Prof. Dr. Lotte Pelckmans

Senior Fellow (Heinz-Heinen-Fellowship)

Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies

Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, Copenhagen University, Denmark
pelckmans@hum.ku.dk

Title of current research project: "Digital archives and contemporary female anti-slavery activism surrounding descent-based slavery in West Africa and its diaspora." 

Lotte Pelckmans
© Lotte Pelckmans

Academic Profile

I will work on two projects: one is a documentary movie, focussing on diasporic female activism about the legacies of descent-based slavery in West Africa. The second is a Digital Humanities project, which aims at curating an online community archive shared in whatsapp groups, with testimonies by people classified as being descendants of the enslaved in Soninke West Africa. I plan to work on this community archive of counter-memories of the anti-slavery movement central to my documentary movie called 'Ganbanaaxun Fedde' (GF) (2023, 36min).  As one of the first highly digitized and online anti-slavery movements in and from West Africa, GF is using several interconnected WhatsApp groups to communicate with members, collect their testimonies (mostly movies and audio messages) with complaints and grievances, and tries to archive and map some of the online testimonies of those considered descendants of the enslaved. GF members are historical minorities who have been exploited by dominant power structures in their societies, where moral grammars of social hierarchies anchored in the slave past remain accepted and have hegemonic currency. Historians have underlined the power imbalances and scarcity of multiple sources to document resistance (e.g. the multiple displacements) of the enslaved before and after abolition. Contemporary online archives in GF WhatsApp groups, do generate new testimonies of past and present wrongs, documenting resistance, violence, and flight. The project endeavors to make a qualitative analysis of the User-generated content in the WhatsApp archive of the GF movement. This archive reflects an unprecedented collective recognition and understanding of how internal African slavery haunts contemporary post-slavery societies, documents the emergence of new collective identities and foregrounds innovative types of User-generated counter-memories.

since 2020
Associate Professor (fulltime), Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, CPH University, Denmark

2019–2020
Senior Fellowship (fulltime), Heinz Heinen Centre for Advanced Study, Bonn University, Germany

2018–2019
Postdoctoral Researcher (fulltime), Comparative Literature, Arts, Aarhus University, Denmark

2017–2020
External Lecturer (part-time), Centre for Advanced Migration Studies (AMIS), SAXO, Denmark

2016–2017
Pregnancy leave

2014–2016
Researcher (fulltime), Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), CPH, Denmark

2012–2014
Vice Team Coordinator and Researcher (fulltime), Institute for History, Leiden University,  Netherlands

2011–2012
Postdoctoral Researcher (fulltime), Centre for African Studies (EHESS), Paris, France

2010–2011
Assistant Professor (fulltime), Anthropology and Development, Nijmegen University, Netherlands

2011
PhD in African Studies, Leiden University, Netherlands

1998–2003
MA in Anthropology, University of Leiden, Netherlands

Monograph

  • 2011. Travelling hierarchies: Moving in and out of slave status in a Central Malian Fulɓe network. African Studies Collection 34. Leiden.

 

Journal Articles

  • 2024. Forthcoming. As editor. With M. Rodet. "E-motions: A history of unrecorded female rural displacements in post-slavery Africa." Introduction to special issue on 'E-motions,' for the Journal of Migration History.
  • 2023. B. Lecocq. "Post-Slavery. Entry in: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History." Currently only available online without pagenumbers.
  • 2022. With F. Becker, S. Nyanto, J. Giblin, A. McDougall, and A. Meckelburg. "Researching the Aftermath of Slavery in Mainland East Africa: Methodological, Ethical, and Practical Challenges." In Slavery & Abolition 44(1): 131–156.
  • 2021. With M. Rodet, B. Camara, and M.-Ch. Deleigne. "Under the Radar. Descent-based Slavery as a Form of Contemporary Slavery." In The Republic. June-July issue, online.
  • 2021. "Récits cinétiques: le déplacement comme récit de contestation des wahayu, concubines de statut servile dans les régions frontalières du Niger et du Nigeria." In Esclavages & Post-esclavages 4. Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique.
  • 2021. With M. A. Baggesgaard. "Narrating slavery: Introduction." In Esclavages & Post-esclavages 4. Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique.
  • 2015. As editor. With C. Hardung. "La question de l’esclavage en Afrique: politisation et mobilisations." Introduction to "Post-esclavage et Mobilisations," special issue Politique Africaine 140(4): 5–22.
  • 2015. "Stereotypes of Slavery and 'Stereostyles' in Post-Slavery: A multidimensional, interactionist perspective on contemporary hierarchies." In International Journal of African Historical Studies 48(2): 381–401.
  • 2013. "Moving Memories of Slavery among West African Migrants in Urban Contexts (Bamako, Paris)." In European Journal of International Migration 29(1): 45–68.
  • 2012. "'Having a road': social and spatial mobility of persons of slave and mixed descent in post–independence Central Mali." In Journal of African History 53(2): 235–255.
  • 2011. With E. K. Hahonou. "West African Antislavery Movements: Citizenship Struggles and the Legacies of Slavery." In Vienna Journal of African Studies 20: 141–162.
  • 2005. With M. E. de Bruijn. "Facing dilemmas: Former Fulbe slaves in modern Mali." In Canadian Journal of African Studies 39(1): 69–96.

 

Book Chapters

  • 2020. "Fugitive Emplacements: Slave Concubines in Niger-Nigerian Borderlands." In Invisibility in African Displacements, edited by Jesper Bjarnesen and Simon Turner, 216–235. London: Zed Books.
  • 2017. "Surnames as a passport to social mobility? Renaming practices of Fulɓe slave descendants in Central Mali." In African Slaves, African Masters: Politics, Memories, Social Life, edited by A. Bellagamba, C. Brown, S. Greene, and M. Klein, 255–286. Trenton: Africa World Press.
  • 2013. "'To cut the rope from one's neck?' Manumission documents of slave descendants from Central Malian Fulɓe society." In The Bitter Legacy: African Slavery Past and Present, edited by M. Klein, A. Bellagamba, C. Brown, and S. Green, 67–86. Princeton, NJ: Marcus Wiener Publishers.
  • 2012. "Memoryscapes of slavery?: Dependent mobility by 'related' domestic workers in Fulbe elite families in Mali." In Slavery, Migration and Contemporary Bondage in Africa, edited by J. Quirk and D. Vigneswaran, 149–180. Trenton: Africa World Press.
  • 2012. With E. K. Hahonou. "'History must be rewritten!': Revisionist Ambitions among West African Slave Descendants." In Slavery, Memory and Identity: National Representations and Global Legacies, edited by H. Douglas, 91–104. London: Pickering & Chatto.
  • 2007. "Negotiating the memory of Fulbe hierarchy among mobile elite women." In Strength beyond Structure: Social and Historical Trajectories of Agency in Africa, edited by M. E. de Bruijn, R. van Dijk, and J.-B. Gewald, 285–311. Leiden: Brill.