Thinking Women: New Books Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights

Infamous Bodies Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights

Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women Celebrities & the Afterlives of Rights takes seriously feminist and feminine public culture in defining the both the terms and critiques of liberal humanism. The figures of study - Phillis Wheatley, Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman, Mary Seacole, & Sarah Forbes Bonetta - traverse centuries and mediums as they are represented in various corrective histories of Black political life. Engaging Black & transnational feminist thought as well as feminist legal and political theory around human rights, this talk situates spectacular 18th and 19th century Black women’s subjectivity as the foundation of thinking political futures through rather than against vulnerability.

Samantha Pinto is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (NYU Press, 2013) and Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights (Duke UP, 2020), as well as the co-editor of Writing Beyond the State (Palgrave, 2020) with Alexandra S. Moore. She is currently working on a third book, Under the Skin, on race, embodiment, and scientific discourse in African American and African Diaspora culture, as well as a book of essays on feminist ambivalence.