The 2024-25 MacKay History Lecture

"The Underground Railroad as Afrofuturism: Exploring New Galaxies in the Outer Spaces of Slavery" 
Thursday, October 24, 2024
7:00 p.m.
room 1028, Kenneth C. Rowe Management Building, 6100 University Avenue, Halifax

Featuring dann j. Broyld, Associate Professor of African American History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell
Organized by Philip Zachernuk, Department of History

The lens of Afrofuturism can address new dimensions of the Underground Railroad, detailing what imagination, tact, and technology it took for fugitive Blacks to flee to the “outer spaces of slavery.” Runaways revealed the inner workings of their intelligence with each day they were away. Escaping slavery brought dreams to life, and at times must have felt like “magical realism,” or an out-of-body experience. The American North, Canada, Mexico, Africa, Europe, and free Caribbean islands were otherworldly and science fiction-like, in contrast to where Black fugitives ascended. This talk will address the intersections of race, technology, and liberation by retroactively applying a modern concept to dynamic historical Black moments.
 

dann j. Broyld is an associate professor of African American History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He earned his PhD in nineteenth-century United States and African Diaspora History at Howard University. His work focuses on the American–Canadian borderlands and issues of Black identity, migration, and transnational relations as well as oral history, material culture, and museum-community interactions. Broyld was a 2017-18 Fulbright Canada scholar at Brock University and his book Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region During the Final Decades of Slavery (2022) was published with the Louisiana State University Press. Borderland Blacks recently won the Ontario Historical Society's 2022-23 Fred Landon Book Award. 

Learn more about the MacKay Lecture Series