Governor General to receive honorary degree
TORONTO, March 21, 2007 -- The history and heritage of African peoples and the stories of their migration around the world – often as slaves – have found a home in a new research institute at York University.
Her Excellency the Right Honourable Michaëlle Jean, Governor General of Canada, will open the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples on Sunday, to mark the 200th anniversary of the British law to abolish the slave trade. The Governor General will also be awarded an honorary doctor of laws.
“We are truly honoured that the Governor General will be inaugurating the Tubman Institute, which is unique in Canada in its field of academic research,” said York President and Vice-Chancellor Lorna R. Marsden.
The official opening will be preceded by an international symposium on Friday and Saturday – “Slavery, Memory, Citizenship” – with experts on the African diaspora addressing topics such as the impact of British abolition and the legacy of slavery (see symposium program at http://www.yorku.ca/nhp/index2.htm).
“The Tubman Institute will be a window through which the slave histories of black people in Canada and throughout the African diaspora can be seen. Their stories cannot be whitewashed from our collective memory,” said York Professor Paul Lovejoy, director of the new institute and Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History.
The new institute will build on work done by researchers at York’s Harriet Tubman Resource Centre on the African Diaspora, headed up by Lovejoy since 2002. The centre – and now the Institute – are named in honour of Harriet Tubman, a Maryland woman who fled slavery in 1849 and became a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad that helped enslaved Africans flee the U.S. for the relative safety and freedom of Canada in the 1850s.
Personal and official documents, photographs, interviews and maps archived by the Institute tell the stories of the migration of African peoples around the globe, whether voluntary or by force, over hundreds of years.
“The type of interdisciplinary research we are doing draws on subjects that range from music to biography, and from culture to religion,” said Lovejoy. “We are interested in issues of identity and ethnicity, as well as gender.”
The Tubman Institute is the only academic research centre in Canada that focuses on the dispersion of Africans around the globe. It has close ties to other types of institutions that are preserving the stories of black Canadians – the Buxton Museum near Chatham, Ont., for example. In addition, researchers affiliated with the institute, both at York and other institutions, are involved in projects in more than 14 countries. York Professor José Curto is digitalizing records in Portugal, Angola and Brazil for his work on fugitive slaves and the urban history of Angola, for example, and York PhD candidate Nadine Hunt has taken digital photos of archival source materials in Jamaica.
“The work of the Institute is global in scope because the movement of Africans was a worldwide phenomenon,” said Lovejoy. “It affected numerous regions, particularly the Americas and the Islamic lands of North Africa and the Middle East.”
To ensure that the archive of primary documents gathered from around the world can be shared with the world, the Tubman Institute is developing leading-edge digital technology. A special database being developed with Scott Library and Emory University in Atlanta will be searchable in a number of languages and will interface with other databases including one from an Emory project that is compiling data on the voyages that brought enslaved Africans to the Americas.
“The role of slavery in the creation of the modern world is too often forgotten,” said Professor David Trotman, associate director of The Tubman Institute. “The Institute will help to ensure that African slave names, voices and experiences take their place in the institutional memory of this society, and will contribute to an informed discussion about issues of social justice in the world today.”
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Media contact:
Janice Walls, Media Relations, York University, 416-736-2100 x22101/ wallsj@yorku.ca
Keith Marnoch, Media Relations, York University, 416-736-2100 x22091/ marnoch@yorku.ca
