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Artisanal Knowledge and Practical Aesthetics Worshop

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Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

No booking required

Artisanal Knowledge and Practical Aesthetics - Postgraduate workshop organised by Robert Stearn, followed by ‘Equiano and Craft’, lecture by Ruth Mack, State University of New York at Buffalo

Professor Mack’s paper examined the concept of embodied knowledge as it is worked out through Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. Many of the questions brought to Equiano’s text over the past decade concern issues of authenticity and identity (asked in especially provocative form in Vincent Carretta’s biography of Equiano). Professor Mack examined the root of these debates over the location of identity in Equiano’s own thought. She contextualized Equiano’s thinking about society in terms of related Scottish Enlightenment theories he would have known well. The center of the paper concerned craft or maker’s knowledge and its strange fate in the formation of Equiano’s social theory. Here, Professor Mack looked at the way craft is both embraced and distanced from the form of subjectivity Equiano wishes to claim, tainted as craft must be by its association with the slave’s merely bodily identity, as the slave trade conceived of it. Working through this tension in his relation to craft ultimately gives Equiano the terms for an ethnography of his African homeland that is both aesthetic and, ultimately, political.

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