woman of African descent had
fundamentally, if briefly, transformed health policy across
the British Empire. It also mattered if during her life
Pratt had moved in and out of freedom more than one time:
possibly born unfree, and then experiencing incarceration in
the asylum. And it definitely mattered if her pamphlet was one
of a long line of narratives, and in particular slave and post
slavery narratives, a hallmark of which is the extent to which
they detail.
violence.
So how should we be writing about the violence inherent in
Atlantic slavery and the various compromised freedoms that came
after slavery, whether ethnic cleansing in Latin America, Jim
Crow in the United States south, or indentured immigration and
widespread degradation across the Caribbean?
As I think about this question, there are several competing
imperatives, some of which I think scholars have discussed
quite extensively, and others less so. I list them here in no
particular order.
First, the imperative to piece together and relay what happened
in the past in as much concrete detail as possible. Second, the
need to explain why slavery - why exactly slavery and
emancipation were such horrendous violations, out of
step with a past historical context that was admittedly
brutally violent. And I think a lot of times when we talk about
this, the obvious reference point is the Royal Navy or the
Merchant Marine, which similarly had very little regard for
bodily integrity,
and that were incredibly violent institutions. But we see slavery
and emancipation as being out of step even within that context.
A third imperative is the need to treat even deceased
historical actors with dignity. I think there are some fields
that think about this quite a lot, and others not as much.
Fourth, the knowledge that oftentimes the only time
enslaved people and free people emerge as named people in the
archives with stories to tell, even brief stories to tell, is
because of a moment of unusual violence or brutality recorded
for posterity.
The literary critic and historian Saidiya Hartman
explained this dynamic in one of her articles,
and she writes, "An act of chance or disaster produced a
divergence or an aberration from the expected unusual course of
invisibility, and catapulted the black woman from the underground
to the surface of discourse. We stumble upon her in exorbitant
circumstances that yield no picture of the everyday, no
pathway to her thoughts, no glimpse of the vulnerability of
her face, or of what looking at such a face might demand."
Hartman then goes on to note how, despite how little we can
know about enslaved women in these circumstances, they must
nonetheless stand in for the experience of enslaved people
more broadly.
"Yet the exorbitant must be rendered exemplary or typical,
in order that her life provides a window onto the lives of the
enslaved in general. So these instances of violence are both
often the only thing we have for a single individual's life, and
must stand in for the whole experience of enslavement, and
in doing so, we end up repeating and repeating and repeating
these instances."
A fifth imperative is the need to avoid prurience. The line is
incredibly thin between relaying and revelling, between stating
what is necessary to understand the historical dynamics and
hoping to draw out a visceral reaction of some kind in the
audience.
And then there's a sixth imperative, and that is the
imperative to treat as precious every time an enslaved person
shows up with a name and a story. Here I think about the
work of a colleague, Randy Browne, who wrote the book
"Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean."
Browne's work is different because he mined the rarely used
archives of 19th century Berbice, and Berbice had been a
Dutch colony until the until 1792, and under the Dutch legal
system, enslaved people had some legal rights and could testify
in certain legal proceedings.
So the British, when they took over Berbice, continued this
system in Berbice alone, which means that these records are
especially detailed and provide far more insight into enslaved
people's lives than is typical in the British Caribbean world.
But especially notable is an entry in the index of "Surviving
Slavery." Under the category of "enslaved people," Browne lists
every single named enslaved person whose story he tells, no
matter how briefly, in the book. This list runs on for nearly two
full columns in
very small font, and there are surely at least 100 names in the
entry. And so I think there is a care here that is guided by a
particular set of ethics, that every single person he mentions
deserves to be findable in the index itself.
Seven. The importance of rejecting the idea that black
history broadly, but the history of slavery specifically, is
solely a recounting of death, even as names more often than
not emerge out of the archive in the context of violence and
death.
Several years ago I faced a truly difficult moment as a
teacher that crystallised for me some of this problem.
I was teaching a class on the early modern Caribbean and it
was a very small undergraduate summer, although I recognise at
Oxford that is probably par for the course. But at this
institution in western New York, it was not par for the course to
be teaching two students [audience laughter].
