She continues, “​​If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.” This, Harman explains, “is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.” Since the publication of Hartman’s groundbreaking memoir, the phrase “afterlife of slavery” has been deployed across humanities fields to underscore the significant connection between periods before and after slavery. For its tenth anniversary annual conference, the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) invites individual and panel proposals that grapple with the history of slavery and its afterlives in the United States and throughout the broader African diaspora. Ongoing social, political, and cultural developments demand continued preservation, dissemination, and engagement with the experiences and ideas of African Americans and others across the African diaspora.

About Our Conference Theme

In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2008), historian and literary scholar Saidiya Hartman describes her personal quest to “reckon with the lives undone and obliterated in the making of human commodities.”