Lecture by Marjoleine Kars

The author is composing a biography of two African men, Accara and Gousarie, who were caught up in Dutch slavery and colonialism during the Age of Revolution. Leaders in the 1763 Berbice slave rebellion, they next served as slave hunters, army drummers in the Dutch Republic, and Maroon fighters in Suriname. Defying easy characterization, the pair were victims, perpetrators, resisters, and collaborators – sequentially and, at times, simultaneously. This talk will detail my research findings to date and raise questions about how to write the biographies of people forced to shape-shift across boundaries and allegiances and whose presence in the archives is equally slippery.

Bio: A native of the Netherlands, Marjoleine Kars works in the field of early modern Atlantic history, specifically resistance and revolution, slavery, and Dutch colonialism.Her first book, Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), examines the role of radial Protestantism in the Regulator Rebellion in pre-revolutionary North Carolina. Her second book, Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (New York: The New Press, 2020), investigates a massive and nearly successful slave rebellion in a Dutch colony (now Guyana) on the Caribbean coast of South America. The book was a NPR “Best Books for 2020,″ co-winner of the 2021 Frederick Douglass Prize and the winner of the 2021 Cundill History Book Prize. Professor Kars is currently at work on a biography of two eighteenth-century African men caught up in slavery and resistance in the Dutch Atlantic world.

IISH Seminar: This lecture is part of the monthly IISH Seminar series.

In principle, seminars take place every first Tuesday of the month. The seminar is open to the public, but with regard to accommodation, we would like you to register, jacqueline.rutte@bb.huc.knaw.nl, under the mention of 'lecture'.