They're actually wonderful students. So it was a really
good environment. It was not typical. And toward the end of
the semester we got to the 18th century. I'd started in 1491,
let's say, and then the semester was ending in the 18th century.
And I had assigned Vincent Brown's book "The Reaper's
Garden," which examines 18th century Jamaica through the lens
of death, both in terms of the violence of slavery, the dire
disease climate of the island, but also - and this is what I
thought was so powerful about the book and important, the
spiritual practises that
enslaved people developed to see the dead off to their final
resting place. And for a number of reasons, I probably wouldn't
assign this book now, but that was the sort of logic to my
selection.
Unfortunately, the very week we were supposed to read and
discuss this work, the only other black professor in the
department died very suddenly and in terrible circumstances
that I will not relay, given my thoughts here about how we
handle this material.
All three of us struggled to handle this book during that
week.
The past was all too present, and the psychological toll of
processing the implications of so much death in the past, while
suddenly grieving a beloved professor and colleague in the
present was too much. And I think it's probably the only
time in my career that I actually just cut the reading
for the rest of the week.
And that leads me to my final imperative or consideration,
which is the way that the spectacle of black death or near
death seems to be required proof of the extent to which white
supremacy and racism are societal scourges that need to
be rooted out.
Western cultures seem able to process the terrible legacies of
slavery and racism only if there has been a spectacular death or
near death, especially if there is video of it. From Rodney King
to George Floyd, what seems to spark social conscience is video
footage of black men dying or nearly dying. And this is an
impulse to question. I think we have to question that
politically first. What does it mean for so many organisations,
especially in this country, to preface the reckonings that they
have
undertaken by invoking George Floyd's death?
What does it say that a British organisation in particular
requires the death of a black man on another continent to
understand its own complicity in or benefit derived from Atlantic
slavery?
But there is a historical question here as well.
To what extent does a similar impulse motivate historical
work? Do we include violence beyond what is necessary? And of
course, necessary is a very fluid idea.
But do we do that so that we can prove that slavery was an evil
atrocity? And if we do, whose needs are we prioritising - ours
in the present? And if we are prioritising those, then what
responsibilities do we have to historical actors amid our
operating as historians in the present, still marred by the
legacies of this atrocity?
These are not new questions. To return to Saidiya Hartman again:
in 1997, she opened her book "Scenes of Subjection" by
refusing to include the scene in which Frederick Douglass
recounted the violent beating of his Aunt Hester. And she neither
reprints his words, nor does she describe it in her own words,
and she explains her choice.
And long before Hartman, Mary Prince was also struck by this
dilemma in her own narrative, "The History of Mary Prince,"
published in London in 1831.
After retelling the exceptionally horrifying
treatment of an elder in the salt ponds of Grand Turk Island,
she paused and reflected.
"Oh, the horrors of slavery. How the thought of it pains my
heart. But the truth ought to be told of it, and what my eyes
have seen, I think it is my duty to relate, for few people in
England know what slavery is. I have been a slave. I have felt
what a slave feels, and I know what a slave knows. And I would
have all the good people in England to know it too, that
they may break our chains and set us free."
Prince felt a responsibility or duty to relate what she had
seen, what she had felt, and what she knew because she had
been enslaved.
So I have come to think of these ethical challenges as a call to
some form of responsibility, but from the comfortable distance of
the 21st century, what is our responsibility or duty? Is it
the same as that which Prince outlined for herself, even
though we have neither felt, nor seen, nor known intimately what
slavery was?
And in the time that I have left, I want to think a little
bit more about this question of my responsibility to two of the
women whose stories I have worked with in my own research.
So I will return again to Ann Pratt.
I felt a responsibility to figure out her race.
I knew from the way that people wrote about her - wrote about
her in particular while trying to discredit her testimony -
that she was not black in the way the term was used in 19th
century Jamaica. One official claimed that Miss Pratt, "has
for years past born the character of a prostitute, has
had connection with black men and had children the result of
promiscuous intercourse, two of whom are now alive." And it's
clear from the way that "black men" is invoked there, that this
was a way to damn her character. And of course, that insult
does not work if she herself is black, as in the terminology of
the day. Yet for a reason I couldn't initially pin down, the
conclusion that she was white also did not seem to sit well
with what I was reading in her narrative.
