Kicking off the year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar, "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.
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, shared their perspective on the influences on continued violence and other residues of slavery and settler colonialism.
“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.”