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Fabio Santos (he/him): I here, I think we can start. We can. Okay, yeah. Good. Thank you. Clara.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): great. So welcome everybody. Why cannot see But it's great to know that there are some people around

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Fabio Santos (he/him): So welcome to this session, which is actually the first of 2 sessions on historical sociology as relational memory. I'm saying I'm gonna say a few words on on this theme on this topic before we have

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Fabio Santos (he/him): We have 2 papers to be delivered by by jasmine and apha. So the idea of this session, and then also the second session that's gonna take place in a few hours

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Fabio Santos (he/him): is to? yeah, reconcile memory studies and historical sociology, or to conceive of historical sociology as income passing memory studies. particularly the sort of memory studies that? yeah, has gained ground that became more prominent in the past years. So a conception of memory studies where memory is no longer regarded as this

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Fabio Santos (he/him): sort of monolith that is produced and reproduced by by hegemony groups, and also by official archives, which we know by now, are also full of of gaps and silences. So it's no longer the single story that shima mundane goes the abdic she has so aptly cautioned against

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Fabio Santos (he/him): the idea. Instead of this session, and of the contributions that we collected. try to understand memory as imbued with power, as relational, as co- constitutive, and also as multidirectional to borrow an idea from Michael Rosberg.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): So it's really an attempt,

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Fabio Santos (he/him): it overcoming this single story, this single memory in order to to excavate and retrieve what has long been forgotten or suppressed, and also to put these in relation, therefore, also the relational in the title in relation with with other memories

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Fabio Santos (he/him): now

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Fabio Santos (he/him): to engage in such a project. We have found excellent contributions. By Jasmine Harris, Ifabal and Amy Chin for the first session, and then Rachel Chu Pristian, it's a who, an Amelina Jana Shifa man with Peters and medium threads for the second session, though unfortunately Amy and and I had to cancel their

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Fabio Santos (he/him): participation for very good reason. Reasons. this means that for this first session we only have Jasmine and Eva.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): so

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Fabio Santos (he/him): we might even finish earlier than originally planned which gives us either a longer break for coffee or for sleep. Depending on our time zone. The format is that we have approximately 20 min for each presenter that can then be followed by

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Fabio Santos (he/him): urgent question, questions that need answering, you know, for understanding some argument or something, but then we would have more space and time at the end. So after both presentations, where we can also where you can also address your questions to both authors. make into linkages, and also the authors and presenters themselves can, of course, engage in a dialogue.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): also, before we start. I'm thankful to Clara for her very spontaneous help, because my former co-chair Karen, had to cancel. And you kindly agreed to co the session. So this basically means collecting collecting questions from the in person audience. That would be wonderful. And also if you could. let if I and myself know if you don't hear us at some point

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Fabio Santos (he/him): that would be amazing. But we don't hope that this is gonna happen.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): So without further, I do, I will very briefly introduce Jasmine. Jasmine Harris is an an associate professor of African American studies at the University of Texas in San Antonio. She is a scholar working

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Fabio Santos (he/him): on and with intersectionality. So she's researching how gender racialized and class structures impact people's lives, people's experiences, especially how such structured art structures are cemented in, but can also be potentially overcome in the education system. And I think the focus is here more on the education system in the United States.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): I've seen also that she's writing a book called Academics, the Disturbing Education of Black Girls in American Schools, which is an auto ethnographic account of the life lessons. she learned in and about schools as a black woman with a Phd. I look forward to reading that book once it's published. But for now I look forward to hearing your presentation. So, Jasmine, the floor is yours.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): and thanks for the technical assistance as well.

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Okay, Hello, thank you.

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All right. So my presentation is called doing historical sociology. When am I a part of the story? I'm going to talk a little bit about my background. As a way into this discussion. So, as Fabio mentioned, I am a professor of African American studies at

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the University of Texas, San Antonio. My Phd. Is in sociology, but with a focus on the experiences of black people, and particularly in the United States.

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and in particular in the education system. And that's really driving the work that I do. It's very interdisciplinary.

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So how did I get interested in this topic? I was doing archival research as part of my book that is coming out, that the title has been changed. It's now called Black Women Ivory Tower, and when I submitted my presentation I did not have the pre-order link. But I do now. It's you just can Google it. And it's out there. If you're interested in it. I want to say that in this talk today I'm not going to be talking

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explicitly about that project, but about the methodological work as a part of creating that project.

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Black woman. Ivory Tower looks at the experiences, both historical and present, of black women in higher education, going all the way back to the 18 hundreds, and as I was doing this work as a black woman who has a Ph. D. It became clear very early on that there is a lot of

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emotion work that is involved in that process because of the social location of black women in the United States relative to the history of American chattel slavery, and for those of you who don't know. There is a lot of political discourse in the United States right now about the necessity

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of history of American child slavery being taught in schools. So there is a conservative attempt to in many ways wipe out a lot of the archival information that we have by eliminating it from schools and public library systems. So

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that's a part of this as well. When I was working on this project in particular, I started to think about the methodological considerations of this project. How do I separate myself from a data collection process that is so closely related to not only my own experiences, but the experiences of my family.

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I'll stop here and also say that I wrote a paper. I think it was published in 2020, and it is about the way that race research in the discipline of sociology in the United States is thought of when white sociologists are doing the work versus when black sociologists are doing the work. So I did an audit study of the top 20 sociology programs in the United States

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to look at faculty who identified themselves as race scholars relative to their racial identity, and what I found overwhelmingly was that the race scholars at these top 20 programs are overwhelmingly white.

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and that their work is valued as objective and scientific, where ours is often thought about in this sort of derogatory term of research, where we are just simply studying ourselves. And that means that the research doesn't have scientific value and that has

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long-standing impacts on our career trajectories and our economic positions in the United States as sociology professors doing this work.

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So I've been thinking about the relationship between method, race gender and political discourse in the United States, and that's really at the

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foundation of this project and this talk.

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And and so, as I was doing this work specifically thinking about historical sociology as the social movement, right. Calhoun talks about historical sociology as a way forward, thinking about the present and the future by reconciling the past.

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Thank you. So so talking about Calhoun, he says, and I have this quote here, the genuine importance of historical sociology is obscured by attempts to grasp it as a form of research method rather than as part of a substantive reorientation of inquiry. So beyond just methodological considerations

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as a method of inquiry, how do we come to work through these archives? And what does that work that we're doing in the archives mean for the communities of people that we're studying both historically and in the present day and for ourselves as well.

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oh, can you not see me? Okay.

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In the present

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I wanted to consider what approaches historical sociology help us to think about transformations of of social life. And so

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a story. And I'm sort of sad that Amy Chen can't be here because she is a professor at Basser, and my research is very much couched in the experiences of black women at Bassar, because that's where I went to school as an undergrad, and I was, as I was working on black Women ivory tower. I really wanted to study the life of Anita Hemings. Anita Hemings was

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the first black woman to graduate from Ambassador College, and for those of you who don't know. Vassar College is a small Liberal Arts College in the Hudson Valley in New York. It was historically in all women's school when coed in 1,969. It's a member of the 7 Sisters, a set of institutions that were created in the 1,008 hundreds

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for women's education, because

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women could not attend Harvard, Yale, Princeton, And each of those 7 Sisters schools had a partner school that was for all men in the case of Vassar. That was Yale University.

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And so Anita Hemings graduated from

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faster in 1,898, after 3 and a half years of successfully passing as a white woman.

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 There is very little information about how it came to be known that she was passing, except that her roommate, whose name was Lulu.

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was apparently very jealous of Anita. She was popular, she was thought of as very beautiful both on campus and in the broader pipsey community. And Lulu, a white woman, was very upset by this.

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Anita's brother comes to visit her in her second year. Her brother, who has darker skin than she does, and is attending mit as a black man, and whispers, you know, start to happen. What's interesting about this is that I traveled back to Vassar, to their special archives to gather information on Anita. As I was writing

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this book, and the information is, as I said earlier, it's minimal. It's not well curated or taken care of. It's a lot of old scraps of paper with, you know, small notes written on them, and most of what we know about her experience. There is speculation.

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What I also uncovered. Was that Anita, after she was found out and allowed to graduate, returned to the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, which is a historically black neighborhood in that area where her family was living

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disgraced. She was very upset, obviously that her racial identity had been revealed. She was ostracized from the friend groups and networks that she had made while she was there, but she did not give up

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the idea of passing. She took a job as a foreign cataloger at the Boston Public Library, and she met a man there named Andrew. Love. Andrew. Love was a black man passing as a white man who received a medical degree from Mahari Medical School, which is an Hbcu, and was at the time as well.

