No description available.

Magister Artium - MA / I read representations of Sojourner Truth in her Spiritual Narrative, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth with a focus on the portrayal of her unconventional character, through a close analysis of language, structure, photographs and narrative voice. Truth’s editor Olive Gilbert’s raises questions about whether the daguerreotype offers a more accurate form of representation than text. I explore the similarities and differences between visual and written portraits in representations of Truth as a unique figure. I question critical readings of Sojourner Truth’s dress in photographs as conservative, reading instead for a combination of conservative and subversive elements. I suggest that her interest in aesthetic forms such as dress and décor is symbolic of her yearning for home, her heritage, her agency, and unique taste. Her many references to her family indicate that she was more than just an empowered figure, but also one who still grieved. I read Truth’s description of domestic space as representing ambivalently, both her sense of loss, and her attempts to acquire agency. I consider how Truth attempts to recreate a sense of family and belonging through fragments of memory. In my reading of how she questions and extends conventional notions of family and community, I explore how she adapts and includes song, and quotations from the Bible in her sermons, by drawing on elements of African folktale and music. Most critics focus on Truth’s strong voice as an activist, there is little attention to the significance of spiritual solitude for her reimagining of community. I suggest that Truth offers alternative ideas of community as fluid rather than as fixed in one place. I explore how her ideas challenge the notion of nation as exclusive. I consider the genre of The Narrative by analyzing Olive Gilbert’s role as editor and writer. I propose that her role in The Narrative is a more complex one than suggested by critics, as it challenges conventional concepts of autobiography creating a conversation between two voices and lives.

This study sought to investigate the efficacy of a professional development designed to equip teachers with antiracist practices and support them in developing an abolitionist mindset. The study was designed for white teachers. Participants of the study engaged in a 6-week course grounded in a constructivist learning theory, TLT, and centered around the text, We Want to Do More Than Survive by Love (2019). Participants also engaged with a variety of other texts and resources grounded in asset pedagogies. The sessions were participant-led and focused on cultivating the skills for antiracist teaching while cultivating a mindset grounded in abolition. The data gathered through surveys and a focus group revealed that some design elements, such as continued reflection, affinity space, and building community before engaging in critical dialogue, were found to be highly effective. Stages of development emerged as teachers moved from leveraging culturally responsive practices, to engaging antiracist practices, to critiquing systems of oppression. As teachers deepened their understanding of abolition, they became more aware of the implications of systemic racism in education, and how educators can play an active role in dismantling it. The current study, along with the growing body of research on asset pedagogies, could provide a road map for what effective asset pedagogy professional development could look like.

The Ohio constitutional convention in 1802 established Ohio's status as a free state, marking the Ohio River as the border between slavery and freedom. However, slaveholder influence continued to permeate the region as questions over fugitive slaves, Black migration, and the rights of free African Americans created a hostile political climate for African Americans. Despite anti-Black legislation and the fragility of freedom along Ohio's southern border, African Americans continued moving into Southeast Ohio, forming small communities across the rural landscape. As they formed communities, they built institutions and began to challenge the limitations posed by the white supremacist society in which they lived. I argue that Southeast Ohio's self-sufficient Black communities were the core of activism surrounding Black freedom and citizenship rights. They constructed their American citizenship to encompass the rights to mobility, education, and self-determination. African Americans within the rural landscape turned to self-determination through separatist agrarian communities, Black institutions, and regional political alliances to pursue racial uplift and to press for their right to citizenship. Using newspapers, government documents, court documents, I examine the strategies employed by Black activists, as well as the attitudes held by white Southeast Ohioans. This thesis challenges Black histories of Ohio to elaborate on the role of interstate politics and the local political landscape in Black activists' fight for freedom and citizenship in a rural Midwestern community. / Master of Arts / When Ohio became a state in 1803, the state constitution prohibited slavery. However, the introduction of new laws limited the rights of African Americans in response to Black migration from neighboring Virginia. Black Ohioans in Southeast Ohio faced both the discrimination of local and state laws and the danger of slave catchers from across the Ohio River. This thesis investigates the strategies employed by African Americans in their fight for freedom and citizenship rights, including the rights to free movement, voting, and education. African Americans communities organized and petitioned against unjust laws and to form institutions to provide for their needs when the law failed to do so. I argue that self-sufficient Black communities formed by free African Americans were the foundation to the fight for citizenship in Southeast Ohio. In asserting their right to citizenship, African Americans drastically changed ideas about freedom and citizenship in the region.

