Events, General, Lectures
„Polluted Luxuries: Consumer Resistance, the Senses of Horror, and Abolitionist Boycott Literature“
Jessica Conrad – PhD Candidate
University of Delaware
Away! ‘tis loathsome! bear me hence!
I cannot feed on human sighs
Or feast with sweets my palate’s sense,
While blood is ‘neath the fair disguise.
No, never let me taste again
Of aught beside the coarsest fare,
Far rather, than my conscience stain,
With the polluted luxuries there.
_”Oh Press Me Not to Taste Again,”
Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Poetical Works (1836)
Polluted luxuries, stained consciences, shuddering senses – these were compelling reasons to abstain from the products of slave labor which, in 1836, at the time of Elizabeth Margaret Chandler’s writing, already proliferated in an expanding American market. Writers such as Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and John Greenleaf Whittier imagined a world of goods haunted by the touch of enslaved laborers – goods which in turn haunted consumers. By parsing out the language of abolitionist boycott literature alongside its historical and material cultural moment, this talk will examine the ways in which abolitionist literature posits a very literal and as yet unaccounted for version of material relations. Those material relations, it seems, collapse the boundaries between consumer and producer, self and other, in ways that have horrific, haunting implications for market society, then and now.
Wednesday, 3rd May 2017 – 4 c.t. p.m.
Philosophicum, P 110
General, News
The information sessions on the institute’s exchange opportunities will be held in HS 7 (Forum) on the following days:
- General info session on all exchange programs: Thursday, Oct. 29, 6-8pm
- Info session on the department direct exchange: Thursday, Nov. 5, 6-8pm
- Info session on the ERASMUS exchange: Wednesday, Nov. 11, 6-8pm
All students interested in studying in the United States, in Canada or at an European university should not miss these information sessions.
General, News
Thursday, 04.12.2014, 12.15-13.45, Room 00 161, Audi Max “The Heart Mountain Relocation Center.”
Between 1942 and 1945 more than 10,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were confined in the Heart Montain Relocation Center in north central Wyoming, the result of Executive Order 9066, authorizing the establishment of military zones along the west coast from which citizens could be excluded for any reason. This Order was applied only to those who wore the face of the Asian enemy; more than 11,000 people, two-thirds of them American citizens, were thus relocated in one of the most egregious (but, at that time, legal) abrogations of civil liberties in U.S. history. Their Wyoming settlement, the third largest town in the state, consisted of more than 450 barracks which, at the end of the war, became the building blocks for homesteading schemes in the area. Barrack fragments still dot this transformed landscape: homes, at different times, to two very different populations of settlers. This talk looks at the history of Heart Mountain, traces the barracks as they become part of a familiar, Western landscape, and discusses the importance of these structures in the interpretation of this nationally significant site.
Flyer (PDF)
