Peter A. Mark Professor em. für Kunstgeschichte, Wesleyan University Aufenthalt am Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: April 2024Forschungsthema am Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: »The earliest West African responses to the Atlantic slave trade«Projektbeschreibung: While historians and anthropologists have studied in detail both the origins of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Africans’ ritualized memory of that trade, the earliest responses to the slave trade by local communities in West Africa (Senegambia and Guiné) have hitherto been ignored. Contemporary eyewitness documentation exists, written by Portuguese and Luso-African merchants. My research, mining these written accounts, has uncovered the existence of the first communities of runaway slaves in West Africa. These proto-Maroon communities were established by the late 16th and early 17th century. Several communities of escaped slaves were established, with at least the tacit support of local Africans. These maroon communities were composed in part or entirely of captives who had escaped from the Portuguese. During the late sixteenth century, fugitive slaves established villages where they were safe from recapture. In broad outline this was similar to maroon communities in Suriname and Jamaica, except that there was no need for a military force to protect against recapture. By the 1660s, these communities offered asylum only to slaves who had escaped from Europeans, suggesting the inception of an identity that transcended local ethnic groupings. Were there women among the escaped captives? Did asylum communities provide wives from among the local community? What was the motivation for leaders or elders in the host community? Was it to increase the numbers of their dependents? My research addresses these questions. (Peter A. Mark) Zusammenarbeit: Peter Mark ist auf Einladung von Professor Roland Hardenberg und dem Frobenius-Institut für kulturanthropologische Forschung an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main zu Gast am Kolleg. Wissenschaftliches Profil von Peter A. MarkPeter Mark ist Professor em. für Kunstgeschichte an der Wesleyan University. Seit 1984 forscht und lehrt er regelmäßig am Frobenius-Institut, u.a. als Alexander-von-Humboldt-Fellow. Von 2015 bis 2019 war er Gastprofessor für Geschichte an der Faculty of Letters der Universität Lissabon. Außerdem hat er am Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art (Paris, 2019) und am Max-Planck-Institut (Halle, 2018) geforscht; von 2012 bis 2013 war er als Senior Fellow zu Gast am Forschungszentrum »Re:work, Arbeit und Lebenslauf in globalhistorischer Perspektive« an der Humboldt-Universität (Berlin).Website: Weitere Informationen über Peter Mark finden Sie hier. Forschungsschwerpunkte: Kulturgeschichte Westafrikas: vorkoloniale Geschichte, Kunstgeschichte und europäisch-afrikanischer Austausch vom 16. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, Formen von Gefangenschaft und unfreier Arbeit vor der Ausbreitung des atlantischen Sklavenhandels
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