Barbara Rodríguez
In residence Academic Year 2007-2008
Independent Scholar
Address: 104 Mt. Auburn Street, Floor 3R
Telephone: 617.384.8343
Email: brodri01@mac.com
Biography
Barbara R. Rodríguez received her B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and attended graduate school at Harvard University, where she was awarded her Ph.D. in 1993. She specializes in African American literature, with a focus on autobiography and the slave narrative. Her research explores the tradition of the slave narrative in American literature and art in the 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-centuries. She investigates, more specifically, the formal experiments at the center of this tradition, discussing works of literature, photography, sculpture, and collage. In these negotiations of form, she argues, the slave author measured the nation’s assimilation of slavery’s horrors, just as the contemporary author repeatedly adapts the form to chart the relationship between innocence and violence, and between traumatic history and the law in the representation of slavery. She is the author of Autobiographical Inscriptions: Form, Personhood, and the American Woman Writer of Color. and has been awarded fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (1987, 2001), the Ford Foundation (1998), and the Rockefeller Foundation (2001). She returns to the Du Bois Institute, having been a resident fellow in 2006-2007, where she will be completing her second book manuscript, entitled The American Slave Narrative: Slavery and the Persistence of Form. She will also be working on another book project, “Representations of Slavery: Texas, Mexico, and Race in the 1830s and 1840s.”
Project
“Representations of Slavery: Texas, Mexico, and Race in the 1830s and 1840s”
I am currently completing my second book manuscript, entitled, The American Slave Narrative: Slavery and the Persistence of Form. I am also working on another book project, Representations of slavery: Texas, Mexico, and Race in the 1830s and 1840s. The project explicates the relationship of early “New World” constructions of race to American notions of Manifest Destiny. For instance, in one chapter, I read Frances Calderon de la Barca’s travel narrative Life in Mexico (1843), and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappacini’s Daughter” a text inspired by Life in Mexico. I discuss these literary texts with works from the genre of painting known as “Pinturas de Castas”, representations of the racial caste system instituted by the Spanish colonizers of Mexico, contextualizing my treatment of these works with a discussion of Mexico’s abolition of slavery (by its second president, the Afro-Mexican, Vicente Guerrerro, in 1829, soon after Mexico won its independence from Spain). In response, Americans, having imagined that Texas would sustain the expansion of the system of slavery, adopted the notion of racial Anglo-Saxonism, and acted on the belief that American Anglo-Saxons were destined to dominate and acquire the American continents.