History Department Events Calendar
CGJS Talk: Bryan Cheyette, "Levi, Douglass and Slavery"
When: Wednesday, 30 April 2025, 4.15-6pm, followed by a drinks reception
Where: Oculus, OC 1.03
Abstract: In this talk, Professor Bryan Cheyette will bring together the memories and narratives of two groups of people who suffered under slavery: the victims of the slave plantations in the American south before the American Civil War; and those who underwent forced labour in the concentration camps in Europe. He will focus on two icons: Frederick Douglass, whose fugitive slave narratives are considered representative of the antebellum slave plantations in the American South; and Primo Levi, who described himself as a 鈥榮lave鈥� in Auschwitz-Monowitz, a forced labour satellite camp about four miles from the industrialized killing in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
This talk is called 鈥榙ecolonizing testimony鈥�, following the Nigerian Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka, who argues that the long history of testimony goes back to the transatlantic slave trade.
Bio: Bryan Cheyette is Emeritus Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Reading. His research interests include modernism and politics, fiction and ethnicity, postcolonial literature, theories of 鈥榬ace鈥� and modernity, and Holocaust testimony. His recent work connects the history of antisemitism with colonialism and anti-black racism. He is the editor or author of 11 books, including The Ghetto: A very short introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (Yale University Press, 2014). He is currently writing a concise history of testimony from slave narratives to refugee stories.