Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Slaves in the antebellum South had a unique civil status: they were both people and property. In early October of 1855, in Callaway County Circuit Court in Fulton, Missouri, Celia, a pregnant, nineteen-year-old slave, was on trial for murdering her owner in an attempt to prevent his raping her, as he had been doing since she was fourteen years old. I argue that Celia's court-appointed defense attorney, John Jameson, challenged her status and made a claim of citizenship on her behalf. Jameson argued that the language of the state's rape law, which sanctioned a woman's use of deadly force to defend herself against rape, embraced Celia as it did free white women. Using the case file and an analysis of the contemporary discourse of citizenship, I demonstrate that this assertion is a claim of citizenship on her behalf and examine the reasons for its failure to save Celia from the gallows.

Publication Type: Individual Presentation
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Dr. Kwame Botwe-Asamoah, University of Pittsburgh
Most discourse on the Euro-Christian slave trade has focused on the trading of African captives between the European Christian kingdoms and some African brokers and kingdoms, as well as the “middle passage” (from the European dungeons on the coast of Africa to the coasts of the Americas). What remains uninvestigated, however, is the point of captivity of prisoners of wars and victims of raids by some powerful African kingdoms and the length and breadth of their forceful transportation to the dungeons on the coast of West Africa. The purpose of this study is to investigate, videotape and analyze the social and cultural history, as well as historical sites/monuments about the internal captivity of prisoners of wars and victims of raids by the Asante Kingdom and its vassal states in the savanna region of today’s Ghana.

▲This will be a lecture-slide (power point) presentation, so I would need 25 minutes.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: The sixties and seventies were tumultuous decades that called for alternate models of activism for African American men and women. These alternate models of progress were often presented in the name of “the Revolution.” While the cultural nationalist model and the Socialist model, most notably manifested in the Black Panther Party, are well known, my paper proposes another role for black women in “the Revolution.”
Born out of the theories and goals of both the Civil Rights-Black Power movement, black feminist organizations were created by black women as a space to merge their gender and race consciousness. Of the black feminist organizations developed, the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) developed with the goal of redefining the “role of the black woman in the revolutionary struggle.” By 1971, the TWWA was a black feminist organization that promoted the rights of women of color and fought against capitalist institutions. This paper investigates the development of this form of black revolutionary woman created by the TWWA and the contours of their redefinition of race and womanhood. It suggests that the TWAA provided another model of revolutionary black womanhood that was cognizant of gender, race, and class on an international and multicultural level. Furthermore, it argues that the black women TWAA created an elastic conceptualization of blackness that defied national boundaries and was one with other women of color worldwide. The project speaks to how the women of the TWWA created a multicultural feminism and how they fostered gender solidarity across national and cultural lines.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: Charlotte is a southern metropolis. Its highways are clogged with people, new developments abound, and most neighborhoods boast diverse populations. It is a melting pot of people, places, and sounds. However, buried beneath all of the glitz of city life and the hustle and bustle of businesses is a history of oppression and redemption. This paper explores the resting place of over fifty slaves buried in an apartment complex off of Mallard Creek road. Named after the owner of the slaves, William Tasse Alexander, this cemetery is the largest remaining slave cemetery in Charlotte. Through this cemetery's history and that of the W.T. Alexander house this paper will weave clear picture of slave life, for both the slaves and their owners, on one of the largest plantations in Mecklenburg County. It will also discuss the strange parallels between the bio-piracy of the periwinkle plant that covers the cemetery’s grounds and the theft of African-Americans from Africa. Furthermore it will briefly discuss the erosion of such historical land marks beneath the constant need for more development.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines representations of gender and legal subjectivity at the sociolegal nexus of domestic violence and human trafficking. There are important differences in the way victims of battering and victims of human trafficking (most of whom are women) are represented and responded to by government agencies, law enforcement and other stakeholders in the U.S. and internationally. For example, while domestic violence victims are packaged and processed as legal and cultural subjects within standardized formats, victims of human trafficking are displayed in iconic, exotic, even mythical frames. Most trafficking survivors’ stories resemble urban legends (Brunvand 1981), written briefly in the second person, omitting victims’ social pasts, specific dates and places, family names and discrete incidents of violence. This format diverges strikingly from the usual legal texts of affidavits and court settings routinely used to document intimate partner violence. Despite these differences, assessments of the nature and scope of trafficking draw heavily from the experience of domestic violence responses, whereby estimations of frequency and circumstances from the latter inform the former. Moreover, policy makers now appeal to service providers who assist victims of domestic abuse to provide help to trafficking victims, with little focus on traffickers or consumers and perhaps compromising scarce resources for victims of battering. Using data from the U.S. and the Central Asia, I compare how the complements and conflicts of these two serious crimes implicate gender as a critical element of legal subjectivity.