Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Asian American women are often stereotyped as “exotic” and “passive.” This presentation aims to explore the manner in which such stereotypes link to the experiences of racialized sexual harassment for Asian American women. The personal, interpersonal and vocational impact of racialized sexual harassment will also be addressed.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In his 1853 novel Clotel, William Wells Brown’s representation of an 1853 yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans highlights antebellum racial and national anxieties by constructing a material and textual link between the US and the West Indies. Medical theories about race, anxieties about slave revolts, and sectional and national tensions about the US’s hemispheric position converge on diseased bodies that are, disturbingly, both white and black. This essay explores Brown’s representation of the epidemic in relation to hemispheric configurations of identity and race to suggest that Brown’s depiction of disease in the 1853 Clotel plays a unique cultural role. Unlike later publications of the novel, the earlier edition engages dominant narratives of Southern racial exceptionalism such as the Fugitive Slave Law and fears of slave insurrection only to complicate them, rewriting the geographic and historical relationships between black and white bodies, their geographies, and respective citizenships. Clotel repositions the relation of Haiti to North America and national attempts to define American geo-political boundaries against the West Indies.
Brown revises his sources to deconstruct the spatial constructions of race that defined American citizenship against the contagion of the tropics. In the novel, black blood appears inside diseased white bodies, while a “tropical” disease emerges within New Orleans. Brown’s representation of disease in black bodies supposed to be inherently immune deconstructs the purity of white bodies and nations, situating whiteness not as an original healthiness infected by an invading tropical malaise, but in relation to racialized bodies. The epidemic was figured as a sign of blacks’ immunity to yellow fever and their inherent suitability to slavery. In New Orleans, the outbreak was also a reminder that a slave revolt could easily occur while white plantation owners were ill. Therefore, Brown’s description of these bodies is unique for several reasons: first, his later publications of the novel do not contain such a detailed description, and second, Brown departs significantly from his sources by representing both white and black bodies as diseased, thus linking New Orleans to Haiti and its slave revolts. For Brown to contextualize Clotel and racialized bodies with the Haitian Revolution is to link the 1850s with eighteenth century revolutions and simultaneously to subvert antebellum taxonomies of citizenship. Brown makes possible a reading of Southern exceptionalism and the nation’s fragile unity alongside Haiti’s revolutionary and racial history.