Presented by Dr. Myrna Sheldon, Associate Professor (Classics/WGSS, OHIO)

Dr. Sheldon's current book project titled "The Ontology of a Mixed-Race Woman" takes an 1861 Louisiana court case, in which a young woman, Alexina Morrison, sued for her freedom by claiming that she was white, and had been wrongfully enslaved. At the trial were several witnesses, including a naturalist John Leonard Riddell who examined a strand of Alexina's hair before the court under a microscope and argued that her hair revealed she belonged to the "caucassian race." [sic] I use this moment to unfold a set of related arguments about race, science, and citizenship in the emergence of U.S. liberal democracy out of the racial grammar of European colonialism. In particular, I argue that the historical emergence of biological race should be understood as a transformation in the Christian colonial belief that human variation was controlled by God, to a conviction that it is only controlled by human sexual choice. Ultimately, the book argues for the founding of the United States as an initiation in a new global discourse of whiteness. And it takes Alexina's claim to whiteness as an opportunity to ask whether the racial grammar of Enlightenment-era citizenship can be transformed through enfolding more bodies into representative democracy. 

This event is in collaboration with Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGGS).

The CIS Thursday Forum is a weekly series focusing on international research, scholarship and creative activity for the OHIO community.