Webinar: Enslaved Series: Rise! Black Resistance: Gabriel’s Revolt to George Floyd

Enslaved Series: Rise!
Black Resistance: Gabriel’s Revolt to George Floyd
 
Sunday, August 29, 2021 at 10:00 AM

Register HERE

Rise: Narratives of Resistance

“Rise” questions the genre of slave rebellion in all its commercial and political uses.

I argue the central dynamic (social power and submission) is less about Black agency than about readerly [White] pleasure.

Texts like “Nat Turner’s Rebellion,” or even “The Life of Frederick Douglass” (or sci-fi spin-offs of the genre such as Battlestar Galactica and Westworld) fulfill the contract a narrative implicitly makes with a reader: give me pleasure but don’t make me complicit.

Enslaved Series Overview

“Enslaved” will examine:

1) the broad European beginnings (in philosophy and material practice) of the transatlantic slaver empires;

2) the developing commodity practice of selling humans, from its islands and Latin American beginnings, to the English colonies and the eventual States and beyond;

3) the interlocking system of law and practical enslavement, Indigene as well as Black, upon which an empire of wealth and death established itself;

4) after 1774 the structural dependency of State economies (North and South) on the selling of black bodies;

5) the forms of active and passive resistance to the colonizers and the rise of the stateless;

6) and finally, the defining in law and through cultural norms and social practice, of the caste of legal Whiteness in Anglo-colonial society. These interconnected narratives bring us to the present political scene: the development of a raced (White) Ethnostate in contemporary US.