Aline Helg


Aline Helg is a historian, specialist in the history of slavery. She is known for her research and books on the history of revolutions, the Americas, the African diaspora, civil rights, racism and ethnicity.

Biography

At the age of six, her parents left to live in America and she experienced living in a country with a language unknown to her.
She obtained her doctorate at the University of Geneva in 1983 and became a professor in the same institution in 2003.As Switzerland offered her few opportunities as a historian after her doctorate, she began her academic career in America working on Cuba, and Colombia. She was interested in emancipation movements and the racial question, and focused on how people demonstrated resilience to build a dignified life.
She subsequently taught at the Department of Political Science at University of Los Andes in Bogotá. She also taught at the Faculty of Psychology and Education sciences and at the University Institute of Development Studies of the University of Geneva and at the History Department of the University of Texas at Austin from 1989 to 2003..

History of slavery and revolutions

As Aline Helg says the slave populations of the Americas did not wait for their freedom to be granted, but they have built autonomous emancipation strategies. It indeed counts a good number of freed slaves in South America.
She indeed examined a good number of freed slaves in South America, even before the issue of the abolition of slavery appeared.
She wondered about the means that these people have used to achieve this.
and finds that active rebellion is not the most effective form or even the most used. The browning, the emancipation against the military engagement, the manumission participation and integration of the slave point of view in the discourse on freedom are constitutive strategies developed gradually and a discreet resistance leading little by little towards the resumption of their freedoms in a process called incapacitation. This research questions a vision of the 1980s that insists on impressive revolts and which somehow coincide with a sort of Santo Domingo syndrome.
Aline Helg also wrote articles for different publications such as " Black Men, Racial Stereotyping, and Violence in the U.S. South and Cuba at the Turn of the Century" published online by Comparative Studies in Society and History
Her book, Plus jamais esclave,, tells the story of Francisque Fabulé in particular.
Aline Helg regularly appears in the media as a specialist in the contemporary history of South America..

Awards

In 2016 she received the award of the "Académie romande" for her work Plus Jamais Esclaves.The book explores the liberation strategies adopted by the victims of slavery themselves in the Americas between 1492 and 1838.