CBH TALK - What You Don’t Know Will Hurt You: Claiming the Untold Stories of Enslaved Women Warriors
When the archives run dry, what is a historian to do? Rebecca Hall’s recently released graphic novel Wake: The Hidden History of Women Led Slave Revolts, both uncovers history and explores the historians’ work; the immense effort to scour the archive, and the frustration when the search turns up little. This is the case in Hall’s quest to uncover the history of enslaved women rebels. Wake weaves the true story of her search with a deeply personal narrative that honors the courage and agency of enslaved women. Part memoir, part archival excavation, part informed imaginings, Wake defies categorization even as it inspires the imagination. Hall discusses all of these threads with Black feminist scholar Nneka Dennie.
Participants
Rebecca Hall, JD, PhD is a scholar, activist, and educator. After graduating Berkeley Law in 1989, she represented low-income tenants and homeless families for eight years before returning to get her PhD in history. She has taught at UC Santa Cruz, Berkeley Law, Berkeley’s history department, and as a visiting professor of law at the University of Utah. She writes and publishes on the history of race, gender, law, and resistance as well as articles on climate justice and intersectional feminist theory. Dr. Hall’s work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the American Association of University Women, The Ford Foundation, The Mellon Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She is currently a Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and working on her second graphic novel on Black women and Reconstruction.
Photo by Cat Palmer
Nneka D. Dennie is an Assistant Professor of History and core faculty in Africana Studies at Washington and Lee University. She earned her PhD in African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and completed her BA in Political Science with Honors in Africana Studies at Williams College. As a Black feminist scholar specializing in African American intellectual history, Dr. Dennie’s courses examine race and gender in the United States and the Caribbean. Her research interrogates the work of nineteenth-century Black women thinkers. Dr. Dennie is currently working on two books, Re-defining Radicalism: The Rise of Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability in the Nineteenth Century and Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a 19th-Century Black Radical Feminist. She is also the president and co-founder of the Black Women’s Studies Association.
