Henry Box Brown; African Atlantic Artists and Radical Interventions

The purpose of this book is to excavate and recover a wealth of under-examined artworks and research materials directly to interrogate, debate and analyse the tangled skeins undergirding visual representations of transatlantic slavery across the Black diaspora. Living and working on both sides of the Atlantic, as these scholars, curators and practitioners demonstrate, African diasporic artists adopt radical and revisionist practices by which to confront the difficult aesthetic and political realities surrounding the social and cultural legacies let alone national and mythical memories of Transatlantic Slavery and the international Slave Trade. Adopting a comparative perspective, this book investigates the diverse body of works produced by black artists as these contributors come to grips with the ways in which their neglected and repeatedly unexamined similarities and differences bear witness to the existence of an African diasporic visual arts tradition. As in-depth investigations into the diverse resistance strategies at work within these artists’ vast bodies of work testify, theirs is an ongoing fight for the right to art for art’s sake as they challenge mainstream tendencies towards examining their works solely for their sociological and political dimensions. This book adopts a cross- cultural perspective to draw together artists, curators, academics, and public researchers in order to provide an interdisciplinary examination into the eclectic and experimental oeuvre produced by black artists working within the United States, the United Kingdom and across the African diaspora. The overall aim of this book is to re-examine complex yet under-researched theoretical paradigms vis-à-vis the patterns of influence and cross-cultural exchange across both America and a black diasporic visual arts tradition, a vastly neglected field of study

Old Print Media, Radical Ideas, and Vernacular Performance in the Life and Work of Robert Wedderburn and Henry Box Brown

This chapter explores the performative and political careers of two key radicals in the nineteenth century Black Atlantic, the Jamaican-born British proto-anarchist Robert Wedderburn (c.1762 -1835?) and the escaped slave and African American abolitionist, Henry Box Brown (c. 1815 - ?). It discusses their political meetings and polemical publications which enabled them to create an audience for their political interventions

Vagrant Presences: Lost Children, the Black Atlantic, and Northern Britain

This article discusses a range of African Atlantic figures whose vagrant and vagabond lifestyles help to broaden Paul Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic. Geographically, the author moves away from metropolitan concerns to discuss the rural and the provincial as key areas to discover hidden truths about African Atlantic peoples. The article investigates North British historical concerns from slavery and its aftermath in Scotland to the Cotton Famine in Lancashire. It takes a close look at the radical Scots-descended Robert Wedderburn, the North-of-England-based circus performer Pablo Fanque and the fugitive slave and wanderer James Johnson. It also discusses contemporary artistic responses to black presence in North Britain by Ingrid Pollard and Jade Montserrat to show how these presences are being remembered and reimagined. It uses the theoretical model developed by Michael Rothberg of “multi-dimensional memory” to investigate the way these historical characters and events are key to the fullest understanding of the Black Atlantic in Britain and beyond

Viewing Inside the Invisible: African Atlantic visual arts in the 1990s

This article examines work by a variety of African Atlantic artists who investigated slavery and memory in the 1990s. They range from the maverick African-American artists and interventionists, Kara Walker and Fred Wilson, through the Cuban artist, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, to the Black British artist, Lubaina Himid. The article will discuss thematic and compositional synergies around the circum-Atlantic and illustrate the currency of what we might call a diaspora aesthetic amongst many of the best African-descended artists working in the 1990s. The article will argue that engagement with art from different geographical regions in the diaspora is key to a full understanding of African Atlantic art praxis in this period

Of Plastic Ducks and Cockle Pickers: African Atlantic Artists and Critiques of Bonded Labour across Chronologies

This article examines the inter-relationship between the historical Transatlantic Slave Trade and contemporary forms of human bondage. This essay explores Kei Miller's poem, 'When Considering the Long, Long Journey of 28,000 Rubber Ducks' together with installations by the black British artist Isaac Julien, to show how each make links between past and present oppressions to create works that are both effective critiques of the excesses of contemporary capitalism and memorials to the victims of the historical trans-Atlantic slave trade. It discusses the memorialisation of the deaths of the Morecambe Bay cockle pickers in 2004 as a key moment in navigating between past and present exploitation

Old fire, new hope: refiring the sunday school, renew the church

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/1648/thumbnail.jp

Thermal Pressurization and Onset of Melting in Fault Zones

We examine how frictional heating drives the evolution of temperature, strength, and fracture energy during earthquake slip. For small slip distances, heat and pore fluid are unable to escape the shearing fault core, and the behavior is well approximated by simple analytical models that neglect any transport. Following large slip distances, the finite width of the shear zone is small compared to the thicknesses of the thermal and hydrological boundary layers, and the fault behavior approaches that predicted for the idealized case of slip on a plane. To evaluate the range in which the predictions of these two sets of approximations are valid, we develop a model that describes how frictional dissipation within a finite shear zone drives heat and mass transport through the surrounding static gouge. With realistic parameter values and slips greater than a few centimeters, the subsequent evolution of strength and fracture energy are approximated well by the planar slip model. However, the temperature evolution is much more sensitive to the finite shear zone thickness, and the ultimate temperature rise tends to be intermediate between that predicted for the two simplified cases. We explore the range of conditions necessary for melting to begin and focus in particular on the potential role of fault zone damage in facilitating fluid transport and promoting larger temperature increases. We discuss how the apparent scarcity of exhumed pseudotachylytes places constraints on some of the more uncertain fault zone parameters.Earth and Planetary SciencesEngineering and Applied Science

A Critical Evaluation of Cohesive Zone Models of Dynamic Fracture

Finite element calculations of dynamic fracture based on embedding cohesive surfaces in a continuum indicate that the predictions are sensitive to the cohesive law used. Simulations were performed on a square block in plane strain with an initial edge crack loaded at a constant rate of strain. Cohesive laws that have an initial elastic response were observed to produce spontaneous branching at high velocity, but to modify the linear elastic properties of the body. As a consequence the cohesive surface spacing cannot be refined arbitrarily and becomes an important length scale in the simulations. Cohesive laws that are initially rigid do not alter the linear elastic response of the body. However, crack branching behavior was not observed when such a cohesive relation was implemented using a regular finite element mesh.Earth and Planetary SciencesEngineering and Applied Science

Jade Montserrat’s Fugitive Traces and Earth-Splattered Bodies: Making African Atlantic Homespace in Alien Environments Then and Now (1758–2018)

This article discusses the Scarborough-born Black British artist Jade Montserrat, interrogating her multimedia work in the light of the history of slavery and Black British presence, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. It looks specifically at the video works Clay and Peat Bog, discussing them in the context of their relation to Black presence in the North and the history of Black agency including new information about runaway slaves. The watercolour Toes and the installation piece No Need for Clothing are discussed in these terms as well, while the latter is used also to describe how charcoal traces from the work illuminate the physical cost of the work on Black bodies. The article uses theoretical work by Edouard Glissant, Paul Ricoeur, Michael Rothberg, Katherine McKitterick, Ian Baucom, and Hannah Arendt, as well as the context of Black British history, to help illuminate the multiple meanings the work engenders