Dr. DoVeanna Fulton - Recovering Work on Temperance, Race and Writing: Frances E. W. Harper

Dr. DoVeanna Fulton
“Recovering Work on Temperance, Race and Writing: Frances E. W. Harper and Others”
Friday, January 26, 5 PM
University Baker Center, rm 231 (http://www.ohio.edu/center/)
Ohio University, Athens, Ohio

This lecture is part of the public presentations by candidates for the OU African American Studies Department Chair (http://www.ohiou.edu/aas/)

In this presentation Dr. Fulton (http://english.memphis.edu/fulton.htmlx) examines the relationship between African Americans and the Temperance Movement and the recovery of African American temperance writing. These social reformers simultaneously confronted racial ideology that marked Blacks as physically inferior and morally degraded, while arguing the deleterious effects of alcohol consumption on domestic and public institutions. Placing the anti-drink agenda in consonance with thediscourses of anti-slavery and racial and gender equality, African American activists created a radical rhetoric of temperance that negotiated the politics of race with struggles for moral reform.