Please join os on October 23 (Friday), at 12pm CT, for our Fall faculty workshop with Prof. Sarah Jessica Johnson (English). Johnson will be sharing her paper “The Pictorial Politics of Perpetual Pregnancy: Solitude de la Guadeloupe.” Prof. Larissa Brewer García (Romance Languages) will be the discussant.

Sarah Jessica Johnson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago and researches archives of slavery and marronage in the United States and Caribbean from the seventeenth through nineteenth-century. She is interested in how resistance practices and flight from enslavement by Black and Native individuals in the Caribbean and North America shaped textual and visual production in the colonial period.

Johnson’s current book project, Forms of Escape: Maroons and Marronage in Fiction and the Archive, explores the narratives of historical and fictional maroon individuals as examples of how practices of marronage shape narrative and archival form in eighteenth and nineteenth-century anglophone and francophone U.S. and Caribbean texts. She argues for how historical marronage is often represented differently than other forms of flight and freedom from slavery. Crucial to this study is an archival paradox: Maroons absented themselves from the printed record, eschewed the position of author, only to be figured and represented by others who, expectedly, struggled with the depiction of a practice they could not know firsthand.

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Friday, October 23, 12-1:30pm CT (on Zoom)

Sarah Jessica Johnson (Assistant Professor of English)

“The Pictorial Politics of Perpetual Pregnancy: Solitude de la Guadeloupe”

Discussant: Larissa Brewer-García (Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature)

Johnson’s paper can be downloaded here (password: solitude)

Please click here to register for the meeting. Registration is required (password: 185575)