Confronting the Silence of the Archive: Black Women’s Labor: Economics, Culture and Politics

Thu, Oct 6, 12:00 to 1:45pm, Richmond Marriott Hotel, Richmond Marriott Hotel Salon H-AV Room

Richmond Marriott

500 East Broad Street
Richmond, VA – 23219 USA

This roundtable brings together two of the co-editors and four contributors to the 2016 special issue of Souls, Black Women’s Labor: Economics, Culture and Politics, to discuss questions regarding the importance of recovering lives, rectifying archival silences and reconstructing forgotten narratives to chart new directions in Black women’s history. Influenced and informed by Tera Hunter’s To Joy My Freedom (1997) the organizing principle behind this special edition of Souls was to bring together scholars whose work on African American women considers their historical and contemporary experiences as critically informing questions of class, gender, labor, sexuality and racial capital. Historians working to recover and reimagine the narratives of black women as they negotiated public housing, joined labor movements and encountered the carceral state have enriched and complicated the fields of labor, gender and cultural studies as well as scholarly approaches to studying economic justice, social movements and labor in the U.S. Scholarship centering African American women profoundly alters our understanding of a range of practices, institutions, and sectors such as welfare, sex work, policing, war industries and protest.

The four authors include Jewell Charmaine Debnam, whose essay, “Mary Moultrie, Naomi White, and the Women of the Charleston Hospital Workers’ Strike of 1969,” uses both oral histories and archival sources to reconstruct this labor struggle; Dr. Nicole Ivy’s “Bodies of Work,” develops the conceptual framework of symbolic labor to rethink the significance of the history of enslaved women who served as gynecological test subjects in the antebellum South; Dr. Crystal Moten’s, “Fighting Their Own Economic Battles,” details the struggle of Saint Charles Lockett to create a manufacturing company that was responsive to the needs of black women, and black mothers in working-class Milwaukee; Dr. Alexis Gumbs’, “Spelling Soul: For Cheryll Y. Greene”, reflects on the unseen labor of black women as mentors, institution builders and organizers of intellectual communities through the life of the late Managing Editor of Souls. The co-editors of the special volume include Sarah Haley, an assistant professor of Women and Gender Studies and African American studies, whose current work examines the imprisoned women in the U.S. South following the Civil War and Prudence Cumberbatch, an assistant professor of Africana Studies and Coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program whose research explores black women’s activism in Baltimore in the 20th century.