Mabel O. Wilson “The Measure of Freedom and Unfreedom”
About this Event
This talk explores the establishment of the capital city built at the fall line of the Potomac River in 1791, with the intention of it becoming not only the seat of federal government, but, with infrastructural improvements, a major trading point and port between the Chesapeake Bay, Atlantic Ocean, and Northwest Territory. Land served not only as the ground upon which the new federal territory was mapped, but “land” acquisition, enabled by property rights, also served as the legal substrate for both the establishment of “unalienable rights” and the conditions of unfreedom experienced by all enslaved and free Black peoples in the US. During this period, racial difference fundamental to national belonging was calibrated in relation to disappearing indigenous nations and their rich knowledge and cultural practices about their respective homelands, and through a growing dependence on enslaved Black labor—all of which became essential to the construction of the capital, Washington City in the District of Columbia.
Speaker
Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and Chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, where she recently served as director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-director of the Global Africa Lab. Wilson has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012), and co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). With her practice Studio&, she is a member of the architectural design team that recently completed the award-winning Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?), an advocacy project educating the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor. For the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she co-curated the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021). She is currently developing the manuscript for her next book, Building Race and Nation: Slavery, Dispossession, and US Civic Architecture.
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