This Friday (1/24) at 3:30pm in Ruane 105, the Humanities Forum, in collaboration with the Gladys Brooks Foundation, will host Jonathan Schroeder, lecturer at Rhode Island School of Design.
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.
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is a historian, literary critic, and lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2016, shortly after receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago, he rediscovered John Swanson Jacobs’s long lost autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery, in an Australian archive. Republished by The University of Chicago Press in 2024 and profiled in the New York Times, NPR, and elsewhere, his edition returns this incredible narrative to America after 169 years, and features the first full-length biography of Harriet Jacobs’s globe-spanning brother, No Longer Yours: The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs. Schroeder is also the co-editor of Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Material Turn, and the co-director of Congress of the Birds, a 501(c)3 organization that annually rescues, rehabilitates, and releases over 1,000 of Rhode Island’s native and migratory birds. The recipient of long-term fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, and the American Antiquarian Society, Schroeder is currently editing Lauren Berlant: A Reader, writing Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia, and planning and building a 42-acre forest wildlife rehabilitation center in Chepachet, Rhode Island.
