Dr. Paul Lawrie, photo courtesy of Dr. Carlos Colarado
UWinnipeg’s Dr.Paul Lawrie has a particular interest in history, race, labour, and the idea of time. He will be launching his recently published, Forging a Laboring Race: The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination (NYU Press, 2016) on Friday November 4, 2016 7:30 pm, at McNally Robinson, Grant Park, 1120 Grant Avenue.
Forging a Laboring Race, book cover, photo supplied
His book charts the history of an idea — race management, building on recent work in African American, labor, and disability history to analyze how ideas of race, work, evolution and the “fit” or “unfit” body informed the political economy of early twentieth-century industrial America. Forging a Laboring Race foregrounds the working black body as both a category of analysis and lived experience.
“Forging A Laboring Race is an important and imaginative contribution to the history of race and labor in the Progressive Era. It is also a brisk, powerful, and re-orienting critique of the very notion of ‘the black worker’ as a discrete category of experience. This notion was produced by myriad think tanks, self-professed social scientists, and busy-bodied state agencies, and it had real consequences for the men and women who arrived in the urban North in the first Great Migration. It persists to this day.” —Matthew Pratt Guterl, Brown University
Dr. Paul Lawrie is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at UWinnipeg. His teaching and research interests include the cultural and social histories of the modern United States with a specific focus in African American, urban, labour, disability, temporal histories. His article “Mortality as the Life Story of a People: Frederick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction, 1896-1915” won the 2014 Ernest Redekop prize for best article in the Canadian Review of American Studies. His work also appears in the Oxford Handbook of Disability History, Disability Histories and the Cambridge Anthology of African American Literature.
Forging a Laboring Race is currently available for purchase through NYU Press and Amazon.ca.
