Graduate Seminar Meeting with Joy Miller

About Joy's research: During the late nineteenth century, white plantation owners in Hawai’i worried about securing enough labor to supply sugar plantations as Hawai’i’s sugar economy grew. By the turn of the twentieth century, workers’ protests on Hawaiian plantations, African Americans’ desire to find political and social freedom from the American South, and the United States’ ambition to expand its global reach into the Pacific World set the ground for African Americans to emigrate to Hawai’i. In my dissertation, I analyze the proposal for African American emigration to Hawaiian sugar plantations from 1862 to 1904, arguing that the annexation of Hawai’i by the United States in 1898 induced African Americans from the South to emigrate as it would fortify the United States’ position in the pacific. I contend plantation owners created a racialized image of southern blacks that recreated the docile plantation slave. African Americans who arrived at Hawaiian plantations challenged this notion of blackness and fought against blackness being used as a tool of oppression.

In-person attendees, please RSVP to help with food orders. 

Tuesday, May 30, 2023 | 11:00AM-12:30PM
PEB 201 + ZOOM

Boxed lunch on terrace from 11:00AM-11:30AM

Talk and conversation from 11:30PM-12:30PM