
Literary Pursuits

Sexual Violence and American Slavery: The Making of a Rape Culture in the Antebellum South
by Shannon Eaves
“A culture, by general definition, shares a set of expectations,” she says. “People have an understanding of how they are expected to behave, but these prescriptions are not innate. Slave owners were taught to be violent in this way. The result was a cultural landscape that both enslaved people and their enslavers had to learn to navigate.”
This research, as one might expect, has been emotionally taxing. “I had to find ways to decompress and step away, to borrow some of the strength that I know these enslaved women had to have,” says the Columbia, S.C., native who hopes to inspire and enlighten CofC students, incorporating what she’s learned about sexual violence “as the physical embodiment of this system of exploitation” in her classes and in her involvement in the Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston. “We consider how rape and sexual violence is used to exert power and control over Black communities in the post-Civil War era, through Reconstruction and beyond. What may have started during slavery continues to be a tool.”
That tool cuts both ways, Eaves acknowledges, making the intersections of race, power, violence, class and gender inherently complex and interesting. Humans are entangled with each other, she points out.
“Systems of oppression also ensnare the oppressor,” Eaves notes. “Sadly, there’s no happy ending, no moment of redemption, but that’s the human condition. History is not comfortable, but nor is the present often comfortable, so why should history be?”

instructor of Hispanic studies – An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods is the first comprehensive comparison of two of the greatest epics of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America: the Popul Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala and the Huarochirí Manuscript of Peru’s lower Andean regions. The rebellious tone of both epics illuminates a heretofore overlooked aspect in Latin American Indigenous colonial writing: the sense of political injustice and spiritual sedition directed equally at European-imposed religious practice and at aspects of Indigenous belief. The link between spirituality and political upheaval in Native colonial writing has not been sufficiently explored until this work.

assistant professor of Hispanic studies – Corporeal Readings of Cuban Literature and Art: The Body, the Inhuman, and Ecological Thinking looks at Cuban literature and art that challenges traditional assumptions about the body. Examining how writers and artists have depicted racial, gender and species differences throughout the past century, García identifies historical continuities in the way they have emphasized the shared materiality of bodies and shows how these works interact with ecologies of the human and nonhuman across diverse media, time periods and ideologies. García engages with Cuban cultural production at the intersection of assorted social issues.