TORONTO, September 5, 2002 -- International scholars on the African slave trade will gather at York University September 12-13 to launch the Harriet Tubman Resource Centre on the African Diaspora, a global research centre and digital library on the history of Africans victimized by the slave trade.

Named for the heroine who led many African Americans to freedom in Canada before the American Civil War, the Harriet Tubman Resource Centre will increase the accessibility of documentary evidence of the slave trade and the plight of enslaved Africans in the Americas and the Islamic world. It is the culmination of an internationally supported effort to document the slave trade and bring to light the cultural and personal intermingling of Africans, Europeans and Amerindians that resulted from the forced encounters of slavery. This work furthers the aims of the UNESCO Slave Route Project, to recognize a new pluralism that acknowledges, respects and promotes this cultural diversity and the impact of Africans on the history of the modern world.

The digital library, the first of its kind, combines the resources of a network of scholars around the world, and includes multimedia images, music, audio and video interviews, and original documents and manuscripts in many languages. The digital library uses a tailor-made version of software supplied by IBM Canada Ltd., whose substantial hardware contribution to the project has doubled York’s computer capacity. The centre is working on software innovations to manage the variety of multilingual data, which will be processed in Toronto at York, and at research centres in Benin, Jamaica, Costa Rica and Brazil, as well as at partner institutions in the United States and Britain.

"The preservation of this history, including the many personal histories of enslaved Africans, enables us to see the African cultural patterns that are now an inextricable part of the European, Canadian and American cultural fabric," said York Prof. Paul Lovejoy, an international scholar on the history of the slave trade and holder of the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History. "This forces us to look at our own internationalism and multiculturalism," said Lovejoy. He praised the Canadian and Ontario governments for their generous support of the project through the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Ontario Innovation Trust (OIT).

"Canada and Canadian researchers offer a unique perspective to the world on the notion of diversity and multiculturalism," said Carmen Charette, senior vice-president of CFI. "This state-of-the-art infrastructure will afford our researchers the opportunity to collaborate with the best in the world and help advance research in the global social sciences."

"The Ontario Innovation Trust was delighted to invest in this imaginative use of technology", said David Bogart, executive director of the OIT. "The powerful collaboration between York's industrial partners and its research team led by Prof. Lovejoy has created a unique facility to help Canadians and the world community, preserve and understand these vital historical resources."

Distinguished scholars attending the launch include Dr. André Kramp, director and international coordinator of the UNESCO Slave Route Project in Paris, with which the Tubman Centre is affiliated. Also at the launch, Prof. Lovejoy will announce the donation to the Tubman Centre of a private collection of historical texts on the Caribbean, including many first editions, from Dr. Tony MacFarlane, a medical doctor and philanthropist in the Jamaican Canadian community. The collection provides a major resource for the study of Caribbean history that will complement the digital library. The launch takes place on Thursday, September 12 at 4 p.m. in the Assembly Hall, Room 152A, Founders College, Keele Campus, 4700 Keele St., followed by a reception at 5:30 p.m. A symposium on African religious practices and their offshoots in the Americas, including Orisha (Santeria) and Vodun or voodoo, will convene the following day, Friday, September 13, in Founders College Senior Common Room.

With the assistance of a major collaborative research initiatives grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Prof. Lovejoy and his associates have helped retrace and document the routes of the Atlantic trade in African slaves and the impact on the cultures of the Americas. This research has forced a total reassessment of conventional thinking on Africa.

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For further information, please contact:

Prof. Paul Lovejoy	Susan Bigelow	Suzanne Quinn	Isobel McKone
Dept. of History	Media Relations	Media Relations	Special Projects
York University	York University	Canada Foundation for Innovation	Ontario Innovation Trust
416-736-2100, ext. 66917	416-736-2100, ext. 22091	613-996-3160	416-977-9188, ext. 249
plovejoy@yorku.ca	sbigelow@yorku.ca	suzanne.quinn@innovation.ca	imckone@oit.on.ca

YU/072/02