English Lecture Series Talk - 2/27

As part of the English Department's Spring Lecture Series, Edlie Wong will be presenting "Freedom with a Vengeance: Slavery, Kinship, and the Legal Culture of Travel" this Wednesday, February 27th at 4:00 pm in 1123 Anderson Hall.

Wong's talk charts the legal controversies over slaves brought to the states north of Mason Dixon after Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw's landmark ruling in the case of the slave girl Med in 1836.  Drawing upon a largely unexplored archive of freedom suits and reading them against the literature of abolitionism, this talk offers a more critically and historically embedded understanding of the freedom celebrated in the fugitive slave narrative.  It explores material that had been largely left out of the anti-slavery story: the cases brought by abolitionists to free slaves who had traveled with their masters into free jurisdictions.  Freedom suits reveal the contradictory logic by which abolitionists disregarded the slaves' express desires to remain with their masters, and in many cases argued for the very sorts of separations from kin that usually figured so large on abolitionist attacks on slavery.  These readings in law and literature thus present a critical alternative to the abolitionist plotting of freedom and the criminal agency of fugitive flight as they give expression to a politics and poetics of theft.

Edlie Wong is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University and recent Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum.  This talk is drawn from her current book project, Fugitive and Foreigner: Cultures of Travel in the Black Atlantic, 1820-1861.