Co-sponsored by The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and the Yale Center for British Art in conjunction with the exhibition "Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds."

The focus of this conference is one of the central themes of the exhibition: the unfinished legacy of Jamaican slavery, both for present-day Jamaica and the wider Atlantic world. Scholars from the UK, the US, and the West Indies, as well as visual artists, musicians, and film-makers will investigate a range of topics including labor, religion, and the legacies of slavery in Jamaica and Britain. Complementing these panels will be a series of “break out” sessions in the exhibition and the collections of the YCBA and other institutions at Yale in which the broader conceptual and historical issues debated during the conference can be brought to bear on the analysis of specific objects and images.

Panels include:

* The Legacies of Slavery in Jamaica
* The Legacies of Jamaican Slavery in the United Kingdom
* Labor and the Legacies of Slavery
* Music and the Legacies of Slavery

Breakout session topics include:

* The Middle Passage and Iconography of the Slave Ship
* Sugar and the Plantation
* Afro-Jamaican Performance and Art
* Contemporary Afro-Caribbean Art
* Anglo-Jamaican Print Culture
* Slave Gardens

The conference will also feature a performance by a local reggae band and a screening of Stephanie Black’s film “Life and Debt.”

All conference activities will be held at the YCBA, 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT, unless otherwise noted.

This conference is free and open to the public. Registration is required. To register, please e-mail Serena Guerrette at ycba.research@yale.edu. For more information and a complete conference schedule as it becomes available, visit http://www.yale.edu/glc/belisario/index.htm.