W.E.B. DeBois Lecture at Humboldt University

Can We Forget? A Memorial to Enslaved Laborers

The degradation, violence, and dehumanization of racialization threads through modernity—its subjectivities, social relations, politics, culture, capitalism, and built environment, especially within institutions like universities that order all of these formations. Mabel O. Wilson will explore how the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia engages the university’s hidden history of slavery. She shares how the memorial’s complicated design process and public dialogues wrestled with the legacy of anti-black racism in its remembrance of the pain of bondage and the dignity of this enslaved community. Her talk asks if commemoration can serve as a means of repair and care for those living in the slavery’s wake? Can one make spaces to remember those who were enslaved without, as Saidiya Hartman poignantly reminds us, recasting the violence of archival erasure?