The United States in the nineteenth century transformed itself from a series of local economies into a national market that sought out international resources. This march of a market economy tried to bring artisans to heel. It commodified factory labor. And the process exacerbated racial and gendered divisions among laborers.
Labor historians have documented, for example, how the Antebellum creation of whiteness fueled the racial division among free laborers in the North. This panel will focus on the texts and other cultural artifacts that chart work or workers during this nineteenth- century transition. A focus on workers and writing about workers promises to excavate opposition and alternative formulations to markets and empire. Writing about labor also offers the chance to explore the growth of whiteness, gender role divisions, ideologies of masculinity and sexual practices in these larger narratives. Examples appear in slave narratives, novels and nineteenth-century discussions of science, technology, race and economics.
Send a 200-word abstract and a two-page vita by January 1, 1998 to
Todd Vogel,email preferred at: Tvogel@mail.utexas.edu
Todd Vogel
The University of Texas at Austin
<Tvogel@mail.utexas.edu>
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