PODCAST

Things - 25 May 2016 - Slaves

Dr James Poskett (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge)Remembering Haiti: Phrenology, Slavery and the Material Culture of Race, 1791-1861Dr Stefan Hanß (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge)Familiar with the Matter: Slavery and the Body in the Early Modern MediterraneanAbstracts:Dr James Poskett. Eustache Belin saw the violence of slavery and revolution first hand. Born a slave on the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1773, Eustache spent his youth toiling in the sugar mills. But amidst the Haitian Revolution of 1791, he escaped to Paris. Incredibly, in the 1830s, a French phrenologist took a cast of Eustache’s head. Over the next thirty years, Eustache became a focal point for discussion of African character. Phrenologists wanted to understand the relationship between the African mind, slavery and revolution. In this talk, I follow the bust of Eustache as it travelled back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. In doing so, I show how a single phrenological bust