Sarah Cornell, assistant history professor, will present the final lecture of the 2009 Borderlands Lecture Series on April 30. The lecture will be in the SUB Santa Ana rooms A and B at 3 p.m.
Daily Lobo: What will you talk about during your presentation?
Sarah Cornell: The lecture will look at the ideas and experiences of the diverse peoples who lived between the Southeast and Mexico over the course of the 19th century. More specifically, I'm going to ask how foreign elite white Southerners enslaved and freed African-Americans, and Mexicans of all classes engaged in a process of comparing, constructing and challenging evolving racial and labor political systems by looking at one another. To even be more specific, I'm going to think about the ways in which (and) why it was that Mexico was seen as a haven for fugitive slaves in the Antebellum era, and yet a scant time later, Confederates spoke about Mexico as the perfect place to institute new regimes of racialized and free labor.
DL: Why did you decide to talk about this topic for the lecture?
SC: In terms of why I have decided to lecture on this topic because my work is driven by the need to get beyond the black-white binary in the U.S. South and show that Southerners - black, white, elite or not - were not (provincial), in the fact that they envision themselves as members of transnational communities, so that is the national boundaries of the U.S. South implement their vision for the present and the future and so when Southerners looked at Mexico they saw this as providing a potentially alternative configuration of race and labor.
DL: Why do you think it's important for people to know about this topic?
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SC: One of the reasons is that the U.S. South is seen as the last bastion of biracialism and in many ways American exceptionalism. Work on the West, Southwest and the Northeast has really challenged this idea that the U.S. is exceptional or that a black-white binary, but the larger narrative hasn't changed because the South is too often seen as the cradle of U.S. race relations, and that's why I decided to write about the national history of the South and Mexico, to show that this history is in fact more complex, and I just hope by doing that it will help contribute to the larger narrative of changing.
DL: How did you get involved in this work?
SC: This talk is based on my book manuscript.. It's tentatively titled Americans in the U.S. South and Mexico: A Transnational History of Race, Slavery and Freedom from 1810 to 1910.
