Friday Seminar with Emma Christopher and Bryce Beemer

This week, our guests Emma Christopher (University of New South Wales, Australia) and Bryce Beemer (Duke Kunshan University, China) are looking forward to a lively discussion of and feedback on their respective projects.

(1) Emma Christopher, “’The Territory is Life’: Slavery, Freedom and the Fight for Survival in the Río Yurumanguí, Colombia”: This paper explores a community that has fought for its territory for 400 years through slavery and into legal freedom, eventually gaining collective land rights in May 2000, but remains in an often deadly fight over it.

(2) Bryce Beemer, “Creolization Theory and Southeast Asia: Slavery and Cultural Exchange in Precolonial Burma, c. 1750-1850”: Creolization theory beneficially illuminates the agentive power of the enslaved in processes of culture building and community reinvention. This discussion will engage the potential benefits and pitfalls of adapting creolization theory to the Southeast Asian context.