EUROTAST
EUROTAST
Charting the Impact of Slavery
An EU research network, EUROTAST brings together an unprecedented range of researchers from the humanities and sciences. Eurotast is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network. Using a combination of historical research, archaeology and cutting-edge genomics the project will address pressing questions relating to the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies. The team of historians, archaeologists and scientists will research the origins of the 12.5 million Africans carried into the transatlantic slave trade, their physical quality of life, and the material legacy of the slave trade.
Partnership work will also include working with networks of museums and schools across Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, and the production of content with the Eurotast team for media dissemination through the BBC and beyond.
For more information see eurotast.eu
Race in Jamaica
About the project
Unveiling the Public Secret: Race in colonial and independent Jamaica
Racial discrimination in Jamaica in the decades preceding and following independence was a public secret: everybody knew it took place in institutions and also within the private sphere of the home but very few people dared to expose this secret. Informed by Critical Race Theory, this book-length project makes racial discrimination in its myriad and often very subtle forms visible in Jamaica from 1918 when organisations were set up that demanded far-reaching reforms until the present, and also explains why and how it was kept a public secret, and mentions some effects of this silencing of race. In doing so, it will provide insights into the workings of race and will also question the usefulness of colour-blindness as a strategy for racial inequality. In colonial and independent Jamaica, any instances of racial discrimination aired in public were non-racialised and it was claimed that all races lived in harmony. This project will show that in spite of this colour blindness, race continued to shape social relations in institutions and private sphere, and that it retarded the progress of racial equality as it prevented government from remedying long-standing racial inequality and made it hard for groups organised along racial lines to emerge and put pressure on government.
The aim is to expand this project first of all along comparative lines, with Phd students or post-docs examining racial discrimination in other former colonised parts of the Americas. And second, to set up an international research network that will facilitate a dialogue between Caribbean historians working on race in the pre- and immediate post-independence period and social scientists working on race in the contemporary Caribbean on the other in order to explore the long-term impact of slavery and colonialism on race relations in the region.
This project is led by Henrice Altink
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