Working on the Unfinished Conversations Project this summer allowed me the opportunity to draw connections and linkages across the African diaspora in ways I was previously not afforded. Beginning with viewing interviews from Africatown, I was immediately thrown into contexts different from my own yet whose contours were familiar to me. The interviewees reminded me of great aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins to whom I owe a visit. This familiarity, while comforting, also took a toll over time. Reviewing their experiences of precarity required I read between the lines of their resistance efforts to gather the ways they were still being subjected to discrimination and violence for their original “sin” of being Black and, consequently, captured against their will. Scholars in  Black studies talk about the violence of the archive and I understood this sentiment in the abstract. But confronting this archive of the present gathered by Unfinished Conversations brought this violence into sharp relief for myself in ways beyond simple intellectual exercise or philosophical abstraction. Over the course of the summer, I began to feel these stories in my blood like they were sediment and my body a river flowing over the bank’s edge, perhaps the one Cudjoe Lewis arrived at in Alabama in 1860. Indeed, water—along with hands—was a common theme. Both allude to a certain type of tactility and movement, a movement that carried my consciousness across the Atlantic to South Africa for the second half of the summer. This archive was obviously unfamiliar in many ways, but because of the global catastrophe that is anti-Blackness, I still found myself resonating with some of these interviewees. The way one interviewee fromSouth Africa, for example, spoke of her grandmother pushed me back from my desk and required I take a lap around my office. I was struck by the intimacy of her witnessing of her grandmother’s racialized strife and burdensome relation with capital and managerial labor that undoubtedly drained her vitality and dynamism—the costs of Blackness in the colonial context. These, too, are things I’ve witnessed. After this summer, I’m left with a question: after the witnessing is over, what do we owe to those whose suffering we just witnessed?

zuri arman ’26 Ph.D. 
Unfinished Conversations Researcher

At the intersection of archive and exhibition, the Global Curatorial Project informed me of the personal responsibility required to truthfully describe and represent oral histories. This issue emphasizes the need to strike a delicate balance between curatorship and ethics. While delving into interviews conducted in Senegal, a pattern of fluid exchanges — more akin to monologue than an interview — emerged. It is powerful to be faced with the challenge of curating and summarizing narratives devoid of a question-and-answer structure; that is, to pick apart material that is innately whole. Ultimately, it accentuates how recognizing patterns within historical narratives should operate without forcefully superimposing interpretations. It is about embracing the threads that weave materials together while upholding the intrinsic value of each individual account.

Being one of the few people to actively engage with large sums of this material has been the most authentic and brilliant way in which I have learned about colonialism and enslavement. Oral histories have the power to humanize historical accounts that are often devoid of accuracy and care — given how history is controlled by colonial institutions. Therefore, particularly acknowledging that this work is possible through Brown University — a colonial institution with deep ties to racial slavery — I aspire to prioritize sustaining the level of humanity intrinsic to the source material while condensing it into the written form and pondering about what it means to actively pursue ethical archival and curatorial practice.

Nélari Alejandra Figueroa Torres ’25 
Unfinished Conversations Researcher

As Global Curatorial research assistant under the Unfinished Conversations project, I learned about the different ways that racial slavery’s legacies exist in locations such as Liverpool, UK and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. During interviews, each narrator shared with me wisdoms that I will never forget and revealed global systemic injustices that I had not previously been cognizant of as someone living in the U.S. It is the echoing of their words in my ears that guided my research presentations and interview summaries for the Global Curatorial Project exhibit, “In Slavery’s Wake.” As someone who enjoys museums and hopes to work within them, I know this position has permanently altered the way I operate in these institutions. I’ve come to realize there are questions that must be asked in every exhibition and every display of art: who decided; who led; who served; whose stories are being told; whose stories aren’t being told; how can we effectively pass the microphone around to each person who hopes to speak?

Laura Tamayo ’25 
Unfinished Conversations Researcher

I had the lovely privilege to work with the Unfinished Conversations program as an Archives Assistant. In a practical sense, I gained essential skills that expanded my knowledge in what is involved with digital preservation and working on a project with such a large and important initiative. I also gained significant insight into the Afro-Brazilian experience, which differs from my personal life experience with the Azorean-Cape Verdean context. I witnessed many parallels, differences, and the stories of people sharing the reality of racial slavery and its after effects. I also worked closely with the material from South Africa, where the testimonies of the vineyard workers stay with me to this day. I cannot thank the Center or the project team enough for this amazing opportunity.

Daniel Everton ’24 A.M
Unfinished Conversations Graduate Archivist

Spending my summer working on the Unfinished Conversations project has provided me with remarkable new insight on racial slavery’s impact within a global and cross-cultural context. Starting with Liverpool, I was able to delve into the rich Black community fostered by the city’s positioning as a hub of diasporic interaction. Each interviewee brought unique perspectives from their familial heritage, each providing a new lens through which to analyze racial slavery’s afterlives. Particularly captivating for me was the physical and facial expression of the interviewees. It was through these non-verbal modes of communication that a deeper understanding of the intimate ideas they were expressing was able to be reached. One interviewee from Liverpool, UK  for example, found himself embracing an elder in a warm hug as the elder entered the mosque where his interview was being conducted. This came almost immediately after he expressed the importance of attaining education through one's elders and ancestors. A similar dynamic was witnessed in the Brazil interviews, as interviewees frequently had physical outbursts of emotion to highlight their stories. In one of the most visually remarkable moments of Brazil’s interviews, a samba musician plays a song on his cuíca, looks towards the camera, and grins as the camera cuts to black. This intimate moment comes after the musician expresses the ways in which playing music connects him to his ancestors and Afro-Brazilian heritage. In short, these moments of visual engagement expanded my understanding of what it means to learn. Indeed, there will always be much to gain from textbooks, lectures, and essays. Emotional vulnerability and expression, however, serve as a foreground for educational engagement in unimaginably potent ways. 

Gustav Hall ’24 
Unfinished Conversations Researcher

When Professor Bogues first outlined the origins of Unfinished Conversations and described the many years of work that had led to the development of “In Slavery’s Wake,” he shared the urgent request a group of persons who lived on the outskirts of Dakar. “Please tell our stories,” they said. Despite my previous research experience in the archives, I immediately felt the full weight of this incredible responsibility. In contrast to my past research experience, our task was not to bring the so-called expired narratives of the archive to life—to unearth them in service of the present—but instead to engage and represent the experiences of the still-living.

Among other things, I learned that the oral history method carries the possibility of immediate and long-term social impact for individuals and their communities. Some of the interviewees were at first hesitant to share certain parts of their life story. They seemed to distrust external actors. Malintention, exploitation, and neglect were such common threads across all of the UC site locations. But more often than not, as the interviews progressed, interviewees became more willing to share, in detail, the intimate stories that had informed their lives. For them, the experience not only offered an opportunity for catharsis but, more significantly, placed their personal reflections at the center of ongoing de-colonial and anti-colonial discourses and in service to a project of global significance. The last thing I’ll say: memory was constantly at work, either directly or indirectly, spoken or unspoken, throughout these interviews. I was continuously struck by how memory was operating in the oral-collection and how, for many interviewees, refusing to forget had become a crucial strategy (not a cure) for world-building and reimagining.

Dillon Stone ’25 
Unfinished Conversations Researcher