Event Date:
Friday, November 20, 2015 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm
Event Location:
- Lane Room
“Fugitive Women, Fugitive Rights,” is a talk focusing on Syedullah’s current book project,
which advances a gendered tradition of radical abolitionist politics inspired by the practical and
analytic import of Harriet Jacobs’s critique of both slavery and the kinds of emancipation slavery
precipitated. Thinking the gendered protocols of testimony, solidarity, and retreat authored by
Harriet Jacobs in the writing and publication of her 1861 slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl alongside the inaugural moments of the prison abolition movement in the 1970s,
Syedullah argues that the struggles of the criminal, the contraband, and the fugitive to inhabit the
democratic order represent a distinctly gendered reclamation of the revolutionary spirit, a
tendency to seek freedom, not merely as a human right, but also as a means of holding the nation
to account for the deeper wrongs constitutive of its own domestic violence.
Jasmine Syedullah is a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at UC
Riverside. Her current book project, “No Selves to Defend: Fugitive justice and black feminist
loopholes of abolition” is a political theory of abolition rooted in the antislavery writings of
Harriet Jacobs, the anti-prison testimonies of political prisoners Angela Davis, Assata Shakur,
and narratives from the 1971 uprising at Alderson Federal Reformatory for Women.
November 11, 2015 - 1:09pm