RESISTING ENSLAVEMENT IN VAST EARLY AMERICA
WMQ-EMSI WORKSHOP 2024
May 30 – June 1

 HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, SAN MARINO, CALIFORNIA
CONVENER: Jennifer L. Morgan

From the Call for Proposals
Scroll down to read the full program

The histories of Black people in vast early America are grounded in refusal. Men, women, and children of African descent refused to accept the logics and realities of racial hierarchy; they denied that their lives were only meaningful to the extent that they could enrich others, that their connections to one another were meaningless, and that they brought nothing across the Atlantic and built nothing once they arrived. This consistent and multifaceted refusal is at the core of the evidence that scholars of race, slavery, and the Atlantic world mobilize—often under the heading of “resistance”—to understand the alternative worlds that enslaved people imagined and created.

And yet, questions remain. In the context of the histories of slavery, what does “resistance” mean? How has the concept—long deployed by scholars of slavery and the Black Atlantic—shifted and been refined over time? What does it mean to situate such a broad category in the context of the equally capacious notion of vast early America? And how does our understanding of resistance change when we connect the histories of Indigenous enslavement and African enslavement? The WMQ-EMSI Workshop aims to bring together scholars from history and related disciplines who consider both traditional examples of resistance—runaways and revolts—and who problematize and reconsider the category of resistance by centering strategies of refusal found in language, cultural practices, family formation, cosmologies, and knowledge generation. The workshop will take a broad view of the subject matter, and we are particularly interested in exploring connections and exchanges between Indigenous and Afro-Atlantic individuals and communities.

Participants will attend a two-day meeting at the Huntington Library (May 30-June 1, 2024) to discuss a pre-circulated, unpublished chapter-length portion of their current work in progress along with the work of other participants. Subsequently, the convener, Jennifer L. Morgan of New York University, will write an essay elaborating on the issues raised at the workshop for publication in the William and Mary Quarterly. The participants’ meals, lodging, and travel expenses will be covered by the Early Modern Studies Institute and the Omohundro Institute.

Proposals for workshop presentations should include a two-page c.v. and two brief abstracts (250 words each): the first describing the article or chapter draft the applicant seeks to present at the workshop, and the second discussing the scope of the applicant’s larger research project. The organizers especially encourage proposals from mid-career scholars who are working on their second (or subsequent) major project. Graduate students who have not defended their dissertations by the application deadline are ineligible.

(The CFP is now closed. Materials were due October 15, 2023.)

Program of Events

Friday, May 31, 2024

9:00 – 9:30 am

Coffee

9:30 – 10:00 am

Welcome:

Julia Gaffield, William and Mary Quarterly

Convener’s Introduction:

Jennifer L. Morgan, New York University

10:00 – 11:00 am

Session 1:

Sophie White, University of Notre Dame

“‘His Master’s Grace’: Extrajudicial Violence, Punishment, and Absolution in Atlantic Slave Societies”

Comment: Scott Heerman, University of Miami

Chair: Peter Mancall, Early Modern Studies Institute

11:00 am – 12:00 pm

Session 2:

Kathleen Donegan, University of California, Berkeley

“The Edge of Riot: Cruelty and Resistance in the British West Indies”

Comment: Natasha Lightfoot, Columbia University

Chair: Julia Gaffield, William and Mary Quarterly

12:00 – 1:30 pm

Lunch

1:30 – 2:30 pm

Session 3:

Marcus Nevius, University of Missouri

“Internal Enemy of the Most Alarming Kind: Marronage and the Political Economy of Fear in the British Atlantic in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions”

Comment: Linda Rupert, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Chair: Joshua Piker, William and Mary Quarterly

2:30 – 3:00 pm

Afternoon Coffee

3:00 – 4:00 pm

Session 4:

Christine DeLucia, Williams College

“The Itineraries: Knowledge, Sovereignty, and Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast”

Comment: Cameron Strang, University of Nevada, Reno

Chair: Carolyn Eastman, William and Mary Quarterly

Saturday, June 1, 2024

9:00 – 9:30 am

Coffee

9:30 – 10:30 am

Session 5:

Natasha Lightfoot, Columbia University

“Fugitive Cosmopolitans: Mobility and Freedom Struggles Among Black Atlantic Subjects”

Comment: Sophie White, University of Notre Dame

Chair: Carolyn Eastman, William and Mary Quarterly

10:30 – 11:30 am

Session 6:

Scott Heerman, University of Miami

“Freedom’s Ensemble: Slavery, Abduction, and Belonging in the Atlantic World, 1750-1860” 

Comment: Marcus Nevius, University of Missouri

Chair: Joshua Piker, William and Mary Quarterly

11:30 am – 1:00 pm

Lunch

1:00 – 2:00 pm

Session 7:

Linda Rupert, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

“‘We Came in Search of Freedom’: The Roots of the Spanish Sanctuary”

Comment: Kathleen Donegan, University of California, Berkeley

Chair: Julia Gaffield, William and Mary Quarterly

2:00 – 2:30 pm

Afternoon Coffee

2:30 – 3:30 pm

Session 8:

Cameron Strang, University of Nevada, Reno

“Knowledge is Survival: A New History of American Exploration” 

Comment: Christine DeLucia, Williams College

Chair: Peter Mancall, Early Modern Studies Institute

3:30 – 4:30 pm

Final Discussion:

Moderator: Jennifer L. Morgan, New York University