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One of the most challenging legacies of the transatlantic slave trade is the destruction of indigenous African knowledge systems. Perhaps the most culturally and historically relevant illustrations of how naming and language are bound up with power and dominance were European colonisers defiling, erasing, denigrating and altering African naming systems. As a consequence, fragmented histories are a staple of peoples who were remade without much of a memory, people whose languages, customs, and beliefs were obscured, devalued, constrained, and disassembled.

The Afro-Jamaican journey seeks roots and historical continuity to nurture identity and self-worth. For us to remember, we must reassemble these fragments—to re-make—to rememory. 

My Sloane Lab Community Fellowship focuses on Jamaican fibre plants as a compliment to my ongoing Jamaican pigment/dye plant research and to deepen connections to land, culture and identity.  My study privileges local plant names, which provide insights into Afro-Jamaican history and culture: how a plant looks, tastes, smells, feels, and reacts to touch and its origins and uses. Scientific plant names do not. Jamaican local plant names are sublime insightful renderings of liberation and self-determination, an antidote to scientific nomenclature. 

Register for the Zoom event and view the full seminar series programme: 

The Sloane Lab Seminar Series is convened by Marco Humbel (Sloane Lab & UCLDH), Nadezhda Povroznik (TU Darmstadt), Julianne Nyhan (TU Darmstadt & UCL) and Andrew Flinn (UCL). Administrative support is provided by Lucy Stagg (UCLDH & UCL IAS).

This joint virtual seminar is co-hosted by University College London, TU Darmstadt, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.

The symposium is funded by the Towards a National Collection programme (Arts and Humanities Research Council) as an activity of the Sloane Lab Discovery Project.