This roundtable offers a constellation of papers on interrelated themes of Black Experiences, Material cultures, and Antislavery in the seventeenth to nineteenth-century British Atlantic world.

In "Mineral Spas as Sites of Black Experience, Community-Building, and Expertise in the British Atlantic”, Amanda Herbert (Durham, UK) recognizes the history of enslaving Black people to the spa in Jamaica, but emphasizes that Black healers and patients claimed effective antislavery agency and autonomy, and built community, by using mineral waters to create cures, to connect spiritually, and to help their bodies feel whole and well. In using spas some free Black Britons appropriated European tropes, as when Ignatius Sancho depicted himself as a Black Neptune, navigating the spa with command and ease.

In “Filled with the fruits of forced labor, consecrated to the brotherhood of man: slavery, refinement, and some paradoxes in the British antislavery movement”, Anna Roberts (Johns Hopkins), examines the paradoxical material and ideological culture of snuffboxes, objects housing tobacco grown by enslaved laborers in the Chesapeake, but which were used by some formerly enslaved people, including Ignatius Sancho, and in which snuffboxes became an important medium of antislavery activism when Britons affixed Wedgwood’s antislavery medallion to the lids of their snuffboxes, while the antislavery activist Cugoano was employed by a famed snuffbox miniaturist. By the 1840s, free Black Baltimoreans recognized antislavery activism by gifts of snuffboxes.

In “Dugout Canoes in Atlantic Africa and the Diaspora”, Kevin Dawson (UC, Merced) considers the social, cultural, and spiritual meanings of dugout canoes in Atlantic Africa and the diaspora as central elements in the creation of communities of belonging, conjoining aquatic and terrestrial experiences. More than material objects, they were living entities embodying and expressing generational wisdom and charting community skills. Companions, collaborators, and members of communities of belonging, they transported canoeists safely across liquid expanses and returned them home. Waterways were a sacred space, populated with spirits and deities. Many believed the realm of the dead lay under or across the Atlantic or a large river. Canoes enabled male and female canoeists to connect with ancestral spirits and aquatic deities.

In "Art, Artists and AfroBritish Antislavery Arguments 1787-1792: Quobna Ottobah Cugoano's *Thoughts and Sentiments* in context," John Marshall (Johns Hopkins) analyses that most radical anti-imperial antislavery eighteenth century text by the formerly enslaved Afro-Briton Ottobah Cugoano in combination with analysing art depicting Afro-Britons, including the depiction of Cugoano himself with the artists Richard and Maria Cosway, Cugoano's employers, and with art issued in the midst of campaigns against slavery and the slave trade during 1787-1792 by artists who joined Richard Cosway in supporting publication of Cugoano’s works.

Zara Anishanslin (Delaware), an expert on British Atlantic material culture, will offer a short comment. The panel will be chaired by Marisa Fuentes (Rutgers), an expert on the Black Atlantic. The roundtable aims to offer a kaleidoscopic view of, and an antiracist agenda for thinking about, Black Experiences, Atlantic Material Cultures, and Antislavery.