Editors’ note: Insurrect! was founded as a publication in part because we wanted to create more scholarly networks of support for graduate students that supplemented, rather than relied upon, the formal academy. Like many junior scholars, this week the editors of Insurrect! have been consumed by the ongoing fight against sexual harrassment at Harvard University led by Margaret Czerwienski, Lilia Kilburn, and Amulya Mandava and their supporters; and also overwhelmed by the incredibly disheartening way that senior scholars at that institution have responded. As an online magazine that is devoted to critiques of colonial legacies, and to the foundational work of Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, and postcolonial feminist theory, we cannot ignore how institutions today uphold these legacies through the gendered mechanisms of power and abuse, even within fields designed to analyze them. To that end, we are sharing a personal narrative from one of Insurrect!’s co-founders that speaks specifically to the ways that our working lives as scholars and academics cannot be divorced from gendered institutional power. We are incredibly fortunate to work with and know someone as brave and brilliant as Kellen Heniford.

Transness is a theory of change, of futurity. As trans people, we reject pre-written narratives to build more livable futures. Maybe this is why transsexuality is a recurring trope in science fiction, why whenever transness receives media attention it is framed as unheard of and new. Perhaps this also has bearing on why our histories are so often difficult for many of us.

Eamon Schlotterback is a doctoral candidate in literature at Northeastern University. Her dissertation project seeks to understand gender transition and memoir as technologies of self-making. She is currently Lab Coordinator at the Digital Transgender Archive.

We left off in Part One in the midst of a discussion about the connections between the history of geology and the histories of settler colonialism, the imperial state, and extractive industry in the U.S. We continue that conversation here, with our two participants, Tamara Pico and Gustave Lester. This conversation has been edited for clarity.

Gustave Lester is a PhD candidate in the History of Science at Harvard University and a current dissertation fellow at the Science History Institute.

Tamara Pico is an assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and affiliated with the Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

We brought together two experts on the history of geology to talk about the origins of the discipline and its relationship to settler colonialism. This conversation has been edited for clarity.

Gustave Lester is a PhD candidate in the History of Science at Harvard University and a current dissertation fellow at the Science History Institute.

Tamara Pico is an assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and affiliated with the Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Slave courts pervaded colonial society. British settlers founded the first ones in Barbados in 1661 to judicially regulate enslaved Africans. By the mid-eighteenth century, this institution operated in nearly every British colony, and each individual parish or county had its own court. Manned by two to three Justices of the Peace along with a small group of elite planters, in this court the convicted possessed no right of appeal. From trying petty theft to executing accused murderers, these courts had absolute jurisdiction to try, convict, and execute alleged enslaved criminals. Once sentenced to die, court officials examined and evaluated enslaved people to compensate enslavers for their executed property. If the compensation amount did not suit the enslaver, they could petition to transport the slave out of the colony instead and sell them for a potentially higher price on the Atlantic market. The sentence of transportation allowed colonial authorities to reshuffle labor that was meant to be destroyed but was often too valuable to do so. In both the American South and the Caribbean islands, these courts remained in operation until emancipation in the nineteenth century.

Black life in vast early America was molded by a politic of survival that allowed diasporas to adapt, resist, and constitute new life in the violent colonial landscape. Torn from their natal homes, kith, and kin, diasporas recreated new means of belonging and community to avert the threat of social death amidst the changing colonial currents.

When I decided to major in history at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) nearly a decade ago, I never thought I would eventually contribute to historian Karin Wulf’s articulation of #VastEarlyAmerica via a forum like Insurrect!. I did know back then, though, that I did not want to study 20th century Black life like most of my classmates and professors. As an undergraduate student, I yearned to better understand the world we lived in. I gravitated to topics that assessed how Black people encountered violence, and the strategies Black women, men, and children used to resist and survive.

