California, A Slave State breaks with the common perception of California as a place of endless sunshine, long coastlines, and rich harvests. It does so by exposing the multifold ways in which different forms of slavery and dependency were – and continue to be – constitutive of a state that is one of the largest economies in the world. In an accessible and poetic language that neither simplifies nor euphemizes this history and its brutality, Pfaelzer uncovers the co-existence of traditional and new systems of bondage in a land shaped by the genocide, indenture, and rape of Native Americans, the coerced labor of captive Alaska Natives, African American enslaved labor, the prostitution of Chinese girls, the unpaid labor of convicts, and ecological exploitation.

Pfaelzer’s study reveals the interrelation between these various regimes of oppression in which freedom often merely becomes a short interlude in a transition from one form of (strong) asymmetrical dependency to the next. Her analysis rests on the crucial finding that it was the specific framing of the very notion of freedom that made it possible for human bondage in California to thrive.

Please register here!

Please register until May 14.

This event will be held in English. 

We cordially thank the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn for their cooperation.