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and they realized that they had something in common which was the desire to pass as white, to accumulate all of the privileges, class privileges, especially, that were associated with that

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again, there's very little information about this. So this is like 5 years of me piecing this life together.

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Andrew and Anita moved to the Upper East side of New York City. Andrew opens a successful medical practice, and they have 3 children, and the family passes as white for all I can find. The children did not know.

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The oldest daughter was Ellen Love. Ellen Love attends Vassar, starting in 1,923, and graduates in 1,927. While passing as a white woman

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at some point.

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either before or after she gets to Basser, she finds out that she is, in fact, passing, that her family is passing.

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and she decides to keep that secret for the rest of her life. On her deathbed in 1,996. She tells her best friend.

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and asks the best friend to hold on to that information until well, after she has passed on before telling her family, and in 90 98, Molly Sims, her great-granddaughter, comes out with this bombshell that you know that she has realized that her grandmother had been passing for

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her whole life, and that means, you know, the rest of the family is passing.

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This was really interesting to me, because. passing as a social phenomenon.

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especially in relationship to American chattel. Slavery means that beyond just the stories of Anita and Ellen, we know very little about folks in the United States who were participating in this phenomenon.

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What we do know are usually from failed attempts, right people who have been found out and punished in a variety of ways, oftentimes death, or those people who, on their deathbeds, like Ellen Love.

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gave this information to their families.

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While I was doing this research, and as a part of the research for the book, I was also engaged in genealogical research of my own family. We have a long history of higher education in our family, but very little material information cooperating those facts.

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And so in parallel of doing this book, I was also searching the archives of Philander Smith, which is an Hbcu and Little Rock, Arkansas, where many of my family members attended. I also found that my great aunt received a master's degree at the Teachers College at Columbia University. Again, we didn't have any paperwork for these things, but we were able to find them in the archives of the schools.

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The most interesting thing that we found was that my paternal great Maternal great-grandfather, Sherwood Davis, who disappears from our family tree when my grandfather is about 4 years old.

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I left Louisiana, where my grandfather and his mother were living, and moved to Texas to pass as a white man.

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and this is where I had to stop and say, Okay, this is all very heavy. And in thinking about the emotion work of this sort of historical, archiving work around race and passing. It's actually probably

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not unusual for a black American person of, you know, millennial generation like I am to have relatives who had passed throughout history. But it's very unusual to be able to find that information, to confirm that in in part again, because of passing as a social phenomenon, so I had to stop and think.

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What do I do with this information? Right? Where does the story about Ellen and Anita and the story about me and Sherwood. Where are they disparate, and where are they connected and overlapping?

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So

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I delved into theory because I'm a sociologist, and that's what I like to do. And I started thinking about Satya Hartman's critical fabulation. I started thinking about Patricia Hill, Collins, black feminist epistemology, and I started thinking about Christina Sharpe's work in the wake.

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Sadia Hartman is an English professor. She's at Columbia now. But when she came up with this

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concept of critical fabulation, I believe she was in Indiana. This concept comes from an essay that she wrote called Venus in 2 acts, and it is an essay that is trying to grapple with the concept of Venus on slave ships leaving Africa, coming to North America and the islands across the Pacific.

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and the extensive unknowing that we have about that time. Right? I don't know how many of you have had a chance yet to visit the African American history. A Smithsonian in Washington, DC. That opened in 2,016, but they have a really interesting exhibit there on the ground floor. They start at the ground floor historically, and then move up through time, which is also a very interesting way to curate a museum.

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but on the ground floor they have an exhibit that looks at the different manifests of slave ships that were coming across the Atlantic, counting number of bodies that went on the ship, and counting the number of bodies that come off the ship when they get to North America, and, as you can probably guess, those numbers fluctuate wildly, depending on what happened on those ships.

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whether folks were dying through illness because of the accommodations, those who took their own lives rather than wait to see what was in store for them on the other side of the trip. Those who were killed for disobeying. But

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what Sadia Hartman was trying to to understand. And I should say she's in English, right? So she's writing these stories is, how do I reconcile what

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I know likely happened right with the very little historical archival information that we have. So in particular, she's looking at these manifests and trying to create a story from them.

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And so critical fabulation is this writing methodology that's looking at archival research and critical theory and using it to develop what is essentially a fictional narrative, right? Because we have this wide unknowing, especially around these particular topics.

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Patricia Hill Collins, a sociologist, writes a black feminist thought in 1,990, and that is a book that comes out of her first article on the topic which was called Black Feminist epistemology

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and Patricia Hill. Collins is interested in the ways that black women in particular can impact the empirical process

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via our connections to the communities that we're studying our in-depth and first-person understandings of the culture.

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And she's very critical of what up until then, in sociology is a lot of white men studying black communities. And this idea that the data that they are collecting is in some ways limited by the identities of the

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principal investigators. Because people in these communities are not going to unpack and reveal the kinds of information that they might to.

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For Patricia Hill Collins, a black woman, you know that idea has been expanded right in sociology over the last 3 decades to sort of think more broadly about minoritized identities and the relationship between a principal investigator with a minoritized identity and the communities in which they're going and collecting this ethnographic or interview data in particular.

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And so what kinds of new knowledge systems can we create as sociologists. Collins asks

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by being very deliberate about who we are asking to collect data from these communities. And then what does that data look like?

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Christina Sharp.

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She was at Harvard, but I think that she's recently moved, and I don't want to

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overspeak by saying exactly where But Christina Sharp wrote a book called in the Wake. I think it came out in 19. I'm sorry. 2,018, and it is conceptualizing this idea of the wake like the wake of a boat moving through the water

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as a place of confinement for black people, both historically so, thinking about the wakes of slave ships crossing the Atlantic, but also the continuing impacts of American child slavery on the lives of black people.

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She also this is just a plug for her. She's not here just wrote a book that came out this year. It's called Ordinary notes. and it takes this idea of the wake and sort of couches it very much in the present day. The New York Times did a really great review of it that came out about a month ago. If you're interested in this idea.

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So Christina Sharp talks about the wake as this sort of holding place.

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both historically again, and in the present, where we are being black people in the United States contained, regulated by and punished around the same mechanisms that have roots in American child slavery. So I'm working through these sort of 3 theoretical perspectives and positions coming from. And I should say that Christina Sharp is a philosopher.

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right? And and she does black studies as well. So coming from these different disciplinary perspectives. But all trying to understand, you know, how do we study, think about, write about, and talk about the lives of black people relative to the history of the country. And when we are doing this work, when we're doing this writing.

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can we? And and should we separate ourselves in this very positivistic right. Traditionally empirical way.

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And this is important because reconstructing history is political. I started this by saying that

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there is a lot of political discourse in the United States right now about

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how bad American chattel slavery was, and if it is appropriate for

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students of particular ages, although this, you know that

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the discourse around this goes from K through 12 through higher education in the United States. So there's arguments being made at every level, including in the State of Texas, where I work, and where I run the African-american Studies program at University of Texas, San Antonio, about the sort of importance or necessity of this information.

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Nicole Hannah Jones put together a project called The 1,600 and 19 Project for the New York Times.

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I think it was about 5 years ago now that really delves into the history of American chattel slavery and the ongoing impacts in a variety of different ways. So economically looking at housing, regulation, looking at health, public health issues, especially as the pandemic continues. And

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you know, looking at the disproportionate deaths in minoritized communities in the United States, and there has been extreme pushback about this idea, right? And a lot of that pushback has been rooted in this argument that Nicole Hannah Jones, as a black woman

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is politicizing the history by bringing up the most egregious, the most violent parts of the history, which is again, for for some folks thought of as unnecessary. This came to a head for her in 2020, when she was offered a tenured position at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

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and the Board of that Institution rescinded that offer in part because of the political discourse around this project

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open. I think it's a a so program at Howard University instead, and an Hbcu in the United States, because

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she was made to feel unwelcome at Chapel Hill, which I should also say is her Alma Mater. So again, there are these connections I talked about earlier, how I'm doing this research on a school. That's my Alma mater, and thinking about the ways that my race and the race of folks like me across history at that institution have been treated, and you know where the the line is drawn between

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ourselves as the researchers, the writers doing this work, and the experiences that we're having in these institutions.

