AHA Session 163
Saturday, January 7, 2023: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Commonwealth Hall C (Loews Philadelphia Hotel, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Shennette Garrett-Scott, Texas A&M University
Panel:
Joan Victoria Flores-Villalobos, Ohio State University, Columbus
Shennette Garrett-Scott, Texas A&M University
Justene G. Hill Edwards, University of Virginia
Shauna J. Sweeney, University of Toronto
Shennette Garrett-Scott, Texas A&M University
Justene G. Hill Edwards, University of Virginia
Shauna J. Sweeney, University of Toronto
Session Abstract
Renewed proposals by the Biden administration to replace Andrew Jackson with Maya Angelou and Harriet Tubman on national currency have only highlighted the complex and violent histories that bind Black women and racial capitalism. This roundtable, gathering early-career and advanced historians, intervenes into recent histories of capitalism by not only showing how Black women were indispensable to the expansion of capital, but by centering Black women as economic actors beyond frameworks that privilege profit, accumulation, and the nation-state. Black women’s invisible care work reproduced the labor power that sustained capitalism. The policing and surveillance of Black women centrally shaped the gendered categories that constituted capitalism’s conditions of possibility. But Black women also disturbed, refused, and skirted the structures of racial capitalism. From market women in 18th-century Jamaica, Civil War South Carolina, and 1960s Ghana, to West Indian migrants in turn-of-the-century Panama and Black female bankers in New Deal Virginia, this panel explores Black women’s negotiations of the violence of racial capitalism and their attempts at financial autonomy. As workers, mothers, and knowledge-creators, Black women across the Atlantic fought for the survival of their kin and generated strategies that troubled capitalist logics. By juxtaposing these different historical moments, this panel ultimately questions capitalism as a framework for understanding Black women’s strategies of survival in contexts where capitalism went hand in hand with anti-Black violence, sexism, and exploitation. It seeks inspiration from Black women’s own intellectual and practical innovations and alternative economies to imagine possibilities for reparative economic justice. More than just a historical intervention, the panel also seeks to explore the methodological creativity required to investigate Black women’s history, engaging with fragmentary documentary records that often silence or denigrate them. We envision this as a fluid, informal discussion of the state of the field, with ample time for audience interaction.
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