In the book, I explore the ways in which sexual consent and political consent helped to constitute each other across a range of ideologies, including precolonial theories of customary rule, missionary Christianity, imperial liberalism, and racial nationalism. The book narrates the intertwined histories of sexual violence and popular politics during the period of colonization. I have recently completed the manuscript for my first book, Colonizing Consent: Rape and Governance in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, 1820-1927. I welcome applications from potential graduate students in modern African history, and from those with interests in transnational histories of law, gender, sexuality, and empire. Before coming to Johns Hopkins, I taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. My research has been supported by the Fulbright Institute of International Education, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University. As in my first project, I am particularly interested in questions of gender and sexuality, which have long been central to debates over custom in South Africa. My research for this project seeks to recuperate a lost set of imagined futures for customary law, and in doing so, to intervene in contemporary debates over the place of customary law in the post-apartheid era. This project traces debates over the meaning of “native law and custom” among a range of black intellectuals in South Africa in the decades leading up to the passage of the Native Administration Act. I am currently writing my second book, provisionally titled Imagining African Law: Black Intellectuals and the Politics of Custom in South Africa, 1880-1927. I read court records as sites of vernacular debates about political legitimacy during the period of colonization, and show how competing political ideologies confronted each other on the terrain of female sexuality-with, too often, devastating consequences for women themselves. The book draws on records of more than a thousand court cases, from criminal, civil, customary, and ecclesiastical courts. My first book, Colonizing Consent: Rape and Governance in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, is both a social history of sexual violence and an examination of the deep links between sexual and political authority in the Eastern Cape region, from the late precolonial period through the triumph of segregationism. I am a historian of South Africa, with research and teaching interests in the history of gender, sexuality, empire, and law in Southern Africa and across the continent.
0 kommentar(er)
