This is a past event
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Frost Library, Center for Humanistic Inquiry

Talk and discussion with CHI Fellow Max Perry Mueller
During our regular Wednesday salon with tapas, wine and childcare provided!

Drawn from his second book project, "To Abolish Race: American Utopianism and the Pitfalls of Post-Racial Ideology, 1817-1859," this paper looks at the role Sojourner Truth played in the short-lived interracial intentional community, the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, 1843-1846. An association of “come-outers,” the Community members believed that the only solution to the “race problem” was to form idealistic societies apart from the corrupt American political and religious culture. Rather than view Truth as a singular figure in the history of antebellum antislavery movements, as has been the tendency in the scholarship of Truth’s life and works, this paper understands Truth as a member of a community—in particular the “Community” in Northampton. As such, this paper examines how the racialized and gendered reaction to Truth’s growing authority exposed this short-lived utopia’s inability to fully “come out” of the American society of which it was so critical.

Contact Info

Elizabeth J Kolenda
(413) 542-5870
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