In modern historiography, Henri Christophe, king of northern Haiti from 1816-1820, is generally given a negative persona due to his controlling nature and his absolutist regime, but in his correspondence, he engages in diplomatic collaborations with two British abolitionists, William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, in order to improve his new policies and obtain international recognition. This paper argues that the Haitian king and the abolitionists engaged in a mutual collaboration in which each party benefitted from the correspondence. Christophe used the advice of the British abolitionists in order to increase the power of Haiti into a powerful black state, and Wilberforce and Clarkson helped the king position Haiti as a self-sufficient nation to fuel their abolitionist argument of the potential of post-emancipation societies.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The present study addresses the Abolitionist Approach to Animal Rights proposed by the American legal scholar Gary L. Francione. This research aims to discuss three h v w h h : h moral relationship between humans and nonhumans; (B) the property status of nonhuman animals; (C) the philosophical grounding for a moral theory in defense of nonhuman animals based solely on sentience. For doing so, this study not only x h k g q y h h h perspectives of other authors. In view of this, the present dissertation is divided in three chapters. In the first chapter, it will be investigated the issue of the moral relations held between human beings and nonhumans animals. Major emphasis will be placed on the analysis of the d moral schizophrenia the last one was coined by Francione. In the second chapter, it will be detailed the moral and legal status of nonhuman animals as economic resources and its numerous theoretical and practical implications. Other key issues approached in this h h y K h hy defense of animal rights, and a reconstruction of the debate among Francione and Robert Garner on the relation between equal consideration of interests and property. In the third chapter, four major themes will be subject of problematization: (a) the attempts to exclude nonhuman animals from the moral community; (b) the similar-minds theory of the human/nonhuman relationship; (c) the lifeboat dilemma, the harm of death on sentient beings and their interest in continued existence; and (d) the creation of an animal rights moral theory based solely on sentience and the extension of the moral personhood to all sentient nonhuman animals. As a general conclusion, it will be sustained that the extension of moral personhood as well as moral rights to nonhuman animals will lead to the abolition of institutionalized animal exploitation. / O presente estudo versa sobre a Abordagem Abolicionista dos Direitos Animais proposta pelo scholar de Direito norte-americano Gary L. Francione. Esta pesquisa almeja discutir três tópicos centrais da perspectiva ética de Francione em defesa dos animais não-humanos: (A) a relação moral entre humanos e não-humanos; (B) o estatuto de propriedade dos animais não-humanos; (C) a fundamentação filosófica de uma teoria moral em defesa dos animais não-humanos baseada somente na senciência. Para fazê-lo, esse estudo não apenas explora o pensamento moral de Francione, mas igualmente contrapõe suas ideias às perspectivas éticas de outros autores. Com isso em vista, a presente dissertação divide-se em três capítulos. No primeiro capítulo, investigar-se-á a questão das relações morais mantidas entre seres humanos e animais não-humanos. Dar-se-á maior ênfase à análise das õ q z esta última, cunhada por Francione. No segundo capítulo, será detalhado o estatuto moral e legal dos animais não-humanos como recursos econômicos e suas diversas implicações teóricas e práticas. Outros assuntos-chave abordados nesse capítulo incluem uma discussão sobre o problema da crueldade na filosofia moral kantiana, uma defesa dos direitos dos animais e uma reconstrução do debate entre Francione e Robert Garner sobre a relação entre igual consideração de interesses semelhantes e propriedade. No terceiro capítulo, quatro grandes temáticas serão alvo de problematização: (a) as tentativas de exclusão dos animais não-humanos da comunidade moral; (b) a teoria das mentes similares da relação entre humanos/não-humanos; (c) o dilema do bote salva-vidas, o dano da morte em seres sencientes e o seu interesse na existência continuada; e (d) a criação de uma teoria moral dos direitos animais baseada apenas na senciência e a extensão da pessoalidade moral a todos os animais não-humanos sencientes. Como conclusão geral, será sustentado que a extensão da pessoalidade moral, assim como de direitos morais aos animais não-humanos, acarretará na abolição da exploração animal institucionalizada.

