Slavery North Lunch & Learn with Chris Gismondi

Slavery North Lunch & Learn: "Gender, Family, and Gradual Abolition in Upper Canada and Northern Slavery, 1760-1833"

Slavery North fellow Chris Gismondi will present a talk entitled "Gender, Family, and Gradual Abolition in Upper Canada and Northern Slavery, 1760-1833" at the lunch and learn event on Wednesday, November 20. Gismondi is also teaching a course in the History of Art & Architecture Department this semester entitled Black Subjects in Historical and Contemporary Popular Culture (ART-HIST 390A). All are welcome to the lunch and learn!

About the talk:
This talk aims to unpack the uniqueness of northern slavery and resistance in Loyalist Upper Canada by analyzing enslaved family life through a gendered and decolonial feminist perspective with comparative analysis of other slave-minority demographic spaces. Focusing on reproduction, family, and defiance, I extend the study of slave resistance to northern slavery where bondspeople mobilized against slavery in quotidian ways. I examine how gender and family were exploited throughout northern slavery and the age of abolition specifically via gradual emancipation laws. Enslaved women’s reproductive potential via indentured children was legislated as the transitional process to freedom, which challenges the understanding of women and children as marginal to northern, slave minority-demographic spaces during the age of gradual abolition. Flashes of enslaved people’s everyday tenacity and bravery exist in a hostile, unfinished, and intentionally partial archive.

About Chris Gismondi:
Chris Gismondi is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of New Brunswick and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded art history scholar and curator. He is a PhD Student Fellow of the Slavery North Initiative at UMass Amherst.