Unfinished Conversations

“Unfinished Conversations” (UC) is a new form of curatorial practice, public engagement, and programming to collect, give voice to, and provide a platform for untold histories, memories, and narratives related to the history of racialized slavery and its afterlives. By sharing experiences, histories and memories from people around the world who have experienced the legacies of racial slavery and colonialisms in different ways, scholars, educators and the public will have a new understanding of this global system and how it continues to shape communities today — in both shared and regionally specific ways. This website is a resource for educators and scholars about the history and legacies of global racial slavery and colonization told by those who have personally experienced it. The website is a part of the broader Unfinished Conversations collaborative project.

Contributors to this project include Tony Bogues (PI), Shana Weinberg (Simmons Center), Kiku Langford McDonald (Simmons Center), Tarika Sankar (CDS), Ashley Champagne (CDS), Elizabeth Yalkut (CDS), Patrick Rashleigh (CDS), Khanh Vo (CDS), Bianca Pallo (John Hay Library), Karyn De Paula Mota, Yannick Etoundi

Depicting Glory

Depicting Glory is a digital project that presents a group of rare Chinese objects drawn from across the Brown University Library. Most of these items date from the late Qing dynasty in the 19th century, though one item is a set of maps published in Taiwan around 1960. Although the items were created in different times and places, they collectively reflect societal sentiments surrounding an issue central to China’s modernization process: the intersection of power, status, and collective identity. Each of these objects involves a public reckoning with a dramatic shift in a power that came with the great expansion of military might and regional status in the late 18th century, the cataclysmic erosion of power and order across the 19th century, and the ongoing quest to restore power and glory from the 20th century right through to the present.

Contributors to this project include Ashley Champagne (CDS Lead), Elli Mylonas