Talk: Crop Over

Join Professor Dame Sonia Boyce to explore the history of the Crop Over carnival in Barbados, 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, Boyce will reflect on her double-screened film 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. 

This is a collaborative event between Royal Museums Greenwich and the UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, and forms part of the Centre’s ‘Speaker Series’. The series honours one of UCL History’s most distinguished graduates, the Guyanese historian Elsa V. Goveia.

This event takes place in the Great Hall of the Queen's House. Drinks and canapés will be served after the lecture.

About the speaker 

Professor Dame Sonia Boyce (DBE, RA) is an interdisciplinary artist and academic working across film, drawing, photography, print, sound and installation. She came to prominence in the 1980s as a key figure in the emerging Black-British artists movement.  

In 2022, she represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, going on to win the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. She is a Professor at University of the Arts London, and in 2024 she received a damehood for services to art. 

About UCL's 'Speaker Series' 

Elsa V. Goveia (1925-1980) read History (Honours) at UCL from 1945-1948. She was one of the first West Indian students to have studied in the department. While a student at UCL she won the prestigious Pollard Prize for English History in 1947. She completed her PhD from University of London in 1952 and became a distinguished historian and teacher of British slavery.  

For three decades she taught History at the University of the West Indies, Mona, in Jamaica, where she was responsible for a pioneering course on Caribbean History. Among her publications are A Study of the Historiography of the British West Indies and Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century. This speaker series in Goveia's alma mater department honours her foundational work in the study of Atlantic slavery.  

Banner image: Anne Purkiss