I am a scholar fundamentally preoccupied with revealing historical Black resistance under the oppressive contexts of slavery in the Atlantic world. Students in the United States learn of Black compliance rather than the myriad ways that Black people actively and passively forced a reckoning with their place in the landscapes of freedom. Black women, most significantly, were historically overlooked in their autonomy against violence. As a modality of being that demands a reconfiguring of knowledge production, dissemination, and privileging, Black feminist thought is essential to expressing the intricacies and nuances of resistance practices in slavery.
In my current dissertation project, “Critical Bodies: Slavery, Gender, and Disability in Early Republic Virginia,” I illuminate the embodied experiences and multifaceted slave life related to disability. Disabled enslaved people in Virginia participated in strategies to resist the labor demands of enslavers. Enslaved people actively resisted slavery, often by feigning illness and disability—their proximity to people in their community with disabled bodies/minds aided their performances. Enslaved people with disabilities could then lean on the community for support in traversing the Virginian landscapes—geographically, legally, institutionally, socially—with greater dexterity.
Enslaved people had innumerable modes of experiencing the world, and through accessing distinct avenues of sources, I hope to capture more fully the rhythms of their lives. Using archival records—ranging from slave narratives, plantation records, medical journals, petition records, and institutional records from Virginia, I argue that disabled enslaved people forced enslavers to innovate their extractive and violent practices in slavery through legal technologies. Enslavers extracted labor, no matter the perceived condition of a slave body.
My previous research experience provides intellectual nuance to my research on slavery. During my undergraduate career, I researched the environment, culture, and law. My award-winning senior research paper, “Black Tuesday and the Environmental Switch,” interrogated environmental legislation in Saint Louis, Missouri, during WWII. The archive collection from the League of Women Voters in the State Historical Society of Saint Louis provided substantial source material for my analysis. As I look back on the project, I am struck by the racial and gender contexts that I overlooked. Even the archives available that provided the context for my arguments were heavily gendered and racialized. It was not until I arrived at Rice University as a doctoral student that I began to consider Black feminist thought and praxis. In my graduate career, I incorporate race and gender analysis to unravel the social meanings of identities that influence labor and relationships.
My Women Gender and Sexuality certificate allowed me to learn and utilize methods in counter archiving. As a 2020 research fellow for the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, I collaborated with interdisciplinary scholars to create knowledge about Civil Rights Activist Fannie Lou Hamer. I used GIS knowledge alongside ‘critical fabulation’ theories through a Black feminist lens to create an imagined route of Hamer’s most famous journeys to the Sunflower County Courthouse in Mississippi. To demonstrate the experience of the journey beyond mere distance, I created an improvised map of a likely bus route for the trip.
Hamer is known for her active resistance, and thus she has always been a central person to consider Black radicalism. One of the first Black radical thinkers I encountered was Martin Delaney. Before my matriculation to Rice, I attended the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in African American History (PAAH) weeklong workshop sponsored by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The culmination of the week of engagement with the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, I presented research on African American physician activist and writer Martin Delaney. My interrogation into the contexts that compelled Delaney impressed upon me that African Americans did more than acquiescence to the violence of slavery and oppressive institutions.
Thus, resistance and the Black radical tradition are prominent features that I incorporate in analysis and approaches in each stage of my research career. All historians add knowledge to interpretations of the past, and by actively considering the dynamics of power embedded in knowledge, one can create knowledge that refuses silences.