ɫƵ Center for Global Humanities presents “How Abolitionists Put the Body at the Center of the Fight Against Slavery”
The campaign to undo slavery drew reformers, radical activists, and enslaved people themselves to end what many viewed as the greatest evil of their time. Abolitionists advanced arguments about the essential sameness of all human bodies and the immorality of human suffering, while defenders of slavery trumpeted specious evidence of bodily differences drawn from medical dissections and cranial measurements to argue that Blacks were an inferior race destined for servitude. Despite the eventual end to slavery, the racism embedded in the medical science of the day left a pernicious legacy that continues to imperil black bodily sovereignty, health, and equality.
This is the topic scholar Kathleen M. Brown will explore when she visits the ɫƵCenter for Global Humanities to present a lecture titled “How Abolitionists Put the Body at the Center of the Fight Against Slavery” on Monday, September 25 at 6 p.m. at the WCHP Lecture Hall in Parker Pavilion on the ɫƵ Portland Campus for Health Sciences.
Brown is the David Boies Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also a faculty affiliate of Africana Studies, the History and Sociology of Science, and the Center for Research on Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, and the lead faculty historian on the Penn & Slavery Project. Previously, Brown spent a year as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, United Kingdom. Her scholarship has also been supported by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. She is the author of such books as “Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia, and Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America.”
Brown’s lecture at ɫƵ will draw from her latest book, “Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), which explains how abolitionists endeavored to create a politics of the body that included aiding refugees who crossed state lines, insisting that all people shared “one blood,” and recognizing that slave-produced cotton, rice, sugar, and coffee materially linked the bodies of consumers and enslaved laborers.
This lecture will kick off the 15th season for the Center for Global Humanities, where lectures are always free, open to the public, and streamed live online. It will be followed by four more events this fall. Click here for more information and to watch the event.
About the Center for Global Humanities
The offers lectures by leading scholars to help us better understand the challenges besetting our civilization and outline new solutions for nations and peoples to live together without prejudice. Global in perspective, the Center’s lectures are streamed live on the Internet, allowing our speakers to answer questions from any country. Because the Center believes in the vital necessity of a humanities culture to civic and democratic life, it works closely with the local community to encourage reading, discussion, and debate. The Center was founded in 2009 by ɫƵ scholar Anouar Majid, Ph.D., who serves as its director.