“Sociality as Activist Intervention: Exploring Constitutional Antislavery in the Lives of Anna Murray Douglass, Angelina Grimké, and Charlotte Forten,” November 14 Colloquium with University of Michigan’s Mariah Zeisberg

University of Michigan Associate Professor of Political Science Mariah Zeisberg’s colloquium series presentation will explore the lives and work of Anna Murray Douglass, Angelina Grimké, and Charlotte Forten to show how sociality, family-making, and household politics were used by all three as transformative forms of constitutional activism that advanced the goals of the 19th-century antislavery movement. The talk will be held on November 14 at 3:30pm in Jesse 410, and this post will be updated with live stream links as they become available.

Abstract

Can sociality, family-making, and domestic labor also be forms of constitutional activism? Together we will explore this question by examining the work of Anna Murray Douglass, Angelina Grimké, and Charlotte Forten. Explicitly rejecting a consensus constitutional-theoretical distinction of their time between “civic,” “political,” and “social” rights, these three activists attended to sociality, family-making, and household politics as vehicles for transforming the constitutional order toward antislavery and full civic inclusion of all racialized people. We’ll look at hidden aspects of their activism and trace the stakes of their work for scholarly accounts of constitutional maintenance, disruption, and disintegration.

Mariah Zeisberg is Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is interested in the challenge that subjectivity, pluralism, and conflict pose to liberal ideas about political authority, and her work explores that interest by examining the politics of constitutional meaning outside of juridical contexts. Her first book, War Powers: The Politics of Constitutional Authority (Princeton University Press, 2013), developed an account of constitutional fidelity for the war politics of the elected branches. It won the APSA Neustadt Prize for best work on the presidency that year. Her current research explores family-making, keeping house, and sociability as activist interventions within the antislavery movement.