Sonia Boyce

The UCL Centre for the Study of Legacies of British Slavery is delighted to announce the fourth instalment in its Speaker Series honouring one of UCL History’s most distinguished graduates, the Guyanese historian Elsa V. Goveia. Professor Dame Sonia Boyce RA has been invited to present a lecture entitled 'Crop Over'.

The Crop Over carnival in Barbados is a harvest festival that originates out of the conditions of slavery, plantation life and sugar production in the Caribbean. It is a festival similar to Jonkanoo celebrated in Jamaica and the Bahamas, which is a costumed procession of resistance and the carnivalesque.

In this lecture, the artist and academic will reflect on her double-screened film of the same title Crop Over (2007) to talk about Harewood House in Leeds, the Lascelles family and their relationship to the transatlantic slave trade in the English-speaking Caribbean. In parallel, Boyce will also discuss her filming of Crop Over and the persistence of a folk and masquerade culture of resistance, still evident today. Booking is essential

---