DAY 1: SEPTEMBER 18th 2019
13.30 Registration and coffee
14.15 Welcome and practical information by the conference organizers
14.30 Revisiting the Canon (Chair: Heather S. Nathans, Tufts University)
Sarah M.S. Pearsall (University of Cambridge) “Love and Slavery in Inkle and Yarico (1787)”
Peter Betjemann (Oregon State University) “Desublimating Slavery: Washington Allston’s Genre Paintings after Theatrical Sources, 1794-1800”
Samia AL-Shayban (King Saud University-Riyadh) “Tropicality and Indigenous Feminism perspective: Enslavement, Colonization of Land, Body, and Soul in Colman’s Inkle and Yarico”
16.00 Coffee
16.30 Keynote Address (Chair: Wendy-Lou Sutherland, New College Florida)
Douglas A. Jones, Jr. (Rutgers University) “A Genealogy of Blackface Minstrelsy: On Pleasures from the Black Below”
18.00 Reception in the garden
DAY 2: SEPTEMBER 19th 2019
9.30 Coffee
10.00 Theater and the Anti-Slavery Debate (Chair: Inge Brinkman, Ghent University)
Fredrik Thomasson (Uppsala University) “Theatre, Slavery and Abolition in Stockholm 1770s–1820s”
Sigrid G. Köhler (University of Tübingen) “Intertwining Journal Writing and Theater Aesthetics: The German Reception of the Transnational Abolition Movement”
11.00 Coffee
11.30 Interracial Relations and the Construction of Hierarchies (Chair: Douglas A. Jones, Jr., Rutgers University)
Wendy-Lou Sutherland (New College of Florida) “Race, Homosocial Desire, and the Black in Ernst Lorenz Rathlef’s Die Mohrinn zu Hamburg (1775)”
Mercy Vungthianmuang Guite (Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi) “Theatrical Representations of Slavery in Theodor Körner’s Toni (1812)”
12.30 Lunch at Boon
14.00 Staging Black Resistance? (Chair: Sigrid Köhler, University of Tübingen)
Sarah J. Adams (Ghent University) “Silencing the Rebels of Berbice: Dutch Slavery and Resistance in Nicolaas S. Van Winter’s Monzongo, of de Koningklyke slaaf (1774)”
Heather S. Nathans (Tufts University) “’Citizen Mungo’: Performing Freedom on French and American Stages, 1789-99”
CODA – Tendayi Sithole (University of South Africa) “Staging Charles Mingus Jazz: The Poetics of the Afterlife of Slavery”
15.30 Coffee
16.00 Artist Panel: Performance, Slavery and Decolonization Today (Chair: Margot Luyckfasseel, Ghent University)
Tunde Adefioye (Royal Theater of Flanders), Chokri Ben Chikha (Action Zoo Humain), and Yolanda Mpelé (independent theater and film actress)
17.30 Closing
19.00 Conference dinner at Pakhuis
DAY 3: SEPTEMBER 20th 2019
9.00 Coffee
9.30 Formulating Human Rights (Chair: Kornee van der Haven, Ghent University)
Frank Obenland (Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz) “‘Nature Made Us Equal’: Anti-Slavery Discourse on the Early American Stage”
Nikola Keller (University of Freiburg) “The Location of Slavery: Staged Islands and Abolitionist Conceptions of Ideal Societies in Marivaux’s L’ile des esclaves (1725) and Olympe de Gouges’ L’esclavage des noirs, ou le heureux naufrage (1789)”
Debra A. Ryals (Pensacola State College) “Susanna Rowson’s Janus Syndrome: Slaves in Algiers (1784) and Slavery in America”
11.00 Coffee
11.30 Outside the White Playhouse (Chair: Johan Verberckmoes, Catholic University Leuven)
Wayne Weaver (University of Cambridge) “Musical Acts and Attitudes to Slavery – Interrogating the Jamaican Stage c.1800”
Mariana França Soutto Mayor (University of São Paulo) “Slavery as a Part of the Scene: the Presence of Black and Mestizo Actors and Actresses in the House of Opera of Vila Rica at the end of Eighteenth-century”
12.30 Lunch at Boon
13.30 Closing words and coffee
15.00 Theater tour in Ghent by NTG (“Nederlands Toneel Gent”)
17.00 End of the conference