Lunch will be served at this event. Please email Melody Gehlbach at mkg13@psu.edu to request a lunch.
Nineteenth-century enslaved rebels and militant abolitionists understood slavery to be a war on people of African descent that could only be defeated through abolition war. This presentation examines how abolition war rebels were foremost theorists of racial capitalism, whiteness, and repression. Yet their insights have been overlooked both in major accounts of abolition framed by U.S. nationalism and traditions of anti-capitalist critique focused primarily on Europe. Drawing from his forthcoming book No More Peace: Abolition War and Counterrevolution, Baker shows how those who waged abolition war theorized slavery and imperialism as contingent projects always vulnerable to defeat and ruin rather than destined to expand and prevail. It was this understanding of the contingency of racial capitalism that became a persuasive force in winning support for the strategy of abolition war that carried great risks and required enormous sacrifices. Baker also demonstrates how abolition war thinkers remain relevant today at a time when rising forces of reaction seek to repress teaching and scholarship that foster the critical study of race, slavery, colonialism, and class society.
Oliver Baker is an assistant professor of English and African American studies at Penn State. His areas of research include critical ethnic studies and nineteenth-century American studies with a focus on the relationship between literature and the histories of slavery, settler colonialism, and capitalism.


Occurrences
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Wednesday, February 26, 2025