Subjects & Subjection: European Traders, African Sovereigns & Representing Lost Pasts

Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies presents the 60th Annual Erasmus Lecture

In recognition of the importance of the Centre’s Erasmus collection, each year a scholar of international reputation is invited to present a formal fall lecture at the CRRS. The CRRS is happy to feature Dr. Herman Bennett’s Keynote Address the 2024 Erasmus Lecture.

Abstract:

Employing the familiar philosophical framing, Subject & Subjection, this talk brings into relief an overlooked moment in the African-Christian encounter.  “I am overdetermined from without,” wrote Frantz Fanon in reference to a decidedly modern colonial context refracting the existentialist dilemma configured by subject and subjection.  But as this talk argues, reducing subject and subjection to a singular past risks overdetermining and reducing blackness to a mere negation thereby losing sight of experiences that exceeded governance mediated by early-modern difference (race) and materiality (capitalism).

Speaker:

Dr. Herman Bennett, Distinguished Professor, History, Africana Studies, American Studies, Global Early Modern Studies
CUNY Graduate Center

Herman Bennett is a renowned scholar on the history of the African diaspora, with a particular focus on Latin American history. Through his work, he has called for scholars to broaden the critical inquiry of race and ethnicity in the colonial world. He has written extensively on the presence of African slaves and freedmen in Mexican society during the colonial period and on the consequent interaction between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans in colonial Mexico. Bennett has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has lectured widely in Europe and the Americas, and comes to the Graduate Center from Rutgers University after starting his scholarly career at Johns Hopkins University. Bennett holds a Ph.D. in Latin American history from Duke University where he was a Mellon Scholar of the Humanities.