Eventually I kept poring over the first page of her pamphlet.
And I'll read it. I'll read that first paragraph for you.
"I was born in the parish of Hanover, on Paradise Estate, in
the year 1830.
I was the daughter of John Pratt, long and well known as a
grocery storekeeper, in the town of Lucea. I was placed, when
about six years of age, under the care of Joshua Heywood,
Esquire, a late magistrate of Hanover – while under his care,
I attended the Mico School, then under the care of Edmond Wilson,
teacher in the town of Lucea."
Now, initially, this extract doesn't seem especially
promising. It doesn't seem to tell us a lot about her race,
but I kept puzzling over it until I made sense of it.
The first line is important.
"I was born in the parish of Hanover on Paradise Estate in
the year 1830." So Pratt was born on this date during the
final years of slavery, which in Jamaica ended in 1834. Now,
alone, that opened up some possibilities, but it isn't
anywhere close to being definitive, because there were
many white children who could have been born on estates,
children of drivers, of overseers, and of course,
children to slave owners and plantation estates themselves.
So in this statement and elsewhere in the pamphlet, I
noticed that Pratt was distancing herself from both of
her parents, but in very different ways.
John Pratt, the Lucea shopkeeper, is mentioned only
this once in the entire pamphlet, and she does not call
him her father.
Later in the text, she refers to her mother also only once, but
here she does not give her mother's name, and instead
refers to her as "my mother."
Her mother seems to have been a continuing presence in her life.
Pratt wrote, "After some years’ residence with Mr. Heywood, I
went home to my mother, with whom I resided for some time.
After which, in 1859, I left her, and went to live at Barbary
Hill." So although here too we don't have any clear racial
descriptors of her parents, we do have a situation in which she
seems to distance herself from them in ways that were helping
me build a picture of what might be going on here.
Her father did not live on that estate. She gave us his first
name and his last name, his occupation and the implication
that he lived in town and was not a steady presence in her
life. And although she does not give us her mother's name, there
is a sense of a more intimate and constant relationship, and
the implication is that her mother lived, at the time of her
birth, on that estate. So I was beginning to suspect that her
mother was possibly an enslaved woman in 1830. But still, that
wasn't definitive.
It was the final sentence in that paragraph that I had to
investigate, and it held the final clues.
"I was placed, when about six years of age, under the care of
Joshua Heywood, Esquire, a late magistrate of Hanover – while
under his care, I attended the Mico School, then under the care
of Edmond Wilson, teacher in the town of Lucea." And as I read
this, the frequency of the word "care" is something that is
playing in my mind as something to think about more.
Magistrate Hayward's appearance added more weight to my
suspicion that not only was Pratt mixed race, but that she
had been born enslaved herself.
Pratt would have been six in 1836, which was in the middle of
the Apprenticeship period across much of the British Caribbean.
Created as part of Parliament's 1833 Abolition Act,
Apprenticeship was designed as a four year, four to six year
transitional labour system that would, in theory, train masters
to become employers. And I want to be very clear that I do not
buy this language, but this is the language that was used in
the documents. So it would train masters to become employers, and
it would train formerly enslaved people to become wage labourers
by forcing them to continue working on plantations without
any wages [audience laughter].
For the first 40.5 hours in a given week, an apprentice
received no payment for work, and any subsequent work that
they did after was again, in theory, supposed to be paid. And
here's the critical part. The Abolition Act freed children who
were younger than six in 1834 automatically, and Pratt would
have been three or four when the Act took effect.
But the Act made no provision for these children's care, and
so for this reason many parents sent their children to live in
towns with friends or relatives. It is possible that Haywood took
in Pratt while her mother remained an apprentice, at least
until 1838, when the system was abolished two years early.
