California, A Slave State breaks with the common perception of California as a place of endless sunshine, long coastlines, and rich harvests. It does so by exposing the multifold ways in which different forms of slavery and dependency were – and continue to be – constitutive of a state that is one of the largest economies in the world. In an accessible and poetic language, that neither simplifies nor euphemizes this history and its brutality, Pfaelzer uncovers the co-existence of traditional and new systems of bondage in a land shaped by the genocide, indenture, and rape of Native Americans, the coerced labor of captive Alaska Natives, African American enslaved labor, the prostitution of Chinese girls, the unpaid labor of convicts, and ecological exploitation.
Pfaelzer’s study reveals the interrelation between these various regimes of oppression in which freedom often merely becomes a short interlude in a transition from one form of (strong) asymmetrical dependency to the next. Her analysis rests on the crucial finding that it was the specific framing of the very notion of freedom that made it possible for human bondage in California to thrive.
Join Jean Pfaelzer for her reading and discussion with Damian Pargas (Professor of the History and Culture of North America at Leiden University), moderated by Luvena Kopp (PhD Researcher and Lecturer at the BCDSS).
21 May 2025, 18:00 CET at Uni Bonn Festsaal
The conversation will be held in English. The event is followed by a reception.
To register, please follow the LINK1.