Next weekend William and Mary's Lemon Project, which was started to study and address William and Mary's history with slavery, will host its fifth annual symposium. The theme for this year's conference is "Ghosts of Slavery: The Afterlives of Racial Bondage." Cribbing now from the symposium's description:
This symposium is an opportunity for scholars and non-scholars to come together to share research and discuss ideas related to the afterlives of racial slavery. Central to the symposium’s concerns is how to commemorate and confront a “past” that is profoundly present in the sense that its effects have yet to end and seemingly are made anew. The symposium also invites participants to grapple with the vexing question of how to repair the ongoing losses and wreckages to black life left in racial slavery’s aftermath.
Some of the papers (including mine) depart from the theme in some ways. I'm going to be talking about proslavery thought, so I'm going to be talking some about what the past was that the other participants are confronting. My work until now has largely focused on faculty and visiting speakers at southern colleges (including at William and Mary). But this time I'm turning to the student literary society debates, which were held fortnightly at many southern schools. The topics change over time; they start out in the 1830s as predominantly questions about individualism, literature, and religion, and then shift towards topics of national and international concern -- such as economic policy, territorial expansion, democracy and political parties, and reform movements (including prisons and temperance). Of course slavery and after the mid-1840s disunion also feature prominently in the debates. One of my points is that the discussion of slavery becomes more frequent and also the questions debated change over time, to asking whether slavery is an evil in the abstract to whether it is beneficial as practiced in the U.S., to asking whether the slave trade should be reopened.
In most cases, all we have are the topics and the vote; we do not have the content of the debates, much to my disappointment. There are outlines or even scripts for a few of the debates. But taken together -- we have records of literally hundreds of topics over the years from the mid-1830s to the Civil War -- they create a picture of areas of student interest and how those interests change over time.
Here is the symposium schedule. If you're around Williamsburg next weekend I hope you stop by the conference.
Update: Here is a link to my talk. And here is a link to Allen Buansi's talk.
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