Join Jean Pfaelzer for the reading and discussion of her book "California, A Slave State" with Damian Pargas (Professor of the History and Culture of North America), moderated by Luvena Kopp (PhD Researcher at BCDSS).
"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.