In May 2021, an abolitionist caucus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Graduate Employee Organization (GEO UAW 2322) joined up with the Cops Off Campus Coalition (COCC) to support Abolition May, “a month-long series of actions on campuses across Turtle Island to demand the removal of ALL campus police.” After a year of political education, we spent the month taking direct action on the UMass Amherst campus to support abolition. As a caucus, we secured a vote from union membership to prioritize abolition during contract bargaining: the police have a long history of busting unions and enforcing the exploitation of workers. For the May 3rd Transnational Day of Refusal we collaborated with the Illuminator Art Collective to project a virtual picket line with crowdsourced abolitionist messaging on the side of Herter Hall. On May 20th, we hosted an abolition “block party” with literature, art, zines, a student-led petition for budgetary reallocation and racial justice, and coalition-building among students, faculty, and local abolitionist organizations.

As the language and logics of prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionism enter the liberal mainstream, they also become subject to increased co-optation, bastardization, and de-radicalization. Black rage, Black grief, and Black militancy are incorporated, distorted, and sold back to us as Black capitalism, Black punditry, and Black “representation” in electoral politics. Burning police precincts becomes an appeal for small budgetary concessions. “Abolish” becomes “Defund” becomes “Reform.” We make promises for more diversity and more inclusion. We issue statements and elect the “lesser” of two evils. From the academy, we get what Joy James terms “academic abolitionism” – the rhetoric of abolition so severed from any Black radical, working-class, or grassroots origins that it no longer has radical potential. “There is nothing about the academy that has revolutionary desire,” James notes in a 2019 lecture, “And if abolitionism is about revolutionary desire, then you’re caught in a contradiction.” We become ahistorical about abolition. Business continues as usual.

The January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol building by a rightwing mob has launched “insurrection” into the center of American discourse, demanding that we reckon with this term and its connotations. As a member of the editorial committee that founded this magazine, I have been asked and have had to grapple with whether or not to double down on our controversial name. But to grant the pro-Trump “insurrection” monopoly over the meaning of the word is, I believe, to declare undue defeat.

There’s a problem with teaching 19th-century American literature in Hawai’i. The problem arises from the fact that during the 19th century, Hawai’i was not, and, according to many Kanaka Maoli still is not, part of America. In 1893, the US overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom and its sovereign Queen Lili’uokalani, and in 1898 illegally annexed the Hawaiian islands, despite massive resistance from Hawaiian people. Hawai’i’s specific history is a particularly glaring and relatively recent example of the colonial situation under which 19th-century American literature is taught throughout the U.S.: it is all taught on stolen land. Hawai’i’s history and location, and how this place makes it impossible to forget about colonialism, present an opportunity for thinking about the challenges and paradoxes of teaching 19th-century American literature both in the islands and throughout the territories now known as the US. How might the problem of teaching this curriculum-mandated field of literary studies in an explicitly colonized place offer possibilities for teaching and writing with 19th-century American literature more broadly? How might contemplating this question from Hawai’i offer ways to think through how teachers and scholars on the continent could account for the distinct histories of the people Native to the lands on which they teach? And how might it help teachers both in Hawai’i and on the continent frame C19 Am Lit explicitly as literature of colonization?

As Joe Biden’s inauguration looms, we at Insurrect! have turned our attention to transitions, both democratic and antidemocratic, in United States history. Over the last few months, the world has witnessed the attempted judicial overthrow of a presidential election and the breaching of the U.S. Capitol by a white supremacist mob. With these events in mind, we asked three early career scholars: In light of this year’s regime change, how have you been thinking about transfers of power in your own scholarship?

In October 1876, Martin Delany, the Black abolitionist later called the father of Black nationalism, endorsed Democratic Party candidate Wade Hampton for Governor from a platform in South Carolina. Black people in the crowd booed him from the stage. Very few would follow Delany’s defection to the Democrats that election. Hundreds would be killed by Democrat mobs as they tried to vote against Hampton, the ex-Confederate General who had been among the nation’s wealthiest slaveholders. Hampton’s victory would usher in a “Redeemer” government to end Reconstruction in the Blackest state in the Union.

I was struck one workday by a 1878 map I picked up entitled Gray’s New Map of Hampton, depicting Hampton, Virginia, in the decade after the Civil War (Fig. 1). The image shows the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, then an agricultural and teachers’ college for Black students, now known as Hampton University. The city’s Black population is referenced through “colored” institutions like cemeteries and churches, but individual names of homes or buildings are only labeled for white businessmen, such as George Dixon’s oyster house visible by the Hampton Creek steamboat landing.

