*Lunch will be available at 12:00pm in 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Speaker: Keisha Brown

Title: "Du Bois' Black Reconstruction: Reimagining Race and Labor, from Reconstruction to the Interwar period"

Abstract: Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. Du Bois analyzes Black Americans' role in the Reconstruction Era. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the nation was not only grappling with its identity, but also with questions relating to the newly freed Black population. In both cases, the guiding question was how do we move forward? In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois engaged these and related questions but reasserted Black agency to highlight the myriad of ways that Black Americans were active in shaping their identities, communities, and the nation through political engagement. In this vein, holding state and national conferences centered around the concerns of Blacks at the intersections of race, labor, and social issues illuminate the desire to understand and engage existing democratic processes and institutions to address these problems. This talk will focus on a series of National Conferences held in January and December of 1869 in conjunction with the Chinese Labor Convention convened by White southern planters in the same year to illuminate the different ways in which race and labor were being introduced with the influx of Chinese Coolie labor. Using the work of Du Bois, Moon Ho-Jung, Edlie L. Wong, and others, this talk will analyze the intersections of race and labor in relation to questions regarding capital and citizenship to assess how each of these groups in this tenuous period was reimagining race and labor.