And then finally the school was the strongest indication that
Pratt had once been enslaved. She attended a Mico school,
which was a set of schools established to educate
emancipated children. And I should say here that part of
what took me so long to figure this out is that the scholarship
on the Mico schools is actually incredibly dated. Not in a way
that the scholarship is bad, but it's just scholarship from the
1930s and the 1970s, and there hasn't been much subsequently.
So that is part of why I was struggling to figure out what
was going on with that school.
It was important for me to take the time to keep coming back to
this.
From the time I first read Ann Pratt's narrative to the moment
that I was comfortable describing in print
that Ann Pratt was mixed race and had been born enslaved, that
took nine years.
And again, as I said, it wasn't important because I thought her
race and her treatment received in the asylum was what gave her
pamphlet political power to those who read it at the time.
It was important because I needed to know if this was yet
another example of Saidiya Hartman's "exorbitant
circumstances," in which a formerly enslaved woman, her
story, her words, her life, only surfaced because of the violence
visited upon her. It was. And so I have taken some care in how I
am speaking about her today.
Do you need to know more about that violence? Is this story
less resonant because I have not included all of the details of
what she experienced and witnessed between January and
July 1860?
Should I be required to say more than I already have to make a
convincing case about the horrors of this institution?
And if I do have to say more, what does it say that I have to
endlessly rehearse, in talks and in writings, her agonies and the
agonies of those who died in this foul institution?
For me, this all feels like a trap. There is so much personal,
institutional, and governmental investment in the idea that
slavery was unfortunate and a blot, but perhaps not one of the
worst atrocities in world history, or a profound and
irreparable moral crime and abomination. Shifting public
understanding seems to require constant rehearsing of violence.
Yet why should the absolute worst moments of people, of the
lives of people in the past, be forever instrumentalised for the
purposes of
winning this argument? And if there is an emerging idea that
even the dead still deserve some measure of privacy, should that
not include enslaved people, even if that then means we are
even more limited in what we can write about?
To be sure, I don't think this is the only way to think about
these questions, and I'd love to hear in the Q&A what other
people think about how we might balance this.
And I'm also aware that I am now able to puzzle over this as long
as I want to, and solve it however I see fit, precisely
because I am no longer a university academic. I think
that's unfortunate, that I now feel so much more freedom to
ponder over the way that I write about history now that I've left
academia, because academia is supposed to be a place where
intellectual exploration flourishes.
Recently I learned about guarantees of non-repetition
that are enshrined in the UN's 2006 Guidelines on the Right to
a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of
International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of
International Humanitarian Law. And these guidelines broadly
form some of the legal framework for reparations activists
focused on Atlantic slavery. Within them is this principle of
guarantees of non-repetition, which in effect means that
reparative work after atrocities and conflicts
must be done in the spirit of ensuring not only that such
events do not happen again, but that the reparative or
restitution work itself does not continue to traffic in the
principles and practises that allowed the atrocity to happen
in the first place.
And so in the resolution, this typically means things like
establishing civilian control over militaries, ensuring
adherence to international laws and norms, providing human
rights training to law enforcement and military forces,
among other things.
But I think there could be implications here for historical
work. Are we inadvertently continuing to traffic in the
thinking that allowed Europeans to turn Africans into
commodities, that saw such severe violence as a standard
facet of society? In other words, can non-repetition become
one of the imperatives within which historians of slavery and
emancipation work, and should it?
So I'll end this evening with a final story of responsibility.
In 1850, Nanny Johnston, a 50 year old black woman, was living
in Port Royal, Jamaica. Once the chief port, pirate haunt and
raucous hub of Jamaican social life, Port Royal was, more than
150 years after a devastating earthquake in 1692, a small town
across the harbour from Kingston.
It was a place that contemporaries described as
small and cramped and filthy, and her home, which was near the
beach, was in an area that some local dignitaries deemed among
the town's worst.
Mary Seacole briefly mentioned Dolly Johnston in her 1857
autobiography, and I think this suggests that Johnston was
apparently well known in her community. As a washerwoman.
Johnston did laundry for some of the Royal Navy ships that were
docked in the town.
