Brandeis Stories

Slavery, Citizenship, and the Afterlife of Gender-Based Violence

From left to right, University Professor Anita Hill, Professor Sarah Deer (The University of Kansas) and Professor Crystal Feimster (Yale University) speak during Slavery, Citizenship, and the Afterlife of Gender-Based Violence at the Heller School
From left to right, University Professor Anita Hill, Professor Sarah Deer (The University of Kansas) and Professor Crystal Feimster (Yale University) speak during Slavery, Citizenship, and the Afterlife of Gender-Based Violence at the Heller School.

Photo Credit: Dan Holmes

October 30, 2023

"Slavery, Citizenship, and the Afterlife of Gender-Based Violence," a panel of leading scholars, moderated by University Professor Anita Hill, discussed the logics of settler colonial genocide and sexual violence against Native and enslaved Black women with regards to the delineation of citizenship. It was the second of nine panels in the year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar, "Imperiled Bodies: Slavery, Colonialism, Citizenship and the Logics of Gender-Based Violence."

The panel, featuring University Professor Sarah Deer of the University of Kansas and Crystal Feimster, associate professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and history at Yale, focused on the foundational inequities facing Black, Indigenous and other marginalized people. 

Each participant, providing a different background and discipline, historicized how racialized gender and sexual violence was foundational to settler colonialism and slavery and still permeates present social institutions.

“Today we will understand the relationship between the two, settler colonialism and slavery, and understand it not as two separate institutions or forms of oppression, but as two coexisting and self-supporting forms of oppression,” said Hill.  “We'll learn that through the lens of gender-based violence.”