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
Events, Lectures, News
Dr. Selina Lai-Henderson (Research Assistant Professor University of Hong Kong)
“Langston Hughes, Harlem and Shanghai”
Fakultätssaal (Philosophicum)
June 21, 2016, 4-6 pm (c.t.)
Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was the first African American writer to ever set foot on Chinese soil. At the age of 31, he pioneered what none of his contemporaries or predecessors was able to achieve—rewrite the public image of African Americans in the Chinese cultural and intellectual imagination. Hughes’s sojourn in Shanghai and his encounter with Chinese writers shaped his body of work in profound ways that complicated the discussions of race, national identity, and global citizenship in a transnational arena.
Selina Lai-Henderson is Research Assistant Professor of American Studies at The University of Hong Kong. She was a Fulbright scholar at Stanford University in 2011-12. She is the author of Mark Twain in China (Stanford University Press, 2015), and she is currently working on black internationalism of Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois in China.
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