Today, anti-racist and anti-imperialist writing about early American history is under threat from austerity, executive orders, and historical erasure. Universities are exploiting the economic crisis to continue slashing budgets, the academic job market has collapsed entirely, and U.S. white nationalist mythmaking continues to hold sway within a violent police state and a chaotic election season. As early-career scholars facing these dire circumstances, we founded Insurrect! to honor the ongoing resistance to settler violence, slavery, and imperialism in the colonial Americas. Our goal is to publish the writing of contingent and independent scholars, graduate students, archivists, and library and museum workers who do not have a voice in academia. Insurrect! is not just for academics, but for a public eager for radical change in historical writing

After declaring independence from the French on January 1, 1804, Governor General for life Jean-Jacques Dessalines defended the new nation of Haiti in an Atlantic world determined to refuse its claims to antislavery and anticolonial sovereignty. Speaking to the Haitian people – and addressing anxious onlookers in the Atlantic world – on April 28, 1804, Dessalines proclaimed “Yes, I have saved my country; I have avenged America.” The object of his vengeance was clear: the remaining colonists on the island, whom he had ordered killed in the early months of 1804. Yet the beneficiary of his vengeance, the “America” for whom Dessalines exacted a “terrible but just” retribution, was multivalent and complex. Dessalines’s “America” was a transhistorical concept that bridged past, present, and future to encompass the violent colonization and resistance of Indigenous and Black people. By exploring the richness of Dessalines’s foundational anticolonial utterance here, we gain a better understanding of Haiti and its place in studies of America’s long nineteenth century. Ultimately, Dessalines’s “America” helps scholars decolonize the idea of “America” and an overly US-centric concept of American Studies.

In part two of our roundtable, we start with a question posed by Efren Lopez: How might we funnel the labor and resources of the university, the museum, or any institution in which we work towards the Black Lives Matter movement, abolition, or insurrection more broadly? And what futures do you envision for these institutions that would make them fertile seedbeds for the sort of garden Bradley Craig describes—something capable of fostering “sustainability, care, and pleasure?”

Insurrect! is a new digital space for radical thinking in Early American Studies. Our first roundtable features early career researchers who are attuned to colonialism as an ongoing system of power, and whose work spans disciplines of study as well as geographies outside of nationalist borders. In response to the upheavals of 2020, the editorial team thought it only fitting to begin our roundtable by asking this question: How has this moment of anti-colonial uprisings and demonstrations by Black Lives Matter and Indigenous activists shifted your work in early American studies—either as a researcher, an educator, a curator, a public historian, or an activist?

There is an empty plinth in Bristol. It sits within a stone’s throw of the Cenotaph (Bristol’s monument to its First and Second World War dead), a plaque commemorating the Burma Campaign of 1941-1945, a statue of the conservative Irishman and imperialist Edmund Burke, and an Indian restaurant named 4500 Miles from Delhi. The plinth, until very recently, held its own public signifier of Britain’s former empire: the slave trader and Royal African Company (RAC) employee, Edward Colston. The plaza lies in the shadow of Colston Tower, and a heavy traffic of lorries and commuters follows the curve of Colston Avenue around it. The fact that Black Lives Matter activists had to hoist Colston into Bristol’s harbor for the link between this local ‘philanthropist’ and the state-supported dispossession, sale, or violent death of 1.3 million Africans to be widely acknowledged is a curious feature of Britain’s simultaneous remembering and obliviating of the enormous wealth generated from its investment and perpetuation of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. However, not only considerations of wealth or institutions are missing from both common memory and how the statue’s fall has been discussed – Black people’s histories and presents are all too often obscured behind recitations of Colston’s biography or a focus on the institutions to which he belonged.

Summer 2020 has seen Black Lives Matter and Indigenous rights activists toppling countless statues commemorating racism and racists both in the Americas and around the world. Not all monuments to the past are cast in bronze, however. From the names of our streets to the layout of our neighborhoods to the schools our children attend, memorializations of slavery and segregation surround us in the United States. American private schools, especially, have long functioned to reinforce class and racial hierarchies, and themselves act as monuments to racism and segregation.