Jennifer Van Horn (University of Delaware), “Warmth, Unfreedom, and Justice: Thermoception and Race in the early United States” (History of Art)

How can understanding the entanglements of warmth, cold, and unfreedom in the early United States work toward justice? This talk examines the iron objects that enslaved people of African descent deployed to create warmth for George Washington during and after the presidency. We will situate iron firebacks and plate warmers within transatlantic circuits of exchange and examine the fireplace as the intersection of contradictory sensory formations: Anglo-American comfort and African Diasporic conceptions of heat. Moving from architectural design, to questions of materiality, to period notions of climate and anti-Black racism, enables us to recognize Frank Lee, Christopher Sheels, Marcus, Caroline Branham, and others whom Washington enslaved, as skilled though coerced thermal regulators. Intersecting with sensory and ecological histories, and studies of metals’ material imaginaries, this talk begins to locate the insurgent geologies and emancipatory acts through which enslaved persons subverted a racialized thermoception regime in the early republic. As the ecological costs of heat and cool and the geopolitics of thermal comfort gain ever more urgency, we will look back to see how unfreedom and thermoception were intertwined and contested from the beginnings of the United States.

 

Content Warning: This talk addresses racial capitalism and race-based slavery, including descriptions of the spaces and processes of enslavement in the early United States.

 

Bio: Jennifer Van Horn holds a joint appointment as professor in the departments of Art History and History at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery (Yale University Press, 2022) and The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (Omohundro Institute, University of North Carolina Press, 2017). She co-edited a special double issue of Winterthur Portfolio entitled “Enslavement and Its Legacies” and is now co-editing the collected volume The Disabled Gaze: Multi-Sensory Perspectives of Art, Bodies & Objects. She serves on the editorial board of the Art Bulletin and as president of HECAA (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture).