Exhibit Launch | Slavery and Freedom: Journeys Across Time and Space

Duke History and Franklin Gallery@History invites you to the grand opening of their latest exhibit, featuring a talk with Indrani Chatterjee, the John L. Nau III Distinguished Professor in the History and Principles of Democracy, at the University of Virginia. "Slavery and Freedom: Journeys Across Time and Space" originated from an exhibit, "The Surprising Story of Furcy Madeleine (1786-1856)," created by the Museum of Villèle in Réunion, France. It features the story of Furcy Madeleine, a man of South Asian descent who was kept enslaved illegally for forty years on the French colony of Isle Bourbon, today known as Réunion Island, and the English colony of Mauritius, in the southwest Indian Ocean. The exhibit tells the story of Furcy's long struggle for legal freedom. A tale of family secrets and lies, this captivating drama feels like fiction but is entirely true - and yet it was all forgotten for nearly two centuries. Furcy Madeleine's story and the work of the Museum of Villèle inspired a team of undergraduate students from Duke to examine how North Carolina history connected with the histories of slavery and freedom in the Indian Ocean World. In the fall 2024 semester, they researched the history of slavery in North Carolina and Historic Stagville (Durham, NC) under the supervision of Prof. Mélanie Lamotte. The students who contributed to this exhibit are: Joel Balogun, Fehintoluwa Benson, Maya Bragg, Joel Hernandez, Henry Morrison, Frederico Schmaltz de Rezende Ribeiro, and Diana Villa-Segura. Chatterjee's topic of discussion will be "Connected but Different: Masters in the Indian and Atlantic Ocean Worlds of the 19th Century." A historian of South Asia, Indrani Chatterjee researches the intersections of gender, religion and politics between the late 17th and 20th centuries. She is the author of Gender, Slavery and the Law in Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 1999), editor of Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (2006) and co-editor with Richard Eaton of Slavery and South Asian History (2007). With the aid of two grants, she published Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages and Memories of Northeast India (Oxford University Press, 2013), which won the Srikanth Dutt award from the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (New Delhi, India). She has also contributed chapters to edited volumes, essays to print and electronic journals. Zoom link for lecture: https://duke.is/Chatterjee