Lecture
Thursday, Aug 29, 2024, 11:30 AM
Einstein Forum, Potsdam

Keidrick Roy

(Cambridge, Mass.)

Racial Feudalism and the Black American Enlightenment

How did universalizable Enlightenment ideas emerge from subordinated groups in a society strictly stratified along racial lines? Drawing from his forthcoming book, American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism (2024), Roy outlines the pervasiveness of race-based notions of “feudalism” and the “Great Chain of Being” in the United States from the Revolutionary era through the Civil War. He describes how prominent Black American abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper appropriated and transformed eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas in order to combat the forces of what he calls “racial feudalism.” Finally, Roy applies the liberal framework advanced by Black American Enlightenment thinkers to current debates regarding tensions between the promise of universal ideas and the particularity of group identity.

Keidrick Roy is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and author of American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism (2024).
Beginning in 2025, he will be Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. His dissertation (2022) Jefferson’s Map, Douglass’s Territory: The Black Reconstruction of Enlightenment in America, 1773-1865, won Harvard’s DeLancey K. Jay Prize for the best work across the University “upon any subject relating to the history or development of constitutional government and free institutions in the United States or Great Britain or any other part of the Englishspeaking world at any period of history.” His interdisciplinary scholarship has appeared in journals such as Modern Intellectual History, New Literary History, English Literary History, and American Political Thought.

The event will be held in English

Vortrag im Rahmen der Tagung Enlightenment in the World
Lecture at the conference Enlightenment in the World