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So where do we go from here? Then, much of the work of creating knowledge in historical sociology

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ignores the process of data collection, and my argument as I work through my next project, which is being pulled from the book, and it's it's called a Passing love. And it's about Ellen Love. It's called The Life in Times of of Passing women and other stories in in us. Education.

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In this project I am not necessarily centering myself. but I am explicitly writing through the process of not just collecting this information, but filling in the gaps right? How do

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I much like Satya Hartman is thinking about when she's writing a Venus and 2 acts, and and using this concept of critical fabulation. how do I knit together a story that has historical relevance in this case about the life of Ellen Love, who, I left out a little earlier, goes on, after graduating from Vassar to be a Broadway performer for 20 years of her life as passing as a white woman.

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How do I? I create that story with the very little information that I have? So I have been to

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her high school, the Horace Man School in New York City, which is one of the most expensive schools in the country, and continues to be one of the sort of leading private schools in New York City.

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They're much like at Vassar. Their archival information about Ellen's presence there is very small, and that is the way that her family would have wanted it, you know. this is not. I want to say, not by

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chance, that there is very little information about these things. Folks who are passing did everything they could to destroy any records that might connect them to a past life in which they could be identified as black. And so as a black woman trying to scrape through the very small bits of information. You can't help but feel the emotional weight of

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the work that these people were doing to hide their identities, to

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extract themselves from the histories. Anita Hemings had siblings, she had parents who loved her, who came out in favour of her when her identity was revealed at Vassar. In fact, her father, Robert Hemings.

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I was interviewed by one of the local papers, and he said that paraphrasing here as long as she was well-behaved, and doing what she needed to do.

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I had no reason to want her to be anything other than the white woman that she was being right, and and for many black people at this time passing was an opportunity for upward social mobility that would be otherwise unavailable to them. And so thinking about that right thinking about what it must have been like for her to

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no longer speak to her parents, you know, after marrying Ellen, love no longer speak to her siblings, who were so close to her that they risked everything to come and visit her while she was in school, and to think about

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how difficult it is for me, as I am finding out about my own family members passing in the same way to distinguish between the emotions that I feel about the information about my own family, and the emotion that I feel about what I imagine to be the emotions that they were going through as well.

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So what is then our role as as researchers in this kind of work? How do we bring in our point of view? And how do we add our understanding? And that's something that I'm really

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dealing with in this second project. And I've I've come to 2 things right, reflexivity and auto-ethnography, as Fabio mentioned. Obviously, I'm using auto-ithnography in my book, Black Women Ivory Tower, and thinking about my own experiences in higher education.

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But also now, as I'm doing the second project. I'm thinking about my work as an archivist and as an archivist who is a black woman who's archiving the experiences of black women in literally the same environments that I have been in, where there are almost no traces of them. Right? You would think I graduated from Vassarin in 2,005

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and and so I've been back. But maybe I haven't been in all of the dorms and stuff. But when I was there. There were no pictures of Anita anywhere. There were no discussions of her presence on campus. I actually didn't even find out about her existence until I was in graduate school studying these things long after I had graduated, and and as I mentioned her existence, there has been reduced to a folder or 2 of little slips of paper.

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And so Thinking through that process, what would it have meant for me as a black woman in that space to have that information made available to me to see that information celebrated to see the long trajectory of black women's place in this institution be highlighted for those of us who are still minoritized in those institutions.

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And so I'm I'm thinking about reflexivity and auto-ethnography as a way to examine how and why collecting archival data is so challenging, right? Especially when we're talking about social phenomenon. And you know historical institutions like enslavement and passing, that have all of these politics imbued in them, especially in the United States.

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and are purposely not well documented.

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All right, that is it.

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Thank you so much.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): Jasmine. This was. This was brilliant and very yeah, stimulating, I think, for our discussion. As I. As I said in the beginning, I think it's it's helpful to maybe just have like very urgent questions. that help us maybe better understand some of your arguments, and then spare the broader questions to the end also, in order to have them in dialogue with a fast research which is connected. So are there any

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Fabio Santos (he/him): urgent hands that need to be raised

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Fabio Santos (he/him): in the chat or in the room?

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Fabio Santos (he/him): Can you see anyone know? If not I? I take that as a note, or

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Fabio Santos (he/him): I you the people? One question, could you come

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okay?

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Fabio Santos (he/him): And can we connect it with Charles Charles's question. He also has a question.

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Yes, thank you, Mona, for that question. I am absolutely. I say that very confidently right now, but it took me a long time to get to that point where I was like. Yes, this needs to be included. And and and that's really where this paper was sort of coming from is our training, as sociologist says.

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No, right? It's interesting. It's good that you found that out and do that on your own time. But where does that fit empirically? And so I have been really challenged to

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build sort of an empirical foundation that allows for that inclusion. And it's it's almost going to be like a side by side. So this is what I'm uncovering about this family, and this is what I'm uncovering about my own family. And here is where the overlap is in terms of the needs and purpose of passing in the United States at that historical moment.

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Charles Mphande: So

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Fabio Santos (he/him): I think there's one question in the chat from Charles and funding, and maybe we can take that one. And the rest is for the later discussion. Yeah.

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Charles Mphande: thank you. Do you hear me?

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Yes, yeah.

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Charles Mphande: Okay. thank you, Jasmine, I think.

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Charles Mphande: it's a very moving presentation that you have made, and we're enlightening to. I was just wondering. here you are, as this caller, trying to fill in gaps.

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Charles Mphande: and you're also at the back of your mind. You have the idea of this so-called no objective scholars.

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Charles Mphande: and I want to understand your emotions here. Is it you trying to make it as objective as possible, to be acceptable by these scholars or not.

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That's a really good question.

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I am coming to it from an understanding that. And we were talking about this in the institutional ethnography talk that I was in yesterday. But I'm coming to it with an understanding that

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reviewers, fellow scholars, may be looking for a particular empirical framework that doesn't allow for the kinds of sort of personal and emotional work that is involved in this kind of archival data collection and narrative development.

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While simultaneously advocating for the need for it in this particular case, and I hope we'll see if I can find a placement for this paper, but I hope that it will act as a way to start to expand our thinking away from

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this desire for objectivity. Right? And that's really where Patricia Hill, Collins, black feminist thought and black feminist epistemology is leading the work that I'm doing. And this idea that objectivity doesn't necessarily have to be

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the goal, especially when that objectivity may limit the kinds of data and the depth of the data that you're able to collect. And so it's sort of a balancing act of of trying to appease my colleagues and peers while also challenging them to think more expansively about historical sociology research in this way.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): Wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much, and we will come back to your research later in in in the discussion. But let's move on to If us research I will. briefly. say a few words about you. If you want, you can already try to

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Fabio Santos (he/him): Show your slides.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): if so, If a ball is a sociologist at the University of Gutting and in Germany, where she's part of a bigger project, a bigger research project entitled Individual and collective memories of slavery and the slave trade. It contrasts of comparison of different communities, generations and groupings in Ghana and Brazil. she had prior, being a researcher into other projects

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Fabio Santos (he/him): projects at the same university, one investigating biographies of migrants from Syria and West Africa and Brazil, and in Germany, and the other one focusing on.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): Yeah, the social construction of border zones or borderlands, including the one between Spain and Morocco, which was your empirical project. I think

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Fabio Santos (he/him): so your focus lies on

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Fabio Santos (he/him): questions. of how to understand how to excavate with qualitative methods the marginalized memories in the context of violence and migration. And I think this is also what connects your research to to the one we just listen to. So I'm really looking forward to hearing your presentation. If I

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Eva Bahl: yeah, thank you very much for you for this nice introduction and for organizing this session and for accepting my paper. Thank you very much, Jasmine also for this wonderful paper.

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Eva Bahl: yeah. Hello. Good morning. Good evening Good night to all directions.

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Eva Bahl: Thank you for being here and yeah.

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Eva Bahl: in today's presentation, Elmina and Cape Coast is points of intersection.

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I will.

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Eva Bahl: briefly, very briefly, present the research projects. talk a little bit about my theoretical background regarding entangled histories and relational memories.

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Eva Bahl: I'll introduce Cape Coast and Elmina as points of intersection. I'll give some historical and sociological context.

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Eva Bahl: and then I'll reflect upon some relationalities. with ethnographic snippets, as I've called it. So, using some of my material, and I'll sum it up briefly.

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Eva Bahl: in.

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Eva Bahl: I will first present first findings from the research project that Fabio just mentioned. As you can see, it's started very recently. So we are really in the first year, and I would like to ask you to see it as a work in progress that I'm presenting here.

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Eva Bahl: The study has 2 folky, one is on memory sites.

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Eva Bahl: and one is on family memories and transgenerational knowledge transmission.

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Eva Bahl: And the it's a big project team. You'll see all the names on the last slate. We use a plurality of methods to approach these

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Eva Bahl: questions.

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Eva Bahl: the paper is based on interviews, group discussions, and participant observation

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Eva Bahl: at and around memorial sites. with people who work at these sites who live around these sites, who use these sites, make use of these sites in different ways.

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Eva Bahl: what is important is all of the data I present here is was conducted in the coastal region of Southern Ghana.

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Eva Bahl: This is important to mention, because we've also done research in the north of Ghana, where you find a quite different scenario in some

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Eva Bahl: census.

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Eva Bahl: So some thoughts about entangled histories and relational memories.

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Eva Bahl: Memories are obviously always relational as they relate to the past.

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Eva Bahl: and with reference to Maurice, high facts, I assume that a collective memory does not preserve the past, but reconstructs it with the help of the present

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Eva Bahl: Michel Rolf to your emphasizes the contestedness of memories in this case, in the context of enslavement in the Us. When he says.

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Eva Bahl: the crooks of the matter is the here. Now. The relations between the events, like the historical events and their public representation. In a specific historical context.

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Eva Bahl: memories are also relational as they are collectively share that we can also take from Hi Fox

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here. I would also like to refer to no, but Elias, who has argued that

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Eva Bahl: human beings, by virtue of their fundamental interdependence from each other.

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Eva Bahl: always group themselves in the form of specific figurations. And here the power balances play a very important role.

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Eva Bahl: as a biographical researcher who usually studies the biographical experiences of people, and how they are remembered and presented in the present.

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Eva Bahl: Usually in the present of the interview I would like to underline that.

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Eva Bahl: The remembering we talk about I talk about here is a bit different. way. It is, as I put it here, more of practice, of self-positioning in the context of

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Eva Bahl: contested collective memories.

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Eva Bahl:  the people that I quote in the following mostly speak about the experiences

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Eva Bahl: with collective memories and discourses and the respective conflicts.

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Eva Bahl: so, while this is perhaps in some cases more detached from the biographical experience.

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Eva Bahl: I still use mostly the term remembering, because

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Eva Bahl: I assume it emphasizes the practice. And this is what I'm interested in.

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Eva Bahl: But of course this separation is not

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Eva Bahl: very clear, because the presentation from the present of a biographical experience always is framed by discourses and

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Eva Bahl: collective memory. and contested collective memories, etc.,

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Eva Bahl: in the context of post-colonial studies, shared memory intertwined and overlapping histories and entangled histories between Western and non-western societies have been emphasized.

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Eva Bahl: Black Atlantic a work that focuses on both sides of the North Atlantic.

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Eva Bahl: and especially on the diasporic connections. Paul Gilroy emphasizes the complex interpenetration of black and white life worlds. and suggests to understand the history of slavery as

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Eva Bahl: ethical and intellectual heritage of the West as a whole.

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Eva Bahl: So these 2 strands of thought.

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Eva Bahl: memory, studies, and post-colonial studies, which, of course, have already often met and overlapped at the theoretical background of the

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Eva Bahl: following considerations.

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Eva Bahl: So what I'm going to do in the next minutes is first to introduce Cape Coast and Elmina as historical and memorial sites. You can see Cape Coast on the left side, and Elmina on the right side.

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Eva Bahl: Cape Coast is. You can also see me doing the tour the right side of the picture.

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Eva Bahl:  and

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Eva Bahl: second, I

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Eva Bahl: we'll try to reflect to reflect upon some relationalities that became relevant during the analysis of my data.

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Eva Bahl: It's a work in progress, as I've already said, and I would like to see these reflection as a grounds for joint discussion, and I'm looking for what also to your feedback.

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Hate. Coast and Elmina are 2 coastal towns in the central region of Ghana.

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Eva Bahl: about 150 kilometers west of a crime, and there is like 10 to 15 kilometers between them.

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Eva Bahl: About 1 million departures of enslaved people took place from the Gold Coast between 1519 and 1,825,

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Eva Bahl: most of them in the eighteenth century. and a big part of them went through the dungeons of Cape Coast and Elimina.

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Eva Bahl: In 1,979 the 2 castles were declared Unesco World heritage, together with one other Ghanaian castle.

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Eva Bahl: and more forts and fortifications along the Ghanaian coast.

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Eva Bahl: Today the 2 places are among the main memorial sites for victims of the transatlantic trade and enslaved people.

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Eva Bahl:  I would argue on a global level. They are among the main Ghana tourist Hotspots.

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Eva Bahl: and in the year 2,019 the Ghanaian Government called for a year of return. so called

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Eva Bahl: the African diaspora to come to Ghana to to reconnect to the to Africa.

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Eva Bahl: And of course there's also an interest on the of the Ghanaian Government to attract investment, to get attract tourism. etc. And as it was a big success, since 2020 the Ghanaian Government has called for a whole decade of African Renaissance.

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Eva Bahl: Yeah, I've only listed. I won't read it.

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Eva Bahl: The different European powers, and in one case also local power

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Eva Bahl: that built and occupied the castles over the

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Eva Bahl: over the course of the centuries.

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Eva Bahl: It's important to say that in the case of elmite, where the Dutch, and in Cape

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Eva Bahl: case of Cape Coast, and where the British. who were mainly there during the time of their chattel slavery.

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Eva Bahl: the historian Hug of ice has written about these places as Creoleized and entangled or transnational spaces

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Eva Bahl: were expressions of early modern forms of globalization

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Eva Bahl: inter mingled with the local cultures. So you he, yeah, you can already see this idea of crossroads of a place of connections.

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Eva Bahl: And the following, I present 3 different layers

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Eva Bahl: of relationality, and with each one an empirical insight to my research.

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Eva Bahl: as you will see, they overlap.

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Eva Bahl: and some times the data I use I present to reflect upon one layer could be used to discuss one of the other layers.

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Eva Bahl: Here I quote from an interview that I conducted with a guide at one of the memorial sides. He discusses what I have termed here. Sorry.

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Eva Bahl: The relationality of the ones remembering. He says.

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Eva Bahl: the group was that mixture of whites and black people. So as they came in a group, they have no reason to separate them. So we just took them on a tour. and during the tour you saw them. One group will move this way, the other will be standing this side.

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Eva Bahl: So after the 2 of the black people, they said, they are not going to go with the whites. so they needed to organize another bus.

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Eva Bahl: This is only one of different situations. He introduces in the interview

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Eva Bahl: about conflicts in the tour groups, as he puts it, victim between, as he puts it, victims and perpetrators.

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Eva Bahl: He discusses the strategy to separate white and black tourists into different groups to avoid conflicts in the dungeons.

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Eva Bahl: Another figuration in the tour groups he discussed is the one between Ghanaians and people from the diaspora. Here he has a kind of contradictory presentation.

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As he first says.

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Eva Bahl: they don't have problem going with Ghanaians or people from other African countries.

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Eva Bahl: They don't have any problem with that. So sometimes you can just mix them.

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Eva Bahl: And then, later on, in the interview, he says. some brothers and sisters from the diaspora they sometimes attack, as you understand?

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Eva Bahl: They will say, you people, your great-great-grandparents sold our people into slavery.

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Eva Bahl: so where? By whom, and in which ways the enslaved people should be remembered, is highly contested.

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and it is part of the everyday realities

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Eva Bahl: of people working as guides and educators at the memorial sites.

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Eva Bahl: I'll come now to another level of relationality. It is a relationality that is quite a challenge

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Eva Bahl: for a research project

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Eva Bahl: like ours with such a long term historical perspective. But it's also very challenging on a political and emotional level. I would say

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Eva Bahl: the anthropologist, Katerina Sham discusses that within the official representation on the part of the Ghanaian state it was, and still is, insisted.

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Eva Bahl: presenting the castles as crossroads and junctions of num numerous different histories. of which slavery is only one aspect.

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Eva Bahl: Other aspects she mentions is the Christian missionary history.

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Eva Bahl: the introduction of European educational institutions.

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Eva Bahl: or even the colonial seat of government.

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Eva Bahl: In a minute I'll introduce some more historical layers that are also memorialized in the same place.