As practitioners of gender-open parenting, the refusal to impose a gendersex identity on children, my interviewee/collaborator and I engage in a dialogic interview about our shared embodied, everyday, relational parenting practices. I ask: What do we do when we do gender-open parenting? What does gender-open parenting do? If Marquis Bey and their black trans feminist theory set the scene, Sara Ahmed provides me with the concepts to move the methodology toward an abolitionist phenomenology beyond resistance to cisgender ideology. In my analysis, I find that because language makes people, suspending and refusing cisnormative interpellations opens us to processes of desedimentation and incorporation of alternative modes of relating. Yet, in doing so, we stumble on the stickiness of words, and by stumbling we make others stumble: we disrupt the flow that keeps us in line with the family as the fundamental unit of time. I also find that gender-open parenting allows itself to be framed by different frameworks (gendersex abolitionist and expansionist) that carry different promises. I find that the abolitionist promise as presence turns the emptiness of promises into a liberatory feature, making room for the possibility of alternative possibilities. As such, stumbling out-of-line of the family line means also letting chance happen, rejecting the modern/colonial need to know and categorize, and welcoming the unknown. This thesis is an invitation to gender-open parenting practitioners to refuse to pass on to children the liberal promises of recognition and inclusion in cisnormative racial capitalism and to answer the coalitionary nonnormative calls for gendersex and family abolition.

Ce travail de thèse a pour but d’étudier le degré d’implication des Écossais dans le système esclavagiste britannique graduellement mis en place dans les colonies du Nouveau Monde à partir du XVIIe siècle. Dans la lignée de publications récentes témoignant d’un intérêt grandissant pour la question, il vise à mettre au jour un pan problématique de l’histoire écossaise, qui trouve un écho particulier dans les discussions actuelles sur l’identité nationale écossaise. Cette thèse s’attarde ainsi sur le rôle particulier joué par les Écossais dans le développement économique de la traite négrière et au sein des sociétés esclavagistes des Antilles britanniques. Ce travail de recherche s’intéresse également à l’émergence des idées abolitionnistes en Grande-Bretagne au début du XIXe siècle et à la place des Écossais dans ce grand débat sociétal. L’enjeu de cette thèse est de déterminer s’il existait une spécificité de comportement, d’idéologie, dans le rôle joué par les Écossais au sein du système esclavagiste et dans les campagnes abolitionnistes dans le contexte impérial post-Union. Cette démarche ne s’inscrit pas dans la volonté clivante de singulariser les Écossais, mais de remettre en question l’homogénéité des notions d’« esclavagisme britannique » et d’ « abolitionnisme britannique ». Selon une approche chronologique, ce travail de recherche s’organise en trois mouvements. La première partie s’articule autour de la genèse d’une idéologie impériale écossaise, s’appuyant sur une conception économique esclavagiste. La seconde partie s’attarde sur la réalité du système esclavagiste dans les colonies et la place des colons écossais tandis que la dernière partie revient sur l’apport philosophique, idéologique et politique des Écossais dans les campagnes abolitionnistes britanniques et sur leur inclusion dans un projet à l’identité britannique très affirmée. / This dissertation explores the scope of the Scottish involvement in the British slave system that was implemented in the colonies of the New World from the 17th century onwards. In the wake of recent research revealing a growing interest for this specific issue, it aims at examining a problematic aspect of Scotland’s history, shedding some new light on the current debate about national identity in Scotland. This thesis dwells on the particular role played by the Scots in the economic development of the African slave trade and their participation in slave societies in the West Indies. This research also takes interest in the emergence of abolitionist ideas in Great Britain at the beginning of the 19th century and the part Scottish people played in the national debate. The main purpose is to determine whether there existed a Scottish specificity, regarding behaviours and ideology, in the British slave system and in the British abolitionist movement within the post-Union imperial context. The intent is not to single Scottish people out but rather to question the relevance of concepts such as « British slavery » and « British abolitionism ».Adopting a chronological approach, this thesis consists of three parts. First, it revolves around the development of the Scottish imperial ideology and of a colonial economic conception based on slavery. The second part dwells on the harsh reality of the slave system in the colonies and the role Scottish colonists played in it. Finally, the thesis tackles the philosophical, ideological and political contribution of Scottish people to the British abolitionist campaigns and examines their inclusion within this British scheme.

