April 23, 2024
A talk by Annette Joseph-Gabriel, the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University.
In this talk, Dr. Joseph-Gabriel will share new research on slavery, childhood, and kinship through an analysis of the Toussaint family story as told by its youngest member, Euphémie Toussaint. Born free in New York in 1814 to a formerly enslaved family from Haiti, Euphémie was a musician with a penchant for writing witty letters. The 456 letters she wrote to her uncle, the wealthy hairdresser and philanthropist Pierre Toussaint, form an alternative archive that recounts the remarkable story of one family's survival through slavery and revolution. By reading Euphémie's letters closely, not only for documentary evidence but also for narrative form, Dr. Joseph-Gabriel reconstructs a story of the Toussaints that pays homage to a Black girl's role as both faithful biographer and chronicler of Black life in the 19th century, and as an author whose imaginative world of dream and play can offer us today new modes of recounting enslaved people's stories.
About the Speaker:
Annette Joseph-Gabriel is the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire, which was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book and Honorable Mention for the Eugen Weber Award for best book in modern French history. The French translation, Imaginer la libération: Des femmes noires face à l’empire was a finalist for the FETKANN Maryse Condé literary prize in France. She is also the co-editor of Shirley Graham Du Bois: Artist, Activist, and Author in the African Diaspora, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press, and is currently at work on her second monograph, Enslaved Childhoods: Survival and Storytelling in the Atlantic World. Her research has been featured by Al Jazeera, HuffPost, the Washington Post, Radio France Internationale, France 24 and other venues. She is a recipient of the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics and serves as the senior editor of Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International.
Further information
- Location: Stern Great Room
- Time: 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
- Cost: $0.00