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Eva Bahl: But before that I would like to

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Eva Bahl: mentioned that, of course, this reading as a crossroads has been criticized

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Eva Bahl: by Ghanaian

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Eva Bahl:  researches as well as by people from the African Diaspora. As a selective memory

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Eva Bahl: influenced by European discourses.

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Eva Bahl: I'll now come to a

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Eva Bahl: memo I wrote after my first visit to Cape Coast Castle and dungeons.

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Eva Bahl: and this is really like the first lines of this memo. So I'm still approaching the site. They are right we go to the castle. There's a memorial directly across from the entrance

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Eva Bahl: to the Ghanaian soldiers that fought in World War one and 2 we take pictures.

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Eva Bahl: A man approaches me and explains that if I am still in the country I should come back on November the eleventh, at 11 A. M.

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Eva Bahl: Then the fallen of the world. Wars are commemorated in Cape Coast.

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Eva Bahl: Some historical context

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Eva Bahl: during World War Ii. Some 65,000 Canadians were under the command of British offices in the Royal West African Frontier Force. and fought and worked

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Eva Bahl: in the East African campaign in North Africa, and after 1,943 in Burma, Asia.

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Eva Bahl: Remembrance Day, eleventh November. to honor soldiers of the Commonwealth who lost their lives in World War one and 2.

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Eva Bahl: I find the memorial for the fall, and interesting because of the different layers of commemoration that become visible. Why plays such a monument right in front of the main entrance to the central memorial to slavery?

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Eva Bahl: Is it to establish a context of commemoration

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Eva Bahl: or a contextual connection between colonial soldiers and enslaved people.

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Eva Bahl: when different historical moments are remembered or memorialized next to each other or together. What is their connection?

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Eva Bahl: Is it the social grouping affected, or the geographical place?

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Eva Bahl: I don't have, or I don't give an answer to these questions now.

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Eva Bahl: but move on

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Eva Bahl: in my memo entering the memorial side

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Eva Bahl: as we go in. So it's one of the first things I see when I go in.

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Eva Bahl: a colleague shows me the info on an explanatory unesco black.

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Eva Bahl: that after its use as a trading post, the Castle also served as a military training base

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Eva Bahl: for Jamaican soldiers used by the British in the war against the Asante.

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Eva Bahl: Again, some historical context. The West India regiment was founded in the aid of the eighteenth century.

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Eva Bahl: mostly Jamaican soldiers were recruited for service in West Africa. and played a role in all the 5 British Asante wars between 1823 and 19 or one.

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Eva Bahl: It is not unlikely that the Jamaican soldiers in these wars fought against distant relatives because most of the enslaved West Africans who were taken to Jamaica were a Khan people.

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Eva Bahl: So members of the Fonti and the Santi.

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Eva Bahl: So while Cape Coast and Elmina, as concrete places bear witness to a history of more than 500 years of entangled histories between 4 continents.

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Eva Bahl: The question of the memory focus. of course, subject to constant negotiation

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Eva Bahl: against the backdrop of the atrocities of the transatlantic trade.

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Eva Bahl: I come now to the third relationality.

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Eva Bahl: This layers obviously one that overlaps with the first one with the one the relationality of the ones remembering, but with a

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Eva Bahl: slightly different focus.

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Eva Bahl: I put here that presumed descendants, because in none of the cases. A concrete knowledge

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Eva Bahl: about the ancestors is available to the people speaking.

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Eva Bahl: which is, of course.

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Eva Bahl: as Jasmine already presented. always a problem in this context.

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Eva Bahl: in the following, I want to read 2 quotes about the very present past and the figurations between

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Eva Bahl: Ghanaians and African Americans.

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Eva Bahl: Returnee and Pan-african African-american activist

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Eva Bahl: told a colleague of mine in an interview.

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Eva Bahl: I have some African brothers and sisters here in Ghana. They will say we don't know if African Americans are really African or not, because you have been in the West so long, you know.

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Eva Bahl: you may have to maybe go through some conversion or reorientation. And I say you don't have the authority to question my Africanness.

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Eva Bahl: I say, after all your years of colonialism, we also wondering how much of your Africanness. You got left

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Eva Bahl: right, so don't go there.

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Eva Bahl: I won't give you that power from me to try to judge my authenticity.

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Eva Bahl: to be an African.

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Eva Bahl: and the next board, I read is a young woman who works as a guide again

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Eva Bahl: at the memorial side that is not focusing on

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Eva Bahl: chattel slavery, but attracts a lot of African-american tourists, and she's a younger Nayan woman.

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Eva Bahl: she says. coming here, I had Sarah information about African Americans working over here has given me the opportunity to associate with these people.

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Eva Bahl: Some of them are challenged. they don't feel welcomed.

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Eva Bahl: They feel like there are lots of barriers. We see them differently. We see them as

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Eva Bahl: slaves, bad children like we were being told so. It's like they come here, and they want a different view of it.

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Eva Bahl: Are we really slaves? Is that really how your people think about us? How do you people see us?

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Eva Bahl: They come here to clear their mind.

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Eva Bahl: So what is contested here is. on the one hand, the authenticity of being African. and in Ghana ever present perspective on the people from the diaspora, as descendants from enslaved people.

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Eva Bahl: Rarely in our interviews it has been put as bluntly as by this

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Eva Bahl: young woman, a participant of a group discussion. but the overall idea is widely spread, as has been prominently discussed, for example, also by Sadia Hartman, and lose your mother.

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Eva Bahl: being a descendant of enslaved people, is considered a reason for feeling shame. and at least in Southern Ghana.

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Eva Bahl: something that doesn't really affect much the own collective. It's oftentimes considered a problem of the diaspora.

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Eva Bahl: So, to sum it up. I've

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Eva Bahl: discussed 3 relationalities that became relevant. We. during my research relationalities, of the ones remembering of different historical processes

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Eva Bahl: and of the descendants.

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Eva Bahl: there, of course, more, a lot more relationalities that I could not discuss this presentation for reasons of space and time, but just to mention, of course.

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Eva Bahl: also with reference to Jasmine's presentation.

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Eva Bahl: I could have discussed relationality research, a field. And what does it mean that I, as a white European

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Eva Bahl: woman, I'm doing this research

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Eva Bahl: about figurations in the research project, which is a research project with project partners on 3 continents.

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Eva Bahl:  and relationalities between different memorial sites, because there is quite a competitive relationship relationality between different memorial sites

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Eva Bahl: and the relationality between Brazil and Ghana. That is very important in the project. But also wasn't the focus of this presentation.

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Eva Bahl: So to take up 5 years? Question that question, Fab, you're raised in the session abstract. What does it mean to do? Historical sociology

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Eva Bahl: as relational memory studies.

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Eva Bahl: I would argue that we need to look at historical and contemporary

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Eva Bahl: actors, perspectives at relationalities, figurations, and entanglements. That's, of course, sounds very similar. I think

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Eva Bahl: every of the one of these terms has a bit of different theoretical focus behind.

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Eva Bahl: And we need to look at power relations.

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Eva Bahl:  I would argue that we always need to see processes of remembrance as the not dynamic processes that take place in the context of

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Eva Bahl: multiple power balances. and that we need empirical, historical, and power-sensitive perspectives on relational collective memories.

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Eva Bahl: Thank you very much.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): Thank you very much. Ifa, for sharing. yeah, your preliminary results. Reflections. I think this is important also. for us to to advance with with the research.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): I would say that we open the discussion maybe first, if someone has a direct question to Ifa.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): and then we can also, of course, take questions. for both jasmine and apha and also you, too, can make questions to each other.

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Just mean it. This is Jasmine. Can you hear me?

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Fabio Santos (he/him): No, yes.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): no.

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Eva Bahl: I can.

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Hi, I just have one question. Thank you so much for your talk. This is really interesting, and I can't wait to read after you've finished all of this, I, as an African-american person, have not been to these sites yet. I hope to make that trek someday, but I have heard from others that there is speaking of the emotion work I was talking about in my talk, that there are

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are a lot of emotions that often come to the forefront while visiting these sites.

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Are you in your project, sort of considering

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the different spectrum of emotions that visitors are experiencing relative to the different sort of identities that you're giving them, like attorneys or or visitors as a part of this project.

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Eva Bahl: Thank you.

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Eva Bahl: Yes, definitely, we. We are taking this

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Eva Bahl: very seriously, I would say. And I think it's interesting that you said the identities I'm giving them because I it was something I was struggling with a lot while doing the presentation like how to

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Eva Bahl: how to describe the people I was

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Eva Bahl: like I was trying to put to, on the one hand, anonymize, like to protect

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Eva Bahl: to protect

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Eva Bahl: their their personal data, but also to make them kind of visible and tangible for you.

