Creolization and Transatlantic Blackness

Charmaine A. Nelson is a Provost Professor of Art History in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. She is also the Director of the Slavery North Initiative which focuses on the study of Transatlantic Slavery in Canada and the US North. Nelson has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, and Black Canadian Studies. She has published eight books including The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (2016), and The Precariousness of Freedom: Slave Resistance as Experience, Process and Representation (2024).

Introduction: Expanding and Complicating the Concept of Creolization 1. Blackness and Lines of Beauty in the Eighteenth-Century Anglophone Atlantic World 2. ‘Concatenation’: Syncretism in the Life Cycle of David Drake’s Earthenware 3. ‘[A] tone of voice peculiar to New-England’: Fugitive Slave Advertisements and the Heterogeneity of Enslaved People of African Descent in Eighteenth-Century Quebec 4. Creolization on Screen: Guy Deslauriers’s The Middle Passage as Afro-Diasporic Discourse [Le passage du milieu] 5. Baskets of Rice: Creolization and Material Culture from West Africa to South Carolina’s Lowcountry 6. The Wages of Empire: American Inventions of Mixed-Race Identities and Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall (2012) 7. From Raw to Refined: Edouard Duval-Carrié’s Sugar Conventions (2013)