Women and the Laws: Reading Le Code Noir
Le Code Noir, the body of law advanced by the government of Louis XIV
in the world of 17th-century France, is one of the first codified
legal documents regarding judicial conduct toward enslaved persons in
the French colonies of the New World. As slavery increasingly
established an iron-clad relationship between skin color and the
absence of human and civil rights, what implications did it have for
other colonial powers operating in the Atlantic context? The terrors
of Le Code Noir for the bonded female and her children were determined
by the dictum “partus sequitur ventrem”, Latin for “that which is
brought forth follows the womb”. The codification of hereditary racial
slavery highlights the contradictions that throw into crisis our
entire understanding today of the repertoire of intimacy and
sentimentality.
Hortense Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt chair in English
at Vanderbilt University; on leave this year from her home
institution, she is serving this semester as the M.H. Abrams
distinguished visiting professor in English at Cornell University
where she taught from 1987 to 2006. Her essay collection, Black,
White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture
appeared in 2003 and has been the subject of various symposiums and
critiques; currently at work on two large projects, the Idea of Black
Cultureand the status of women in the revolutionary context of the
18th century, she has recently published work in the African-American
Review, Callaloo, and The Bloomsbury Companion to Feminist Theory; in
2017, she launched the A-Line, a quarterly of progressive thought and
has been a recent recipient of lifetime achievement awards from
Callaloo (2016), the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2017), and
the Hubbell Prize for work in American Literature from the American
Literature Association of MLA (2019). She lectures widely, most
recently as an international visiting fellow at the Institute for
Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Social Justice and the Peter Wall
Institute for Advanced Study at the University of British Columbia in
Vancouver.
This Distinguished Faculty Lecture is co-sponsored by NYU Gallatin and the Center for the Study of Africa & the African Diaspora, the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, the Department of English, and the NYU Center for the Humanities. Presented as a part of Gallatin’s Black History Month programming.
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