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This event will take place on Zoom, as part of our Archaeology and Heritage series.

We are delighted to welcome Gabby Omoni Hartemann, PhD candidate in Archaeology and Anthropology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.  He will present his work on Amazonia.

While Amazonia is hardly remembered and imagined as a territory of Blackness, African ancestors have since long planted deep roots in the multiple places that resulted in thriving Black Amazonian communities. Ancestral stories of heartbreak and joy, migration and rooting, tradition and reconfiguration of world-senses and languages, are intertwined and manifest in material and immaterial ways. Archaeological knowledge, once it confronts its maintenance of coloniality and accepts moving away from its inherent epistemic violence, appears as a potent tool to materialize and make visible unremembered, invisible stories of Blackness. Mana, a Guianese village founded in 1836 by 477 West African people and Hartemann's ancestral territory, is the ground from which he bases his attempts at imagining an anticolonial archaeological mode of knowledge, one rooted in Indigenous and Diasporic African ontoepistemologies, memory, orality, and ancestrality.