Warren Center: Conference: The Scope of Slavery.

The Scope of Slavery: Enduring Geographies of American Bondage

The Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History

What is the proper scope for analyses of slavery? Within the United States, the institution has been viewed as a distinctly regional phenomenon, with its primary locus in the Southern states.  Scholars generally understand slavery as a historic phenomenon, transcended by the Age of Emancipation in the nineteenth century. And yet mass incarceration in the United States has increasingly been compared to slavery, with many emphasizing that the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution made an exception for convicts. The conflation of slavery and incarceration raises important questions about the spatial and temporal parameters of American bondage.

Examining the long duration of America’s carceral geography, we will consider continuities and discontinuities that frame slavery and emancipation, race and mass incarceration, extraterritorial internment, speculative condemnation, and the political mobilizations and strategies for redress pursued by confined populations and their advocates.

This two-day symposium is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the History Design Studio, and the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2014

Opening Remarks, 10:15-10:30am: Vincent Brown (Harvard University)

Opening Keynote, 10:30-12:00pm: Ruth Wilson Gilmore (City University of New York)

     Introduction: Walter Johnson (Harvard University)

 Lunch, 12-1:30pm

 Panel 1: Carceral Landscapes of Slavery and Emancipation, 1:30-3pm

     Tommie Shelby (Harvard University), Chair and Moderator

     Taja-Nia Henderson (Rutgers University, Newark) “Slaving in the Antebellum Prison”

     Rebecca McClennan (University of California, Berkeley): TBA

     Diana Paton (Newcastle University): “‘Punishment after Slavery: Jamaica and the United States in Comparative Perspective”

 Break, 3-3:30pm

 Panel 2: Mobilization and Redress, 3:30-5pm

     Armin Fardis (Harvard University), Chair and Moderator

     Susan E. O’Donovan (University of Memphis): “Citizens of the World: Globe-trotting Slaves in the Age of Secession”

     Toussaint Losier (University of Massachusetts-Amherst): "...Like a Plantation Slave Thing": Prisoner Rebellions, Cell Block Discipline, and the Origins of Mass Incarceration in Illinois     

     Heather Ann Thompson (Temple University): “Fighting UnFreedom: Legacies and Lessons from Attica"

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2014

Panel 3: Race and Mass Incarceration, 9:30-11:00am

     Lisa McGirr (Harvard University), Chair and Moderator

     Elizabeth Hinton (Harvard University):"A 'Long Range Master Plan:' Envisioning Mass Incarceration in the 1970s”

     Max Mishler (New York University): "The Strange Career of Mass Incarceration: Liberal Freedom, Criminal Law, and the Black Convict"

     Khalil Muhammad (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture): TBA

 Break, 11-11:30am

 Panel 4: Sentencing by Speculation, 11:30am-1pm

     Lawrence Bobo (Harvard University) Chair and Moderator

     Anthony Farley (James and Mary Lassiter Endowed Distinguished Visiting Professor University of Kentucky College of Law):“Wave of Mutilation: The Prison as the Middle Passage”

     Gustav Peebles (The New School for Social Research):“Money and the Body in 19th Century Reform Movements”

     Michael Ralph (New York University):“The Actuarial Logic of Slavery”

 Lunch, 1-2pm

 Panel 5: Carceral Empire, 2-3:30pm

     Kerry Chance (DuBois Institute, Harvard University)

     Laleh Khalili (School of Oriental and African Studies): “Lineaments of Settler-colonialism in Counterinsurgency Confinement”

     Jana Lipman (Tulane University): “’The camps are...little better than prisons’ Refugee Camps and Detention in the U.S. Imperial Archipelago”

     Benjamin Weber (Harvard University): "The Highway to Empire: Sovereignty and Servitude in the Panama Canal Zone, 1904-1944"

Break, 3:30-4pm

Closing Keynote, 4-5:30pm: Colin Dayan (Vanderbilt University): “Up against the law, or the impossible color of separation”

Introduction: Glenda Carpio (Harvard University)