The work examines the antislavery writings of Francis Wayland (1796-1865). Wayland pastored churches in Boston and Providence, but he left his indelible mark as the fourth and twenty-eight year president of Brown University (1827-1855). The author of numerous works on moral science, economics, philosophy, education, and the Baptist denomination, his administration marked a transitional stage in the emergence of American colleges from a classically oriented curriculum to an educational philosophy based on science and modern languages. Wayland left an enduring legacy at Brown, but it was his antislavery writings that brought him the most notoriety and controversy. Developed throughout his writings, rather than systematically in a major work, his antislavery views were shaped and tested in the political and intellectual climate of the antebellum world in which he lived. First developed in The Elements of Moral Science (1835), he tested the boundaries of activism in The Limitations of Human Responsibility (1838), and publicly debated antislavery in Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution (1845). The political crisis from the Mexican-American War through the Kansas-Nebraska Act heightened Wayland’s activism as delineated in The Duty of Obedience to the Civil Magistrate (1847), his noncompliance with the Fugitive Slave Law, and his public address on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (1854). In 1861 he became a committed Unionist. I argue that Francis Wayland was a mediating figure in the controversy between abolitionists and proslavery apologists and that his life was a microcosm of the transition that many individuals made from moderate antislavery to abolitionism. Wayland proved unique in that he was heavily coveted by Northern abolitionists who sought his unconditional support and yet he was respected by Southerners who appreciated his uncondemning attitude toward slaveholders even while he opposed slavery. I argue that Wayland’s transition from reluctant critic to public activist was not solely due to the political sweep of events, but that his latter activism was already marked in his earlier work. Most importantly, his life demonstrated both the limits and possibilities in the history of American antislavery.

The current work aims at comparing two abolitionist novels written by women in the XIX century, one is Úrsula by the Brazilian writer Maria Firmina dos Reis and the other is Sab by the Cuban writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. This work aims at verifying how the feminine authorship became a political place to denounce the slave regime in Brazil and in Cuba in the XIX century. Regarding the comparative literature theories and applying the intertextuality and interdisciplinary comparative presuppositions, it was carried out an analytical study about the corpus. The relevance of this research lies on rethinking the feminine authorship role in the Brazilian and Cuban literature, as well as revisiting the political, social and cultural factors that guided each one of the authors during the production of their abolitionist works. The work analysis allowed us to identify that both writers had an important role in their national literature. Both Maria Firmina dos Reis as Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda were women who dared to make use of the pen and ink in a time that such practice was exclusive for men. Concerning the critics about the feminine condition, in Brazil and in Cuba, both writers raised their voices and made their writing a space to denounce the injustices lived by the eighteenth-century women in their countries. However, when referring to the racial issue, it was found that the abolitionist position in Úrsula is more connected to the defense of racial equality and altruistic issues, while in Sab, through the representation of a gentle slave, it is observed that the defense of the abolition is more connected to the criollo reformism ideals. / O presente trabalho tem como objetivo comparar os romances abolicionistas de duas autoras do século XIX, a saber, Úrsula, da brasileira Maria Firmina dos Reis e Sab, da cubana Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a fim de verificar como a autoria feminina constituiu-se como lugar político de denúncia do regime escravocrata, no Brasil e em Cuba, no século XIX. Para que tais objetivos fossem alcançados, realizou-se um estudo analítico do corpus, à luz das teorias da literatura comparada, utilizando-se os pressupostos comparatistas de intertextualidade e interdisciplinaridade. Esta pesquisa justifica-se pela relevância de se repensar o papel da autoria feminina nas literaturas brasileira e cubana, bem como revisitar os fatores políticos, sociais e culturais que levaram cada uma das autoras a produzir uma obra de cunho abolicionista. A análise das obras permitiu identificar que ambas as autoras exerceram um importante papel em suas literaturas nacionais. Tanto Maria Firmina dos Reis quanto Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda foram mulheres que ousaram fazer uso da pena em uma época em que esta prática era quase que uma exclusividade masculina. No que diz respeito às críticas à condição feminina, tanto no Brasil quanto em Cuba, as duas autoras levantaram suas vozes e fizeram de sua escrita um espaço de denúncia para injustiças vivenciadas pelas mulheres oitocentistas nos seus países. Entretanto, no que se refere à questão racial, constatou-se que o posicionamento abolicionista em Úrsula está mais alinhado à defesa da igualdade racial e a questões altruístas, enquanto que em Sab, por meio da representação de um escravo dócil, observa-se uma defesa do abolicionismo mais alinhada aos ideais do reformismo criollo.