Speculative Play and Just Futurities | Dr. Jazma Sutton and Dr. Emmanuel Saboro

Dr. Jazma Sutton and Dr. Emmanuel Saboro will present “Moving Toward Freedom: Black Women, Slavery, and Freedom in Antebellum Indiana” and Sites of Memory: Visuality and Metaphors of the Slave Experience in Ghana.

Dr. Jazma Sutton (she/her/hers) is an assistant professor at Miami University. Her research focuses on the histories of slavery and freedom in the U.S. with a particular interest in African American women’s history and the Midwest. She is currently working on a book project that chronicles the lives of Black women–free, enslaved, and self-liberated– in antebellum Indiana and the ways in which they overcame social, legal, and geographic obstacles to develop regional identities, carve out space for themselves as citizens, and ensure family survival.

Dr. Sutton aims to explore the potential of speculative archives to uncover new ways of documenting the experiences of Black women in the antebellum Midwest. Through the creation of a digital archival resource guide, her project seeks to provide a critique of the production, collection, categorization, and future discoverability of sources related to Black women within Indiana’s predominantly white archives. Moving beyond traditional archival practices to center the sources, archives, and oral histories produced by nineteenth-century Black women and their descendants, her project demonstrates how Black archives, and descendant knowledge in particular, can reshape our view of the past and how we preserve it in the future.

Dr. Emmanuel Saboro, PhD (he/him) is an Associate Professor in Transdisciplinary Studies: African Literature, Cultural Memory, and Slavery Studies at the Centre for African and International Studies, University of Cape Coast, Ghana. He obtained his PhD at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE), University of Hull, England. He has published extensively on memories of slavery in Ghana. His most recent book is Wounds of Our Past: Remembering Captivity, Enslavement and Resistance in African Oral Narratives (2022) published in the Global Slavery Series, Brill Leiden and Boston.

During the SPJF Residency at Indiana University, Professor Saboro will be working on the project, Sites of Memory: Visuality and Metaphors of the Slave Experience in Ghana. This is a work in progress and builds on an already vibrant body of scholarship on memory studies in Africa. Its major originality is that it will expand our current understanding of the enterprise of enslavement and the slave trade by calling for a re-reading of key cultural and historical sites, connected to the slave experience in Ghana beyond their structural representations but as symbolic spaces that can “speak” and be understood only through the imagination and the invocation of metaphor.