Dr. Christian Pinnen, professor in the Department of History at Mississippi College, is coming to Natchez to talk about the colonial Natchez District in an attempt to resurrect the stories of the enslaved and the role Atlantic Africans played in shaping the region. Dr. Pinnen will present his lecture, "Race and Slavery in Colonial Natchez” at the Tuesday, April 22 meeting of the Natchez Historical Society at 108 S. Commerce St. The program is free to the public. It will begin with a social at 5:30 p.m. and the presentation at 6 p.m.
As European settlers began to explore the lower Mississippi Valley and displace Native American people to build settlements, the Europeans knew that they needed to generate profits to make it a worth while enterprise. Most, specifically in Natchez, believed that the key to success was rooted in the ability of settlers to purchase enslaved Africans and utilize their forced labor in their endeavor to build wealth. While the labor practice of racial slavery was well established in European colonial efforts, local settlers had to make sense of the African people among them in social and legal settings. Using Natchez as a lens, this talk explores how legal concepts around slavery create racial categories in Natchez.
Dr. Pinnen’s research focuses on the American borderlands and the legal landscapes that gave rise to definitions of blackness and whiteness in the face of maturing slave societies. He specifically investigates the colonial Natchez District in an attempt to resurrect the stories of the enslaved and the role Atlantic Africans played in shaping the region.
He has published two books: Complexion of Empire in Natchez and Colonial Mississippi. While Colonial Mississippi provides an exhaustive overview of Mississippi’s colonial past, Complexions of Empire in Natchez specifically investigates how the various definitions of race in Europe and the Americas influenced the way that slavery and the law developed in Natchez and, by extension, the colonial southern borderlands.
Dr. Pinnen has won national and international research fellowships from the German Historical Institute, the LSU and University of Texas Libraries, and has presented his research in Europe and the US. He was selected as the Mississippi Humanities Teacher of the Year in 2019, and Complexion of Empire in Natchez won the 2021 Book of the Year Award from the Mississippi Historical Society. In 2024, he was named the Humanities Scholar of the Year by the Mississippi Humanities Council and Distinguished Professor of the Year at Mississippi College.
The April 22 program is funded in part by a grant from the Mississippi Humanities Council, through funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities. For more information, visit natchezhistoricalsociety.org or call 601-431-7737. Emails may be sent to info@natchezhistoricalsociety.org
No comments:
Post a Comment
Blah-Blahs