CorpseFlows, Part 2: Meanings and Movements of the Modern Dead in Sub-Saharan Africa, Iberia, and the Caribbean

Session Abstract

The second of two linked sessions, this panel explores the movements, treatments, and commemorations of dead bodies in nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe.   This panel examines the transcontinental cultural articulations created by the exhumation and transport of one of European imperialism’s “secular apostles” by his Swahili companions, the politically charged reburials of victims of the Spanish Civil War, the funereal choices of French Caribbean dissident intellectuals, and the treatment of the British imperial army’s Ugandan dead in the archival record.  The panel will thus consider the relations between historical meaning-making and contemporary memories, sensitivities and silences, in deciphering the implications of these histories for our contemporary historical debates.