Abolition's Peasants: The Climates of Post-Slavery Speculation
Martha Schoolman
Florida International University
Martha Schoolman is Associate Professor of English at Florida International University in Miami. She is the author of Abolitionist Geographies (2014) and co-editor with Jared Hickman of Abolitionist Places (2013).
Abstract
Agrarianism, a now commonly considered “minor thread” of antislavery thought to its center. She shows how the combination of Garrisonian abolition’s literary productivity and its radical disinterest in the material... [ view full abstract ]
Agrarianism, a now commonly considered “minor thread” of antislavery thought to its center. She shows how the combination of Garrisonian abolition’s literary productivity and its radical disinterest in the material results of emancipation has worked to insure limited discussion of pre-reconstruction conversations connecting land tenure, land reform and emancipation. However, when viewed in the broader context of international social justice movements, a broad intellectual tradition devoted to imagining freedom, agrarian labor and land tenure in terms of one another comes into focus. On the leftward end of this spectrum lies the redistributive principles of the Chartist movement and the emigrant British reformer George Henry Evans who argued that the northern US worker was “enslaved” by a lack of access to land. On the rightward end lies the tradition imagining the formerly enslaved as minimally-autonomous agricultural employees. Schoolman examines the complexity of this line of thought by focusing on the problematic transcultural fortunes of the category of the “peasant” as probed for example in the British Abolitionist Marshall Hall’s pamphlet The Facts of the Two-Fold Slavery of the United States (1854) in which he insists that post-Emancipation African-Americans promised to constitute “the finest peasantry in the world.”
Authors
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Martha Schoolman
(Florida International University)
Topic Area
Panel
Session
P80 » Freedom's Climates (14:00 - Saturday, 24th March, Enchantment F)
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