09 Nov Conversation with the Author of The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North Africa
Terri Snyder (American Studies, California State University, Fullerton)
Monday, November 9, 2015 / 4:00 PM
HSSB 4041
Terri Snyder will lead a discussion of her most recent book, The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North Africa (Chicago, 2015). Snyder’s research interests include slavery and freedom in US history and memory; race and gender in Early America and Early American Cultural History.
In The Power to Die, Terri L. Snyder excavates the history of slave suicide, returning it to its central place in early American history. How did people—traders, plantation owners, and, most importantly, enslaved men and women themselves—view and understand these deaths, and how did they affect understandings of the institution of slavery then and now? Snyder draws on ships’ logs, surgeons’ journals, judicial and legislative records, newspaper accounts, abolitionist propaganda and slave narratives, and many other sources to build a grim picture of slavery’s toll and detail the ways in which suicide exposed the contradictions of slavery, serving as a powerful indictment that resonated throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world and continues to speak to historians today.
Selections from the book will be circulated in advance; a limited number of signed copies will be available at the event for the discounted price of $28. Please contact maclean@classics.ucsb.edu for more information or copies of the selected reading.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Slavery, Captivity & the Meaning of Freedom RFG.