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Eva Bahl: But what is important about the return is perhaps I should

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Eva Bahl: have said that before that those are people that moved to Ghana a long time ago. So they are really people. And I think it's for a reason that

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Eva Bahl: so until now.

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Eva Bahl: we've only interviewed people who like African Americans who've moved to Ghana a long time ago

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Eva Bahl: and have, like quite. I would say.

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Eva Bahl: are very have a quite strong political stance in in this, in this decision, and also in the work they are doing there.

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Eva Bahl:  but also have had time to go through

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Eva Bahl: a lot of emotional work.

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Eva Bahl: and we have not interviewed so far.

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Eva Bahl: roots. Tourists how they are oftentimes called, that are just coming for a very short period of time, and might be very

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Eva Bahl: yes. do, going through a lot of emotional work with this. And I think it's for a reason that we haven't done that yet. We haven't even approached

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Eva Bahl: these

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Eva Bahl: people because we haven't actually approached any tourists so far, which I think would actually be

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Eva Bahl: interesting when looking at these sites, and to talk really to visitors and to different visitors visiting groups.

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Eva Bahl: As you said, the identities. I gave them, the Interestingly, also the the guides also identify, identify the visitors very clearly, like when I said

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Eva Bahl: whites and blacks, it's not only what I'm saying, but it's like taking identities from the research. So

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Eva Bahl: there's not a a short, easy answer, as you can see, but but it is a very important thing to take the emotional work and the emotional burden into account.

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Eva Bahl: I think that's a reason that we haven't approached.

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Eva Bahl: Visit like visitors that are there for a short time.

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Eva Bahl: so far, at least.

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Thank you.

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Eva Bahl: Thank you.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): So I see a question in the chat. Can you also see that? If

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Eva Bahl: yes.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): so is there a scope for another layer of memories from the slaving nations.

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Eva Bahl: could you?

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01:15:44.840 --> 01:15:48.049
Eva Bahl: I'm not sure if I understand you, could you.

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Eva Bahl: if I understand your question.

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Charles Mphande: Okay? So

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Charles Mphande: we have heard from jasmine, how information has been

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Charles Mphande: purposefully eliminated or hidden or destroyed. and I'm interested in finding out if you would be willing also to investigate from

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Charles Mphande: the participants in the Atlantic slave trade, the Portuguese and the Swedes, and so forth. What is it in the record which they have kept.

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Charles Mphande: or they have eliminated? So we don't see it.

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Eva Bahl: well, the focus of this project is

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Eva Bahl: not so much archival research. The focus of this project is really

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Eva Bahl: to talk to the different actors.

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Eva Bahl: That might be very. It might be

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Eva Bahl: variety of people, so that might be

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Eva Bahl: descendants that might be guides and educators that might be political activists, and so on.

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Eva Bahl: That might be also

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Eva Bahl: interviewed, for example, people working in the informal sector around the memorial sites just to name what I mean with actors.

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Eva Bahl:  But of course the what we are

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Eva Bahl: asking, what I think you are asking

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Eva Bahl: is becomes very relevant in the question of family memories

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Eva Bahl: and in the

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Eva Bahl: Brazilian part of the project. One

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Eva Bahl: idea that we haven't managed so far, but one idea is to interview descendants from families who own slaves

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Eva Bahl: like to also look at the family memories on the perpetrator side.

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Eva Bahl: So in the that would be, I think, what comes closest to this in this project.

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Eva Bahl: But not

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Eva Bahl: not very surprisingly. This has been difficult so so far it's difficult to approach

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Eva Bahl:  white

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Eva Bahl: Brazilian families. usually still very established

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Eva Bahl: upper class families

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Eva Bahl: to talk about these these issues. But it's definitely an open. an open question that I find really important to do. Like not to focus. Only when you look at

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Eva Bahl: at the question of

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Eva Bahl: transmission between generations and on the lacona, and what is transmitted, and not to also talk to the side of the perpetrators.

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Eva Bahl:  But I can't. So far. I can. It hasn't been very successful

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Fabio Santos (he/him): now. I don't.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): I don't see if there I'm the other hands raised, but if not, I would have a question myself. mainly to if I in the first place. But then maybe also, Jasmine can help us out a bit because I was really Inspired also by the work of CD. Hartman and the concept that you introduced in your in your presentation, jasmine on on critical fabulation or on a method. Basically.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): so

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Fabio Santos (he/him): would that be something you can think of engaging with Apha, maybe not yourself, because that would have its own epistemological methodological problems. But in the context of the research you're doing with the actors as you label them right. So letting your actors fibulate on

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Fabio Santos (he/him): their histories, or what

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Fabio Santos (he/him): I mean, much of it is documented, but, as we know, a lot of like details are not. And so what could have happened. What might have happened? is, that is that sort of part of your overall agenda. Is that already? Is this already implicit in in the questions you're raising, or would you even

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01:20:14.960 --> 01:20:40.959
Fabio Santos (he/him): make that more central? And then from and then, maybe from from jasmine I would like to hear whether you think that such such an approach would be possible. So to have, I mean, in in traditional methodology, we would call that like focus groups or just a qualitative interview or something. But with that like what a what a collective fibulation!

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Fabio Santos (he/him): in this context of like people living around that area or tracing their history back? to those places. Would that make any sense? to you? you know. Being an expert in that field? how could we apply this method of critical fabulation? Or is that just a text, or is it just a textual method?

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Fabio Santos (he/him): is it a method we use with the in our interlocutors? Or is it more of a writing technique that I wasn't, I'm sure, about? Thank you.

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Eva Bahl: Do you want to start? Or should I start, Jasmine?

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I can start to the, to the question about critical fabulation as method. I was actually thinking about this Ava when you were talking about the Returnee, and I appreciate the clarification, because I guess my assumption when you were giving the talk was that a returning would be sort of what you were talking about, more as like a a temporary visitor.

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And so, you know, thinking about that participants response right? And and their

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unwillingness to allow others to confirm or deny their Africanness

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felt like a place where critical fabulation may be useful. Right? Because

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this person, you know, Pan African nest, if I remember correctly, in their 70 s. They have

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01:22:25.260 --> 01:22:54.099
used, you know, whether they know it or not. They're they're using a bit of critical fabulation to construct what they understand to be the relationship between themselves and this physical location. Ghana, you know more broadly, but these, you know, castles in particular, and and so I think it would be, you know, really interesting to

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01:22:54.370 --> 01:23:00.540
as a part of the focus group and interview data collection, to ask them

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how they have constructed their understanding of this place, especially given what I thought was so interesting, the memorialization of the Ghanaian soldiers right outside of the space that seems to be a purposeful positioning to construct a particular understanding of the place that may be a bit

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separate from enslavement, right? And thinking about how the different types of visitors are sort of constructing that understanding, because, again, sort of thinking about myself as someone who's not been there.

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I would probably be struck by that memorialization as out of place. Because I am

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expecting through this, you know, individual construction, but also a very socialized construction that's happening in the United States about what this place is, and how it should be viewed and seen by others and the other. I'll just leave it here. But the the last thing that I was sort of thinking about in the the first

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participants, comments about the different groups of Oh, sorry. The different groups of of people, white versus black, not wanting to the the the black participants not wanting to ride back, you know, on the bus that they came with that it sounds like these white visitors because of the sort of reconstruction that they are doing. And and again think this is where emotion work comes in, too. Right? You

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you go into the place with this pre-constructed understanding that is rooted in individual and cultural socialization about enslavement.

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But then, once you're there, how do your emotions reshape and reconstruct your understanding of the place and enslavement more broadly. And to to Charles's question, maybe, what is that construction's relationship to

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the individual? Are they descendants of the slave trade, or are they descendants of enslavers? And how are we constructing those things? So I think

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I'm not going to speak for Saudi Arabia, but I think that she would say that it's both a a writing methodology, but also an understanding. You know a way to understand how individuals herself, when she's writing or others when they are talking through these things, how they construct their understanding of

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the place, when when there's so little concrete understanding to be had.

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Fabio Santos (he/him): Thank you.

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Eva Bahl: Yeah, thank you for this great comments, and also your

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Eva Bahl: references to my

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Eva Bahl: and presentation and my data.