On October 3rd she picked up laundry from the HMS Bermuda,
which she spent the next two days washing out in the sun.
On October 6th, she took a Sabbath rest.
That evening, however, she fell deathly ill. The doctor who saw
her the next morning immediately recognised her symptoms. But she
died that afternoon, October 7th, the first person to
officially die of cholera in Jamaica.
Over the next 15 months, cholera spread across the island,
killing perhaps as many as 40,000 people by the end of
1851, the vast majority of them black.
And across much of the archives, the deaths of all of these black
Jamaicans were described by government officials first and
foremost as a labour problem. And I think of course, now here
we are in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I think
we're all like, quite familiar with the ways that pandemics are
quickly shifted into discussing labour and the morality of work.
Nanny Johnston stands out in my mind for another reason.
A decade ago, I published my first academic journal article
about this cholera epidemic, and I misspelled her last name in
the very first sentence.
It was an unintentional mistake, somewhere between a typo and the
fact that there are actually a number of spellings of her name
across various documents and scholarship. But it stayed with
me and probably first brought me to this question of
responsibility.
I think as historians of slavery and emancipation, we do tend to
think a lot about the duty that we have to the people we write
about, especially those of us whose ancestors, like mine, were
enslaved. When the black working poor appear as individuals with
names and personal details and lives and families in 19th
century government documents, I feel the historian's impulse to
share their stories.
But did they, did Nanny Johnston, intend for the scant
recorded details of their life to be picked over and curated
for a historian's anecdote, which is something that I've
just done?
And if I have, in this instance, recovered some black history
from British archives, have I done so at the expense of
treating people in the past who were exploited in life with
dignity after their death? Again, I continue to think about
how widely that video of George Floyd's gruesome death in
Minneapolis circulated. And for what it's worth, I have not
watched it and never intend to.
For those who needed it, the video of his final moments has
served as proof of systemic police brutality. But its viral
replication, with what surely must at this point be billions
of views, is itself a form of violation. So I'll end here by
asking again, what are our responsibilities to those whose
lives and deaths were marked by state violence? And what else do
I personally owe Nanny Johnston? Here I have left out most of the
details of her agonising death, because that seemed like too
much
of a violation. For now, though, they are still in my book
manuscript. But perhaps they should not stay. Thank you
[audience applause].
Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Christienna. What a rich
lecture.
And I was particularly struck, Christienna, listening to your
observations about society's periodic rehearsal
of the spectacle of black deaths and near deaths, and hearing
about your own wrestling with questions of responsibility as a
scholar.
In so much of our work on equality, we speak of the
imperative of ensuring that everyone enjoys equal dignity
and respect.
In your lecture tonight, you've reminded us that dignity and
respect is also something we owe to the dead,
particularly those deprived of those things in their lifetime.
And more broadly, you've challenged us, I think, tonight,
to confront aspects of scholarship and society that may
well be uncomfortable.
But as many of us would agree, I hope, discomfort is often a
prerequisite of societal progress. So thank you,
Christienna, for challenging us to think about our ethical
responsibilities when dealing with history and race. And thank
you for challenging us as well to continue the conversations
we've had this month. And tonight, very shortly, I'll
invite you to join us in having refreshments outside where we
can continue those
conversations. But before we adjourn, can I offer a few thank
yous to Ian Hewitt, Ali Goodall and Linda Austin here at the
Mathematical Institute. And to Rebekah Lee, Aprajita Verma
who's not here tonight because she's feeling unwell, and the
co-chairs of the BME Staff Network. Also to Lauren Gale,
Vanessa Worthington and the many others over the years who have
built this annual lecture into an institution. And last but not
least,
a big thank you to Marilyn Verghis from the EDU, who has
been the linchpin of the efforts in organising this year's
lecture and making it a great success. And finally, once
again, will you all join me in thanking Dr Christienna Fryar
for a sensational Black History Month lecture. Christienna,
thank you.
[audience applause]
The applause speaks for itself. That brings to an end our
formalities. But please do join us for refreshments outside and
admire the immense geometric pleasures of the Mathematical
Institute.