Presentation: “The Underground Railroad as Afrofuturism: Exploring New Galaxies in the Outer Spaces of Slavery”

Description: This lecture employs the lens of Afrofuturism to address new dimensions of the Underground Railroad, detailing what imagination, tact, and technology, it took for fugitive Blacks to flee to the “outer spaces of slavery.” The talk addresses the intersections of race, technology, and liberation by retroactively applying a modern concept to dynamic historical Black moments. Special attention will be paid to runaways in Central and Western New York that fled to Canada, as well as Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass.

The lecture will be held in the Cayuga Museum’s Carriage House Theater, with the presenter attending virtually.

*ASL services provided by Interpretek, with grant funding thanks to the National Park Foundation 

Presenter bio: dann j. Broyld is an associate professor of African American History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He earned his PhD in nineteenth-century United States and African Diaspora History at Howard University. His work focuses on the American–Canadian borderlands and issues of Black identity, migration, and transnational relations as well as oral history, material culture, and museum-community interactions. He was a 2017-18 Fulbright Canada scholar at Brock University and his book Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region During the Final Decades of Slavery (2022) was published with the Louisiana State University Press. Borderland Blacks won the Ontario Historical Society’s 2022-23 Fred Landon Book Award.

This is a program of the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park presented in partnership with the Cayuga Museum