Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: The Intimacies of Racial Slavery, July 31-August 4

Saidiya Hartman, Instructor 

This is a week-long seminar taking place from July 31st to August 4th, 2017.

The deadline to apply to the summer seminars has passed. 

This course will examine the experience of enslavement by focusing on the lives of enslaved women. The bodies of black women created the legal foundation for racial slavery in Anglo-America. The womb was the key site in the reproduction of property and the making of human commodities. Sexuality was the heart of power in the relationship of master and slave.  Intimacy, sexuality and kinship were disfigured by the extreme violence and dishonor of the institution; and, at the other extreme, the concubines and offspring of slave owners were those most likely to be freed.

In the seminar, we will read the classic nineteenth-century narratives of slavery: The History of Mary Prince and Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, as well as excerpts from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Twelve Years A Slave.   In addition to the narratives, we will read short essays, and chapters from secondary historical sources, which may include Laboring Women, Bound to Wedlock, The Price of Their Pound of Flesh, Out of the House of Bondage and Dispossessed Lives. The goal of the seminar is to engage critically the meaning of sexuality, reproduction, motherhood, intimacy and domination in slaveholding societies.  We will also consult primary documents: ship’s ledgers, wills, bills of sales, and legal cases, to excavate and reconstruct the texture of enslaved lives.

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Slave Route and Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. She is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and has received Fulbright, Rockefeller, and Whitney Oates Fellowships. The book she will work on at the Cullman Center, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, examines the sexual upheavals and radical transformations of daily life that took place in the slums of Philadelphia and New York in the years between 1890 and 1930.