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Eva Bahl: I was just reminded listening to your presentation, Jasmine, that I once had. Students in a course read a chapter from Louisiana by Sydia Hartman, where she also created a

465
01:26:32.540 --> 01:26:40.420
Eva Bahl: introduces this critical fabulation concept, and I had one student strongly challenge.

466
01:26:40.690 --> 01:26:51.330
Eva Bahl: my choice of this reading, saying, This is not science. And we had a very lively discussion of. Luckily there were some

467
01:26:51.400 --> 01:26:53.710
Eva Bahl: Students were also

468
01:26:53.770 --> 01:27:04.870
Eva Bahl: defending together with me that this, in certain context, is very important, scientific express form of expression.

469
01:27:05.720 --> 01:27:10.469
Eva Bahl: about the question I I mentioned when I introduced

470
01:27:10.570 --> 01:27:12.130
Eva Bahl: the different time

471
01:27:12.650 --> 01:27:23.290
Eva Bahl: periods that are memorialized in the same place, I said, it's a challenge for the project, but actually, I think a big challenge for the project is that we

472
01:27:23.620 --> 01:27:35.269
Eva Bahl: ask people a lot about things they don't really know. like we are the whole, the whole project is struggling with

473
01:27:36.020 --> 01:27:40.210
Eva Bahl: with La Kunas, with with things that are

474
01:27:40.470 --> 01:27:52.740
Eva Bahl:  repressed, forgotten. hidden. So so a big challenge is to

475
01:27:53.770 --> 01:27:57.520
Eva Bahl: yeah, to make sense out of this. And one.

476
01:27:57.770 --> 01:28:11.709
Eva Bahl: as first of all, we we always do very open ended interviews, often biographical, sometimes systematically focused. But there's never like a kind of question there. But there's it's always very open trying to be

477
01:28:12.300 --> 01:28:17.280
Eva Bahl: also open to them relevancies of the interviewees.

478
01:28:17.590 --> 01:28:28.310
Eva Bahl: And but to your question from you. One thing we've asked a lot is, for example, about fantasies people have

479
01:28:28.410 --> 01:28:32.390
Eva Bahl: like when people say I don't have any idea where my

480
01:28:32.860 --> 01:28:41.950
Eva Bahl: ancestors went, or where my ancestors came from, or what  to ask them about.

481
01:28:42.430 --> 01:28:50.580
Eva Bahl: If they have fantasies about it. like to open up a space to say, this is something

482
01:28:51.000 --> 01:28:58.879
Eva Bahl: it's it's it's very telling that you don't know. And most of the other people also don't know. And there's a reason for it.

483
01:28:58.960 --> 01:29:01.019
Eva Bahl: that we have so little

484
01:29:01.140 --> 01:29:07.210
Eva Bahl: knowledge, and that not also it's been difficult to transmit between generations

485
01:29:07.340 --> 01:29:11.810
Eva Bahl: like concrete knowledge. I mean this also different

486
01:29:12.170 --> 01:29:16.760
Eva Bahl:  forms of knowledge. I think we have to.

487
01:29:17.300 --> 01:29:19.989
Eva Bahl: We have to discuss that also, but

488
01:29:20.400 --> 01:29:27.100
Eva Bahl: to open up a space for this. okay, you don't really know. But still tell us, what do you?

489
01:29:27.350 --> 01:29:30.520
Eva Bahl: You have probably have ideas about it.

490
01:29:30.750 --> 01:29:44.599
Eva Bahl:  so this is one. perhaps. What way of trying to like? Really, in the methodologically, not in the writing, which is, I think, another

491
01:29:45.110 --> 01:29:54.660
Eva Bahl:  step that I haven't gotten there, or we haven't gotten there with the project yet, like the question of How do you write about things?

492
01:29:55.200 --> 01:29:58.910
Eva Bahl: not known or not?

493
01:30:00.300 --> 01:30:03.129
Eva Bahl: Not? accessible to a

494
01:30:03.270 --> 01:30:08.150
Eva Bahl: kind of accessible, a tangible archival

495
01:30:08.280 --> 01:30:10.360
Eva Bahl: objective knowledge.

496
01:30:10.660 --> 01:30:21.139
Eva Bahl:  that that's another step. But in the research project it in the process it was asking like trying to give space to

497
01:30:22.090 --> 01:30:29.949
Eva Bahl: what do you send? Fantasize? What do you like to know? But don't know these kind of questions.

498
01:30:31.650 --> 01:30:40.949
Fabio Santos (he/him): Great thanks, Ifa, for answering this question. Are there other questions in the room and the chat.

499
01:30:43.090 --> 01:30:47.839
I have a question and thank you.

500
01:30:47.960 --> 01:30:48.980
Yes.

501
01:30:49.000 --> 01:31:00.710
it's okay. thank you very much, Jasmine, for your inspiring talk. When you, when you were talking, I. I was thinking up in

502
01:31:00.780 --> 01:31:13.040
Black, a Brazilian historian. The name is Vietnam in the Eightys. She was also a criticizing or or thinking about the problem of the archive.

503
01:31:13.220 --> 01:31:19.149
she said. In the archive is our body, she said.

504
01:31:19.290 --> 01:31:36.150
This is the form to know about ours going into our body, into our reflexivity, and also the idea of the kilombo, a place where free slaves leaps. The kilomo is over, over archive

505
01:31:36.310 --> 01:31:38.130
and over body.

506
01:31:38.250 --> 01:31:48.979
This was in the Eightys. She was a historian also, facing the problem of the male-wide Brazilian historian.

507
01:31:49.260 --> 01:31:53.069
big people making the history the narrative of

508
01:31:53.180 --> 01:32:02.869
Brazil. And she was thinking about a alternative of this archive. And the question, if you're also

509
01:32:02.990 --> 01:32:09.040
in the Us. This this problematic of the body is also there, and and

510
01:32:09.040 --> 01:32:33.110
I think a lot of Brazilian black Brazilian historians are forgotten in the in the history, and and also Lilia Gonzales in the 80 70 s. Was also facing the this is problematic and the the question about if in the Us. American debate they are present, or the problem of the body is also there.

511
01:32:33.140 --> 01:32:36.260
And the other question is about.

512
01:32:37.020 --> 01:33:06.979
I I had about your your I passing this phenomenon of passing, and if also for indigenous people, or for Latino woman from you know a lot of places from Latin America, leaving the U.S.A. Is also this, this phenomena and and of, if this epistemology you are proposing is also possible for for other form of passing in the Usaid or in Europe, for instance.

513
01:33:07.090 --> 01:33:22.599
Turkey people. I know there are a lot of people living in in the centers, and maybe to know if the debate is also for other and passing and phenomena.

514
01:33:22.770 --> 01:33:23.709
Thank you.

515
01:33:28.750 --> 01:33:42.749
Thank you. Those are really good questions, and actually to answer both of them. I'm going to talk about a class that I taught this past spring at the University of Texas, San Antonio called Intersectionality.

516
01:33:42.990 --> 01:34:09.440
where we, you know, we start with the the foundational text from Kimberly Crenshaw, where she uses an analogy of a black woman in an intersection. And there are all of these sort of cars coming at her from each road in the intersection and intersectionality, then, is sort of understanding the sort of unique difficulty of existing in that place.

517
01:34:09.890 --> 01:34:32.920
So I'm teaching this class in Texas, where, in in San Antonio, in particular, the Mexican population demographically, is the the largest population in the city, and you know I'm talking about this from the perspective of a black woman. But many of my students are of Mexican descent.

518
01:34:32.940 --> 01:34:43.490
And what happened? And it was a big learning. Experience for me was a lot of discussion about how

519
01:34:44.250 --> 01:34:56.959
this different version of passing is happening in Texas in particular. But I would argue to your point sort of around the world right where if whiteness

520
01:34:57.050 --> 01:35:13.090
breeds privilege, then there are going to be certain segments of the population because of their potential proximity to whiteness that are going to want to benefit from the blurred lines of of skin tone. Right?

521
01:35:13.500 --> 01:35:26.299
And and so they, these Mexican women had never really heard the term passing before, but once we started to discuss it, they realized that

522
01:35:26.770 --> 01:35:55.640
on one hand, maybe they were engaging in it. Maybe folks that they knew their family members were engaging in it. you know, to the point where I had students talk about being discouraged from learning Spanish, from speaking Spanish and public spaces, because then, you know, would I mark you, identify you as Mexican, and you lose a measure of privilege when folks might otherwise assume that you are white.

523
01:35:55.640 --> 01:36:03.279
and One thing that we we talked about was sojourner truths.

