绿巨人视频

The George and Irina Schaeffer Center and the Center for Critical Democracy Studies are听hosting a book launch for Miranda Spieler鈥檚 new work, Slaves in Paris. The event will feature commentary from three distinguished scholars: Anne Lafont (EHESS), Pierre Singarav茅lou (Paris 1 Panth茅on-Sorbonne), and Jennifer Boittin (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).

Slaves in Paris is a pioneering biographical study of enslaved people and their struggle for freedom in prerevolutionary Paris. It traces the lives of fugitive slaves whose clandestine existences nonetheless left behind a remarkable paper trail.

Spieler reconstructs vivid and intimate portraits of men, women, and children who came to Paris from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. The book is both a history of hunted people and a tribute to their extraordinary resilience.

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BOOK DESCRIPTION
A pioneering biographical study of enslaved people and their struggle for freedom in prerevolutionary Paris, by an award-winning historian of France and the French Empire. In the decades leading up to the French Revolution, when Paris was celebrated as an oasis of liberty, slaves fled there, hoping to be freed. They pictured Paris as a refuge from France鈥檚 notorious slave-trading ports. The French were late to the slave trade, but they dominated the global market in enslaved people by the late 1780s. This explosive growth transformed Paris, the cultural capital of the Enlightenment, into a dangerous place for people in bondage. Those seeking freedom in Paris faced manhunts, arrest, and deportation. Some put their faith in lawyers, believing the city鈥檚 courts would free them. Examining the lives of those whose dashed hopes and creative persistence capture the spirit of the era, Miranda Spieler brings to light a hidden story of slavery and the struggle for freedom. Fugitive slaves collided with spying networks, nosy neighbors, and overlapping judicial authorities. Their clandestine lives left a paper trail. In a feat of historical detective work, Spieler retraces their steps and brings to light the new racialized legal culture that permeated every aspect of everyday life. She pieces together vivid, granular portraits of men, women, and children who came from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. We learn of their strategies and hiding places, their family histories and relationships to well-known Enlightenment figures. Slaves in Paris is a history of hunted people. It is also a tribute to their resilience.
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BIOS
Professor Miranda Spieler joined the Department of History and Politics at the American University of Paris in 2013. After completing her dissertation at Columbia, she served as a lecturer at Wesleyan and Harvard before joining the University of Arizona's History Department, where she received tenure in 2011. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for Human Values at Princeton University and from the Center for Humanities at Stanford University. Before and during her graduate studies, she served as assistant to the writer Susan Sontag. Miranda Spieler is an historian of France and the French overseas empire. Her areas of expertise include European legal history, slavery and emancipation, the history of French Guiana and the Caribbean, policing and carceral systems, human rights, and the history of Paris. Spieler's prize-winning first book, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard, 2012), moves between domestic France and colonial soil to chronicle the lives of convicts, ex-convicts, freed slaves, and non-European immigrants, revealing their envelopment by novel structures of coercion and violence between the French Revolution and the Third Republic. She is a near-native speaker of French and publishes in both English and French.

Anne Laffont is an art historian and director of research at EHESS. She is interested in art, images, and material culture in the Black Atlantic region, as well as historiographical issues related to the concept of African art. She has published works on art and knowledge in the imperial context: L'artiste savant 脿 la conqu锚te du monde moderne (2010, ed.), 1740, un abr茅g茅 du monde (2012, ed.) and on gender issues in discourse on art in the 18th and 19th centuries: Plumes et pinceaux. Discours de femmes sur l'art en Europe 1750-1850 (2 volumes, 2012, ed.). She then worked on the different forms of visualization of pigmentation at the time of the invention of dermatology, as well as on the auxiliary sciences of racism and their modes of graphic recording. This work resulted in a book entitled L'art et la Race. L'Africain (tout) contre l'艙il des Lumi猫res. Anna Lafont was a member of the scientific committee for the exhibition: Le mod猫le noir de G茅ricault 脿 Matisse (2019, Mus茅e d'Orsay). In 2021 and 2022, she taught at Williams College as Clark Professor and conducted research in the southern United States on African-American art thanks to a Villa Albertine grant. Her latest book, co-written with Fran莽ois-Xavier Fovelle, is entitled "L'Afrique et le monde. Histoires renou茅es de la pr茅histoire au XXIe si猫cle" (Paris, La d茅couverte, 2022).

Pierre Singarav茅lou has been a professor of contemporary history at Paris 1 University since 2015. In 2019, he was elected by the British Academy as a 鈥淕lobal Professor鈥� at King's College London: he is one of the first ten researchers recruited from around the world to teach in the United Kingdom.听In 2022, he succeeded Neil MacGregor, former president of the British Museum, as holder of the Louvre Chair dedicated to the study of lost museums of the 19th century (ethnographic museum, Algerian museum, Mexican museum, Spanish museum, Chinese museum, etc.).

Jennifer A. Boittin is the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global History. She received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University and was previously a professor at Penn State University. Her research and teaching look at how colonial spaces in West Africa, Southeast Asia, North Africa, and the French Caribbean were shaped by intersections between class, politics, and urban culture around the world wars and decolonization. Completed in part thanks to a Paris Institute for Advanced Studies fellowship, her second book is entitled Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women鈥檚 Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919-1952 (2022, University of Chicago Press). Undesirable tells the virtually unknown history of hundreds of women in Southeast Asia (French Indochina) and West Africa (AOF) tracked by authorities because they were traveling alone and claiming Frenchness. Drawn from Cambodian, French, and Senegalese archives, Undesirable鈥檚 focus on how ordinary people react to being policed gives historical depth to pressing contemporary issues of migration and violence in France today and of similar reckonings on a global scale. Boittin鈥檚 first book, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (2010, University of Nebraska Press) is an innovative, intersectional history of radical interwar politics. She has also published extensively on the Nardal sisters, Lamine Senghor, Ti茅moko Garan Kouyat茅, Black anti-imperialism, masculinity, Black and African diaspora, Josephine Baker, and women travelers. She is a Past President of the Western Society of French History, editor of French Colonial History, and founding member on the editorial committee for Marronnages, les questions raciales au crible des sciences sociales.