Deirdre Cooper Owens: Slavery’s Hospitality and the Extraction of the Black Body

Slavery’s Hospitality and the Extraction of the Black Body
Lecture by internationally renowned scholar Deirdre Cooper Owens

Respondent: Jennifer Harbour

This event will take place in person and on Zoom. Proof of COVID-19 vaccination or negative COVID-19 test + face coverings are required for in-person attendance. Read more about our COVID Safety Policy at bemiscenter.org/visit.

Join us to engage with Lincoln, NE-based, internationally renowned scholar Deirdre Cooper Owens’s critical consideration of a salient contradiction at the heart of the institution and practice of slavery: the production of disability. Cooper Owens will explore the relationship between hospitality’s double edge and the ideological construction of Black bodies, their value, and Black life. Following Cooper Owens’s presentation, Jennifer Harbour will offer a response and launch the conversation.

As an institution, racialized chattel slavery in the United States existed to serve the interests of the slaveholding elite. The extraction of Black people’s labor rested on white people’s ideas about the hospitable nature of Black servility and Black bodies. Black people’s reproductive labor helped form the basis of what Cooper Owens terms the “medical superbody.” Specifically, enslaved women’s bodies, deemed to possess masculinized strength, were regarded as vessels for the proliferation of slavery and as sites to develop cures for white women. Further, Black people were seen as both inferior (intellectually and morally) and superior (physically). As a result, they were typically described as able-bodied subjects. Yet, the inhospitable and extractive nature of slavery also created disabled Black bodies. But disability, as seen through non-normative bodies, is the ultimate sign of unsuitability in slavery. How do we make sense of this contradiction? Using disability studies and Black feminist theory, Cooper Owens will interrogate how notions of hospitality, labor, and ability/disability informed ideologies about Black productivity, value, and life.