March 15-16: Emerging Perspectives on Race and Gender in the 19th Century United States
One of the projects I’ve been working on as a postdoctoral fellow at the Pennsylvania State University is right around the corner!
The inaugural EMERGING PERSPECTIVES ON RACE AND GENDER IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY UNITED STATES Workshop is a workshop for junior faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and advance graduate students sponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center. And it is happening THIS WEEKEND:
The past two decades have seen an explosion of exciting new perspectives on the subjects of race and gender in nineteenth-century US history. Scholars have demonstrated the integral role of these categories in many of the century’s major developments: from the emergence of a global capitalist economy and the origins of American empire to the making of new regimes of health, medicine, and body care. Along the way, scholars have reinvigorated old conversations and engendered new ones. Historians and other scholars have enriched and enlivened a venerable literature on free and enslaved African-Americans while bringing histories of Latino/a and indigenous Americans into the mainstream. They’ve uncovered previously unknown aspects of women’s lives while exploring the stories of trans- and ambiguously-gendered persons. And they’ve subjected the ‘unmarked,’ taken-for-granted categories of manhood and whiteness to extensive critical scrutiny. In the process, this community of thinkers has shattered the binaries – black/white, woman/man – that have traditionally structured work on race and gender, and provided ample evidence of the benefits to be gained by interdisciplinary and theoretical engagements. Many have embraced the ‘spatial turn’ or employed the human body as a site of scholarly investigation. Others have incorporated theories of performativity or intersectionality into their work, emphasizing the ‘constructed-ness’ of race and gender and the way in which the meanings of these categories inform one another. Taken together, the result of these developments has been a simultaneous expansion and redefinition of what scholarship on race and gender entails.
Some of the best work on these topics is being done by advanced graduate students and scholars in the early stages of their careers. To highlight and encourage this work, the Richards Civil War Era Center at the Pennsylvania State University, in conjunction with the Africana Research Center and the Department of Women’s Studies, invites proposals from early career scholars within three years of having received their PhD and advanced graduate students who are writing their dissertations for the first annual emerging scholars workshop. Taking place March 15-16, 2013 at the University Park campus of the Pennsylvania State University, the workshop will provide a forum for innovative young scholars to discuss new projects involving race and gender with faculty and graduate students from the departments of history, Women’s Studies, and African and African-American Studies. Dr. Daina Ramey Berry of the University of Texas will deliver a keynote address on professionalization and new directions in scholarship. Workshop papers should be no more than ten pages in length and pertain to works-in-progress rather than dissertation projects or book manuscripts nearing completion. Submissions will be pre-circulated to registered attendees and Penn State faculty, including select scholars chosen to provide detailed commentary on papers. Presenters will therefore have the benefit, not only of expert faculty feedback, but informed audience commentary and questions – extending from the immediate context of their papers to broader conversations around race and gender. Presenters can and should assume that commenters and audience members will have a basic familiarity and comfort with feminist and critical race theory and historical literature on race and gender.
The list of participants includes:
Brandon R. Byrd (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)
Cynthia Greenlee Donnell (Duke University)
Kara M. French (University of Michigan)
Kellie Carter Jackson (Harvard University)
Vanessa Holden (Michigan State University)
Stephanie Jones-Rogers (University of Iowa)
Adam C. Lewis (McNeil Center for Early American Studies)
Lyra D. Monteiro (Rutgers University)
Daina Ramey Berry (University of Texas-Austin) will deliver the keynote address.
The panels span four subject areas: Performing Race; Rhetoric, Race, and Politics; Slavery, Childhood, and Violence; The Sexual Marketplace
One of the reasons I took this postdoc was the opportunity to enter on the ground floor of this, the first ever, Richards Center Emerging Perspectives workshop. There are so few workshops of this kind–spaces where early career scholars specializing in race and gender get intensive, critical feedback on works-in-progress in a community of their peers. The Richards Center Emerging Perspectives workshop is also explicitly a ‘safe space’ and professionalizing space for scholars who may need extra support in forming their analyses or advice on how to navigate the next steps of the publication process or their career.
My hope is that the participants will form a cohort and support network among themselves that continues beyond the workshop. We know the feedback loop in academica runs a bit slow. For those of us doing research on race, gender, or sexuality in the early period, finding constructive feedback that moves beyond elementary knowledge and into deep analyses of structural violence, systematic oppression, colonialism and nation-building, transnational flows, bodies, performance, and intimacy can be difficult. Sometimes the feedback we get is destructive or presumes our incompetence because we present as scholars of color, young, queer, etc. Finding mentors, peers, and allies who believe in the work we are doing and understand where we are coming from is crucial. In this sense, I’m hopeful the workshop will lay a foundation for building scholarly community among those of us invested in the study of race and gender in the U.S. and beyond.
Besides which–we are going to have a lot of fun!
For more information on the workshop and the Center, click here.
Image Credit: “Live Stock,” found in Frances Trollope, Domestic manners of the Americans (London, 1832), vol. 2, facing p. 18; reprinted New York, 1832, facing p. 199; [trollope01] as shown on http://bit.ly/UqgoIH, compiled by Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite, and sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library. (Click image for details)
Tagged: 19th century, emerging perspectives workshop, gender, history, race, richards center, sexuality
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Sojourner Truth (1797-1883): Ain’t I A Woman?
Sojourner Truth (1797-1883): Ain’t I A Woman?
Delivered 1851
Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio
Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [member of audience whispers, “intellect”] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or negroes’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.
(via Internet History Sourcebooks | Fordham University posted by Paul Halsall Aug 1997)
“Morgan’s highly original study transforms our understanding of the fundamental assumptions behind slavery in the Americas.”—Kathleen M. Brown, University of Pennsylvania
“Morgan’s remarkably lucid treatment of the role of gender in constructing racial ideologies and in justifying the economic system of slavery should make such complex themes accessible to advanced undergraduates. Her book succeeds in highlighting the importance of African women in determining the shape of the slave system in the New World, as well as the ways in which the system shaped the experiences of African women… . Highly recommended.”—Choice
“The author of this study has made a major contribution … by looking specifically at the issue of gender as a lens through which better to understand the establishment of race-based slavery in Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean and North America.”—The Historian
“When black women were brought from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, their value was determined by their ability to work as well as their potential to bear children, who by law would become the enslaved property of the mother’s master. In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan examines for the first time how African women’s labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies. Beginning with the ideological foundations of racial slavery in early modern Europe, Laboring Women traverses the Atlantic, exploring the social and cultural lives of women in West Africa, slaveowners’ expectations for reproductive labor, and women’s lives as workers and mothers under colonial slavery.
Challenging conventional wisdom, Morgan reveals how expectations regarding gender and reproduction were central to racial ideologies, the organization of slave labor, and the nature of slave community and resistance. Taking into consideration the heritage of Africans prior to enslavement and the cultural logic of values and practices recreated under the duress of slavery, she examines how women’s gender identity was defined by their shared experiences as agricultural laborers and mothers, and shows how, given these distinctions, their situation differed considerably from that of enslaved men. Telling her story through the arc of African women’s actual lives—from West Africa, to the experience of the Middle Passage, to life on the plantations—she offers a thoughtful look at the ways women’s reproductive experience shaped their roles in communities and helped them resist some of the more egregious effects of slave life.
Presenting a highly original, theoretically grounded view of reproduction and labor as the twin pillars of female exploitation in slavery, Laboring Women is a distinctive contribution to the literature of slavery and the history of women.”
-U Penn Press
