Bernstein Faculty Seminar

“’The alleged fetus’: law, neighborhood, and women’s reproductive health in Old Regime France"

This paper focuses on an incident in Lyon in 1728 involving a young single woman named Marguerite Rebourdin. She threw what she described as a “lump of flesh” out of the second- floor window of the room where she lived. In subsequent events her “lump of flesh” was described variously as a fetus, an alleged fetus, and a baby as the human tissue moved through many hands from her room to the street below to a neighbor’s home to the building where she lived and to the city courthouse.

Legal records of the discoveries of fetal and neonatal remains, like Rebourdin’s, feature in many early modern French archives. Looking at the relationship between law and women's sexual and reproductive histories through the lens of the disposal of fetal remains provides an opportunity to re-examine the relationship between legal process and women's sexuality. They reveal the wide range of efforts to interrupt reproduction at various stages that were not prosecuted and the wide tolerance for those efforts. The fabulous work of criminal prosecutions for infanticide in recent decades has illuminated one particular relationship between law and women's reproductive health. Yet the stories of fetal remains that moved around cities through many hands suggest a far more common set of practices around interrupting reproduction in which many actors, including legal officials. were broadly complicit and acquiescent, and illuminates the ordinary reproductive health stories of young women.

Speaker

​​​​​​​Julie Hardwick, John E. Green Regents Professor of History, UT-Austin Distinguished Teaching Professor, UT Systems Regents Distinguished Teaching Professor

"Black Bordeaux and the Search for Refuge After Revolution"

Abstract

The itineraries of over 150 people of color who sought passports to leave Bordeaux, France between the 1790s and 1830 run counter to most histories of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Black migration. The vast majority of them were free and traveling on their own account. Some had been born on the African continent but many were returning to where they had been born, enslaved, or freed in the Caribbean or to another destination in the archipelago. Still, the United States was the most popular colony or country declared as a destination by name. This small wave of migration differed from the thousands of Africans and their descendants who had often arrived enslaved in Bordeaux earlier in the eighteenth century only to return to bondage in the Caribbean.  By contrast, the group of people of color featured in this article were practicing their freedom as they set sail even as they moved closer to the beating heart of slavery when they traveled west. At the same time, the records they left in the archive provide clues about prevailing racial ideologies in France while shining a light on the process of community formation and affective ties among people of color who often have been rendered invisible. Using an otherwise cold, bureaucratic questionnaire as a point of departure, this article excavates and theorizes Black space-making and Black life in the aftermath of Atlantic Revolutions. 

"Navigating the Past in an Era of Thin Historicization," Ethan Kleinberg, Professor of History, Wesleyan University

Ethan Kleinberg is a Professor of History at Wesleyan University and editor of the journal, History and Theory. He is interested in the topic of meta-history and considers questions concerning the purpose and nature of history: Why do we study history? What is the purpose of history? What makes a history true or correct?  

About the Lecture

In this paper I argue that we are living in moment of thin historicization. What I mean by this is the tendency to use historical narrative structure or context as an explanatory scaffold with little or no reflection on the way that the historical narrative or context in question was constructed or the theoretical assumptions that underpin such a construction. As such our moment is decidedly untheoretical. What’s more, and perhaps counterintuitively, the academic world and disciplines have become so thoroughly historicized in this way that the general public and students in our universities no longer see a reason to turn to history as a discipline or a tool of critique. As other areas of academia have widened their zone of engagement by historicizing their fields, disciplinary historians have narrowed theirs. The current emphasis on mimetic representation of past events, that is, on making the objective accurate representation of past events the raison d’être of the discipline, has led history into what appears to be a self-imposed obsolescence—the increasingly narrow zone of experts speaking to and writing for other experts. Thus the odos or path to historical knowledge is assumed to be singular and the emphasis on the meta-hodos, the root of methodology, narrows the disciplinary path of history, blinding researchers and readers to other possible routes to the past. Following my deconstructive approach to the past I propose an alternative poros or route to the past that embraces the aporias that these multiple pasts provoke. Far from the fetish of mimetic representation or the master cipher of contextual explanation, such a move makes the past/s available and relevant for us in the present while also illuminating the space for imaginative critique.

"Democracy and Truth: A Short History," Sophie Rosenfeld, Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

Democracy and Truth have a complicated and delicate historical relationship that dates to the era of the American and French Revolutions. Has this relationship now finally come to an end? Have we entered, as many commentators have suggested in the last two years, the era of post-truth? This talk will try to answer this question by situating the present moment in the long histories of both technocratic and populist challenges to democratic truth, as well by considering what's new in the 21st century, in the US and around the world, when it comes to thinking about facts, knowledge, misinformation, and lies in politics.

"Laboratories of Terror:  Perpetrators of Stalin's Mass Repression in Ukraine, 1937-1943," Lynne Viola, Professor of History, University of Toronto

Stalin's mass terror of 1937-38 resulted in the arrest of approximately 1.6 million people and the execution of close to 700,000 people.  Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the partial opening of archives, historians made great progress in the study of what Robert Conquest labeled "The Great Terror," unearthing statistics on the number of victims of the terror, excavating the "mass operations" which netted the overwhelming majority  of the terror's victims, and expoliring Stalin's motivations in unleashing this massive wave of repression.  Missing from these new studies is the question of Soviet perpetrators of the terror, especially outside of Moscow.  Lynne Viola addresses this issue in a study of the secret trials of provincial- and district-level NKVD (political police) interrogators in Ukraine, who were scapegoated for the terror's "excesses."  These trials, stored in the archives of the former KGB in Kiev, shed new light on the question of the Soviet perpetrator and illuminate some of the darkest recesses of Stalinist repression- most notable, the interrogation room, the prison cells, and the places of execution.

4:00 pm, Wednesday, October 15th, 2014
closed to the public

"Distance, Dissent, and Heresy: Medieval Inquisition as American History"

Christine Caldwell Ames is a historian of medieval Europe with a particular interest in the history of Christianity, heresy and inquisition, and inter-religious relations. Her articles have appeared in The American Historical Review, Heresis, History Compass, and Comitatus, and her book Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2009. A recipient of the USC Mortar Board Society's Excellence in Teaching Award, Professor Ames teaches various undergraduate courses on medieval European history, as well as a survey of Christianity from its origins to the present.

Monday, October 21, 2013
closed to the public

Kathleen Davis was trained as a medievalist at Rutgers University, where she found encouragement to work across disciplinary boundaries. She has worked in the fields of medieval studies, translation studies, and postcolonial criticism, and has recently focused on the issue of secularism. She is the author of Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (2008; currently being translated into Turkish) and Deconstruction and Translation (2001; republished in Shanghai 2004). She is also co-editor, with Nadia Altschul, of Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” Outside Europe. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The Journal for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, History of the Present, Postmedieval, American Literary History, Speculum, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Traductio, and Medievalia et Humanistica, as well as in numerous edited collections. She is currently working on two major projects, one on time in Old English poetry, and one on secularism and modernity.

"Continuities in Soviet/Russian Environmental Policies: The Case of the Arctic"