524
01:36:03.410 --> 01:36:15.379
speech a and I a woman. I think maybe I'll have heard that being referenced before, but something that I told them that that actually I just recently learned a few years ago

525
01:36:15.390 --> 01:36:18.259
is that? Surgender truths!

526
01:36:20.190 --> 01:36:32.320
Native is not the quite right word, but the language that she spoke in public and in private most often was Dutch, not English.

527
01:36:32.350 --> 01:36:43.279
and she gave that speech in Dutch, and it was translated by a white woman who was also

528
01:36:43.660 --> 01:36:51.979
in attendance to give us. You know, what is this sort of famously quoted phrase, Ainawoman.

529
01:36:52.660 --> 01:37:00.329
But the actual translation from Dutch is, I am woman's rights.

530
01:37:00.470 --> 01:37:04.879
And so it is a more sort of bodily

531
01:37:05.300 --> 01:37:36.009
version of what she's talking about right in in terms of the archive being the body right? Or she is saying that when black women have rights we will all have rights, and in that way the struggle for rights is rooted in our physical bodies, and not simply in, you know the words that we speak, or the things that we're fighting for, and so sort of thinking about how

532
01:37:36.300 --> 01:37:49.289
taking that and thinking about these Mexican women who are sort of suddenly realizing that they are using their bodies to

533
01:37:49.410 --> 01:38:03.260
to pass, right, to to strip themselves of theirs of cultural membership, to de-identify, you know, as a marginalized person

534
01:38:03.270 --> 01:38:26.660
really brings to the forefront how important it is when we're studying concepts like phenomenon. Phenomenon like passing to think bodily that it isn't just sort of our understanding of the phenomenon itself. But actually, how people live through those experiences and and the project that I'm working on now at passing love

535
01:38:26.690 --> 01:38:34.079
sort of thinking through that. When does Ellen love find this out? You know, how does that impact

536
01:38:34.180 --> 01:39:04.119
the sort of performative nature of her experience at Vassar in a very physical way, and and that is where, for me, I'm using critical fabulation to in this case, as more of a writing methodology to to try to think through sort of physically, you know. How would she interact? How would she dress herself? How would she look? And I won't go back to

537
01:39:04.480 --> 01:39:23.219
to pull up my presentation. But if you noticed in the pictures that I put up of both Anita and Ellen, their passing is is very much rooted in the the physical right. And so they have to be cognizant of the presentation, especially

538
01:39:23.670 --> 01:39:51.490
because what leads to Anita sort of uncovering is the presence of a darker skinned person right when that that new physical body comes into the space. Now, questions are being asked about her physical body, where, without that sort of side by side comparison. Those things aren't happening right? And so, thinking about how Ellen then sort of

539
01:39:51.490 --> 01:39:56.430
shapes. And as far as I can tell from archival data.

540
01:39:56.450 --> 01:40:06.610
Her look changes a little from when she is at the Horace Man school in K. Through 12 to when she gets to faster, and that

541
01:40:07.220 --> 01:40:17.569
allows me to presume that she finds out about this actual racial identity somewhere in between those places, and starts to shape

542
01:40:17.720 --> 01:40:37.210
her physical appearance, to ensure that she is engaging in that that phenomenon of passing. But I haven't really thought about it from the, you know, international perspective. And I will, because I it sounds really interesting. Thank you.

543
01:40:40.890 --> 01:40:48.019
Fabio Santos (he/him): Yes, it does. I agree. thanks for Sharing further insight into your research.

544
01:40:48.280 --> 01:40:52.480
Fabio Santos (he/him): In theory we have time for a very last question.

545
01:40:52.790 --> 01:40:58.530
Fabio Santos (he/him): but if there is none, we can also just finish earlier, because one of the presenters dropped out.

546
01:40:58.960 --> 01:41:01.950
Fabio Santos (he/him): Is there another question?

547
01:41:05.610 --> 01:41:07.730
one question, one question.

548
01:41:11.880 --> 01:41:15.010
Maybe it's better here.

549
01:41:17.960 --> 01:41:44.069
Sorry I feel like I'm making people run up and down over it. Or, well, basically you But yeah, it's really that that was I actually hadn't heard about passing like in this context before, but it makes a lot of sense, I suppose. I was wondering in the intersectional from the insectional lens. Whether there are studies that you're Well, anybody is aware, but it's especially you. I guess. You has been since you spoke to this.

550
01:41:44.070 --> 01:41:59.509
that explore, maybe. because, of course, there There are real consequences to not being the the whatever the default is considered to be real external consequences, but also it's a real internal

551
01:41:59.720 --> 01:42:19.630
I suppose internal struggle when you can pass. But then, you know, you're kind of reinforcing very understandably that feeling that you are wrong and might not fit. But I was wondering if there in terms of you know, you could speak about people. So being able to pass a cisgender or passing a straight or non disabled and that's also a

552
01:42:19.630 --> 01:42:33.500
a labor, you know. and I'm sure that it is a labor to to sort of conceal the aspects of yourself that you don't think fit, and I was just wondering if you're aware of any. research that may be considered like those intersections.

553
01:42:33.600 --> 01:42:38.960
 anybody. But yet

554
01:42:43.020 --> 01:42:48.389
okay, I'll say something quickly. And then, Ava, if you want to add, you certainly can.

555
01:42:48.750 --> 01:42:59.470
Disability studies actually is doing a lot of this work right now around invisible disabilities. It's not necessarily

556
01:42:59.640 --> 01:43:27.579
passing in the same way, where there's sort of a a purposeful connection to privilege that people are searching for when you're talking about like cisgender passing or racial passing, but in disability studies. They are doing a lot of work around what it means to have an invisible disability, one that you know folks cannot see, which means that you are sort of by default.

557
01:43:27.580 --> 01:44:01.170
passing as able-bodied, and how that then, makes it difficult for people to empathise with your daily struggles around pain. And so this can be sort of physical, but also in terms of mental health as invisible disability. How our folks who are dealing with things like bipolar disorder and borderline personality, disorder, schizophrenia.

558
01:44:01.170 --> 01:44:14.219
who need these? accommodations right to be successful, but are not seen to need them. You know, in the sort of physical context, how that impacts

559
01:44:14.220 --> 01:44:39.210
their daily lives. And and actually, I'm blanking on the name of the the author right now. But I just recently read a study that was specifically looking at faculty and the the presence of mental health, invisible disabilities, and the desire for accommodations, especially, you know, in the sort of stressful fields that we live in and work in.

560
01:44:39.510 --> 01:45:07.809
and the institutional structures of universities where it becomes something, then, that you have to prove the other way right. So where? we're talking about Anita Hemings now in love and sort of racial passing. It's other folks trying to prove, you know, that you are not the the, the dominant racial identity. It becomes the

561
01:45:07.809 --> 01:45:34.550
What's the word that I'm looking for the responsibility of the individual to prove that they have a disability to prove that they are in need of these accommodation. So it it's like they are passing, but they don't want to be. And so it's sort of the the inverse. I know they're doing. some of the stuff in queer study, query theory studies as well. I'm just less well first in that

562
01:45:39.309 --> 01:45:52.330
Eva Bahl: that's just a very short comment. comment. Passing has been discussed like passing as this gender has been discussed by Harold Garfinkel and the August study in the 1960 S.

563
01:45:52.549 --> 01:45:56.909
Eva Bahl: And he he termed it passing. I wouldn't. I don't know whether

564
01:45:57.530 --> 01:46:07.529
Eva Bahl: where the term comes from, but Harold Garfinkel called it. Passing in the 1960 s. Writing about the trans. The trans. Woman. Agnes.

565
01:46:11.200 --> 01:46:26.420
Fabio Santos (he/him): thanks. Thanks for that additional info that maybe leads us to the end. Right? Clatter. Yeah. and and maybe 2 questions to be further grateful. with in in the later session. That's going to take place.

566
01:46:26.420 --> 01:46:49.109
Fabio Santos (he/him): at 5 30. I mean also, Pat, talking about passing what what passes as a valid archival of knowledge would be. something else that you both mentioned in one way or another, and I think your examples also show that actually 2 papers are enough to fill a whole session. So that was

567
01:46:49.110 --> 01:47:01.629
Fabio Santos (he/him): that was brilliant research that you presented. I'm so so thankful and We will discuss with the part 2 session of of this at 5 30 Melbourne time, thanks to both of you.

568
01:47:03.400 --> 01:47:08.000
Eva Bahl: Thank you.