Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Series Lectures

2019-11-13 - 2019-11-20

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Series Lectures
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg is the Mary Frances Berry Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women’s Studies, Emerita, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is known for her path-breaking scholarship in US women’s and gender history, and for her significant contributions to developing interdisciplinary programs and international scholarly networks addressing women’s history, gender studies, the history of sexuality, and cultural and Atlantic studies. Her book, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity, won a Choice Award for Distinguished Scholarly Book in 2011, and her groundbreaking article, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” established the legitimacy of lesbian history in the field. Her most recent project examines the historical trajectory of struggles for human rights and political agency. 

The Mulatta—Desire, Danger and Gendered: Transgression in the Age of Revolution
Date: 11/13 WED

Time: 10:30-12:30
Venue: Room C2-102, Liberal Arts Building #2 at NCU

This talk will focus on the mulatta as the literal—and metaphoric—fusion of sameness and difference, a figure who fundamentally destabilized the eighteenth-century’s racialized and sexualized social and political order. This talk will examine legal and political discourses about miscegenation in the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean focusing on the writings of Edward Long, Bryan Edwards and St. Moreau, as well as John Stedman’s book, Stedman’s Surinam: Life in an Eighteenth-Century Slave Society, and a 1820 novel by a US feminist, Leonora Sansay, titled Zelica, the Creole.

Race, Rights and Revolution—Democratic Enigmas, Relentless Struggles and the Modern Republic: A History

Date: 11/18 MON

Time: 13:20-16:20
Venue: R106A HA Building 2 at NCTU

Political democracy, republican governance and a commitment to human rights took form during one of the most radical periods in human history—the Age of Revolution, a time of chaos and transformation, a moment when the political world seemed remade and the promise of freedom unlimited. Today millions of stateless people roam the world from Miramar to Afghanistan, from Palestine and Syria to the Sudan and Central America. The UN Declaration of Human Rights has become a hollow promise, the cry “Never Again” a cruel mockery. How were the Age of Revolution’s brave promises of freedom and democracy, liberty and equality so brutally betrayed? 

White Slaves/Black Revolutionaries—Who Has the Right to Have Rights? Who Has the Right to Resist? Explorations of the US and the Haitian Revolutions    

Date: 11/20 WED

Time: 14:00-17:00
Venue: R106A HA Building 2 at NCTU

Coterminous with US press coverage of US white “enslavement,” during the Barbary Wars, news of the slave uprisings in the French sugar colony of Saint Domingue hit the US popular press. Were the rebellious slaves in one of the most sadistic plantation slave economies justified in asserting their right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” or did they embody the worst threat to democratic rule—savage black mobs raping and murdering? This talk will explore the evolution of the Haitian Revolution and the radical press’s (in both France and the United States) response to Afro-Caribbean’s assertion to their rights to freedom, political agency and independence from French colonial rule.

*English Lecture (英文演講)

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