Details about the complexities of the lives of the enslaved often are unknown or overlooked, but William Andrews will present a revealing glimpse into these stories on Thursday, Feb. 20. He will deliver the 2020 Levine Lecture “The Fighter and the Victim: Two Enslaved Women in the Life of Frederick Douglass.”
The Center for the Study of the New South's annual Levine Lecture will begin at 6 p.m. at the Levine Museum of the New South. Doors open at 5:30 p.m.; a reception will follow Andrews’ presentation. RSVPs are requested; attendees should bring their parking tickets to the museum for validation.
Andrews, professor emeritus of English at UNC Chapel Hill, is the author of “Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840-1865” (New York: Oxford University Press 2019). More than 60 mid-19th century slave narrators, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs and William Wells Brown, are featured, and the work sheds light on the social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South.
Renowned Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said of “Slavery and Class in the American South,” that Andrews “has ‘lifted the veil’ on class relations within the slave community in the antebellum South. Well-meaning scholars, mostly for political reasons, have far too often chosen to remain silent about distinctions of class drawn by black people among themselves starting in slavery, choosing to discuss African Americans as if they were always a social monolith, and thereby reducing their complexity. Andrews reveals, in riveting detail, that this has never been the case, even well before the Civil War. This is a seminal work of scholarship, one destined to generate a new branch of literary studies, dedicated to studying how class mattered within the African American tradition.”
During a distinguished career at UNC Chapel Hill, Andrews received numerous accolades including UNC Chapel Hill’s Thomas Jefferson Award in 2015 and the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature from the Modern Language Association in 2017. Andrews is immediate past chair of the North Carolina Humanities Council.
The Center for the Study of the New South in UNC Charlotte’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences promotes discourse and dialogue on a rich and diverse constellation of topics and ideas relating to the New South. The 2020 Levine Lecture is the keystone of the series of events titled, “Cultivating the New South: Southerners from the 1840s-1940s,” that focuses in part on unheard, diverse stories of Southerners who helped make the New South what it is today.