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Laboring For a New Empire: Alternative Formations of Work and Workers in 
the Nineteenth Century 
(American Studies Association 1998, Seattle, November 19-22, 1998 -- for  
info about the conference see:  
http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/asanews/cfp1998.html) 
 
The United States in the nineteenth century transformed itself from a 
series of local economies into a national market that sought out 
international resources.  This march of a market economy tried to bring 
artisans to heel.  It commodified factory labor.  And the process 
exacerbated racial and gendered divisions among laborers.  Labor historians 
have documented, for example, how the Antebellum creation of whiteness 
fueled the racial division among free laborers in the North. This panel 
will focus on the texts and other cultural artifacts that chart work or 
workers during this nineteenth- century transition.  A focus on workers and 
writing about workers promises to excavate opposition and alternative 
formulations to markets and empire.  Writing about labor also offers the 
chance to explore the growth of whiteness, gender role divisions, 
ideologies of masculinity and sexual practices in these larger narratives.  
Examples appear in slave narratives, novels and nineteenth-century 
discussions of science, technology, race and economics.  Send a 200-word 
abstract and a two-page vita by January 1, 1998 to Todd Vogel, American 
Studies, 303 Garrison Hall, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 
78712; email preferred at: [log in to unmask] 
 
Todd Vogel 
The University of Texas at Austin 
<[log in to unmask]> 
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