A virtual Fellows Forum with Johanna Heide, a PhD fellow with the DFG-funded RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam. Her research deals with questions of the ‘archive of slavery’ and its afterlives.

Join Us Tuesday, August 23rd, 4–5 p.m. ET—virtual

Unlike other historical itinerants (Harriet Tubman, Ona Judge, Caroline Branham) and their itinerant practices (i.a. self-emancipation, truancy) that are associated with resistant behavior, a liberating vision and movement away from enslavement, Sally Hemings’ articulation of itinerancy begins with a different trajectory. She follows Thomas Jefferson’s summons to Paris in effect moving towards, instead of away from, her enslaver. Moreover, they enter upon a sexual relationship which further complicates Hemings’ position in the tension between structures of violation and the attempt at agency. Yet, she still seeks to redefine the terms of her (and her children’s) existence via "itinerant acts of defiance" (Hartman) that complicate received understandings of resistance and question linear trajectories from enslavement to freedom.

In conversation with Johnson’s novella in which the main protagonist and Hemings’ descendant Da’Naisha Love finds herself in an equally vulnerable position as Hemings, Heide’s research zooms in on the fraught choices and challenges but also the possibilities that ‘forced itinerancy’ can bring about.