“A Natural of This Republic”: Slave Law, Sovereignty and the Legal Politics of Citizenship in Pedro’s Case (1845-1864)“A Natural of This Republic”: Slave Law, Sovereignty and the Legal Politics of Citizenship in Pedro’s Case (1845-1864)http://www.haverford.edu/calendar/details/151581Magill Philips Wing2010-10-20T19:30:002010-10-20T21:00:00
October 20, 7:30PM
Magill Philips Wing
Young Academic Alumni Lecture Series Talk by Joseph Younger '98, Ph.D. candidate in History, Princeton University
Description
The Library and the Office of Alumni Relations present a Young Academic Alumni Lecture Series talk by Joseph Younger '98, Ph.D. candidate in History, Princeton University, entitled “'A Natural of This Republic:' Slave Law, Sovereignty and the Legal Politics of Citizenship in Pedro’s Case (1845-1864)."
During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the borderlands region between the Brazilian Empire and the Uruguayan Republic witnessed sharp conflicts over sovereignty. The geographic reach of Brazilian slave laws was at the center of these debates. Brazilian masters attempted to seize fugitive slaves fleeing across the border along with free persons of color in Uruguayan courts, seeking to use extraterritorial claims to maintain slave labor discipline in the face of Uruguayan manumission laws. In response, slaves, former slaves, and their descendants developed collective strategies to assert their Uruguayan citizenship and with it their freedom. My presentation explores these debates over sovereignty, citizenship, and slave law through a careful, micro-historical analysis of a series of cases surrounding a person of color named Pedro and his family. By exploring the rich and unusual documentary evidence surrounding Pedro’s trial and eventual deportation to Brazil as a fugitive slave, my presentation rescales abstract sovereign conflicts, viewing them from the periphery and through the neglected lens of persons of color. In this way. my presentation provides a new perspective on how individual actors experienced and shaped emerging national entities at the local level, using the courts as critical arenas of conflict in their struggle to forge social rights and sovereign boundaries throughout the Río de la Plata’s blurred borderlands.
Joseph Younger is a graduate student in the Department of History at Princeton University. Joseph’s research focuses on the Río de la Plata borderlands between Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil during the nineteenth century. His dissertation, entitled “Monstrous and Illegal Proceedings:” Law, Sovereignty and Legal Politics in the Río de la Plata Borderlands (1825-1875), traces the connections between quotidian interactions in the local courtrooms of developing legal systems and broader trajectories of state formation and identity creation. Joseph graduated from Columbia Law School in 2001, where he was a Kent Scholar, the school's highest academic honor, for three years. Following his time at Columbia, Joseph clerked for the Honorable Judge Emilio M. Garza on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Before coming to Princeton, Joseph was an associate at Andrews Kurth, LLP in Austin, Texas, specializing in administrative law and government affairs. Joseph is currently a Whiting Fellow at Princeton, awarded to outstanding graduate students in the humanities. In support of his research, Joseph also received a Fulbright-Hays grant for research in Argentina and Uruguay in 2008-9, as well as a grant from the the Brazilian Studies Association in 2008.
Tea at 7:15 pm - Lecture at 7:30 pm
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