In her speech, Broeck examined critical junctures in American history at which white feminists broke their solidarity with African-American feminists. Her lecture presented the interdisciplinary research she is conducting for her book, "No Slavery for the Subject: Rethinking the Formation of the Modern Subject Engendered in Slavery," which will be published in 2010.
Many early white American feminists were involved with the abolitionist movement, Broeck said. These feminists used the inferiority of African-American slaves as a metaphor in the women's rights movement to demonstrate the inferior status of women.
Their writings, however, reflect a sense of superiority over African Americans, she said. This comparison demonstrates a "white European master self-consciousness," because it offers no critique of white women's role in the enslavement of black Africans, Broeck said,
Broeck pointed out that white women, although they were treated as socially inferior to white men, nevertheless benefitted from the transatlantic slave trade, whether directly through the sale or ownership of slaves or indirectly through the consumption of goods produced with slave labor.
Broeck said Enlightenment thinkers were responsible for creating a foundation for the social exclusion of women and African Americans. Enlightenment thinkers were not interested in the advancement of rights for all human beings, but were instead interested in promoting only the priorities of the group they considered most capable of leading society white males, Broeck said. The assumption that white Americans were more capable of ruling than African Americans was hard to reverse after the abolition of slavery because Enlightenment ideals endured in American philosophical rhetoric, she said.
Broeck is a professor of American studies at the University of Bremen in Germany. She said that she first became interested in African-American studies after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., which was one of the first widely televised events in Germany.
"I was 14 when MLK was shot, and that was the first time that I wrote something in my diary that wasn't about boys, that was larger than my own personal life," she said. "As a 14 year old, you trust the world and you think that you can trust the elder generation to be a model for you, and that totally collapsed."
Following this event, Broeck said that she read the works of several African-American writers, including James Baldwin and Richard Wright. She was later drawn to the writings of black feminists like Toni Morrison and Ellis Walker, she said.
Broeck's involvement in African-American studies progressed "from personal to academic to professional," she said, eventually leading her to her current concentration within the field of academia.
Broeck said that she has better access to the latest research in African-American studies through the Dartmouth library than she had through the library at the University of Bremen. English language works in her field usually arrive in Germany after a significant "time lag," she said, and she has to be proactive in seeking them out.
Before arriving at Dartmouth, Broeck published several notable works in the fields of women and gender and African-American studies, including the books, "The Decolonized Body," which was published in 1988, and "White Amnesia Black Memory?" which was published in 1999.
The Harris German-Dartmouth visiting professor program aims to create relationships between Dartmouth and colleges and universities in Germany.
