Christopher Freeburg on Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death

This discussion is with Professor Christopher Freeburg, Dr. Freeburg is the John A. and Grace W. Nicholson Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  Dr. Freeburg is an award-winning author of three scholarly books and numerous articles including, Melville in the Idea of Blackness (Cambridge UP, 2012), Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life (University of Virginia Press, 2017), and Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death (Duke University Press, 2021).  His book in-progress, Soul: A Brief History of Black Cultural Life is this culmination of my life’s worth of teaching African American history and culture from the church to hip hop, from slavery to the present. Dr. Freeburg has won numerous academic awards, fellowships, and titles, most recently, University Scholar, Center for Advanced Study Associate (University of Illinois, 2019-2020), University Scholar (2019-) and Conrad Humanities Scholar (2015-2020), as well as the Hennig Cohen Prize, from The Melville Society, 2012. In this discussion, we discuss his book Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death where he examines slavery texts and media to show how enslaved Africans created meaning through artistic creativity, religious practice, and historical awareness both separate from and alongside concerns about freedom.

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