Talk description:

For one hundred and sixty-nine years, a first-person slave narrative written by John Swanson Jacobs—brother of Harriet Jacobs—was buried in a pile of newspapers in Australia. Jacobs’s long-lost narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, is a startling and revolutionary discovery. A document like this—written by an ex-slave and ex-American, in language charged with all that can be said about America outside America, untampered with and unedited by white abolitionists—has never been seen before. A radical abolitionist, sailor, and miner, John Jacobs has a life story that is as global as it is American. In this talk, Schroeder will consider how truth-telling—which Michel Foucault links to the ancient concept of parrhesia, or “fearless speech”—assumes a modern form in John Jacobs’s writing as a style that constitutes at once a radical denunciation of American injustice and a spectacular performance of autobiographical freedom.

Speaker bio:

Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is a literary historian and lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. He has produced a new scholarly edition of The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, the long lost autobiography of Harriet Jacobs’ brother, John Swanson Jacobs (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and is the co-editor of Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).

*co-sponsored by AGHI