The MacArthur Fellowship is a $800,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.
Among the 22 individuals to receive a MacArthur Award in 2024 are five from New York State, including:
New York City artist an performer Justin Vivian Bond (Viv), 61, who works in the cabaret tradition weaving history, cultural critique, and an ethic of care into performances and artworks animated by wit, whimsy, and calls to action;
Nicola Dell, 41, also from New York City, and a computer and information scientist developing technology interventions to address the specific needs and concerns of overlooked populations, in particular survivors of intimate partner violence and home healthcare workers;
Johnny Gandelsman, 46, of New Paltz, NY is a violinist and producer reimagining classical works and nurturing the creation of new music across genre and stylistic boundaries;
Shamel Pitts, 39, of Brooklyn, who is a choreographer and dancer developing multidisciplinary, performance-based works centered on collaboration and imagining new ways of being in the world and the founder and artistic director of TRIBE; and
Jennifer L. Morgan, a 56-year-old New York City historian who works to deepen understanding of how the system of race-based slavery developed in early America.
Morgan wrote her groundbreaking first book, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), at a time when most scholarship focused on the transport, labor, and resistance of enslaved men.
In Laboring Women, Morgan argues that enslavement was fundamentally different for women because of their reproductive potential. Enslaved women were expected to both perform agricultural fieldwork and produce children, who were born into enslavement.
Morgan’s analysis of wills, probate proceedings, and purchasing records reveals how slaveowners understood forced procreation as a strategy to maintain their labor supply (rather than importing more people to enslave as laborers from Africa).
In her second book, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke Univ. Press, 2021), Morgan examines the development of accounting practices that transformed enslaved people into commodities within a system of trade. She argues that such data obscured and justified the violence enslavers inflicted upon human beings.
Record keepers largely left gender and parentage out of demographic and accounting records. By refusing to acknowledge kinship among enslaved people, enslavers could rationalize family separation. Morgan links the so-called neutral data of the slave trade to the consolidation of a hierarchy of race, based on false narratives about the difference and inferiority of enslaved Africans.
At the same time, Morgan recovers the humanity and agency of enslaved women. She demonstrates that enslaved women understood that their captors exploited their ability to produce children to create wealth. Morgan also charts their efforts to resist the commodification of their motherhood.
Morgan is currently at work on The Eve of Slavery — a book about African women in seventeenth-century North America. It is organized around the life of Elizabeth Key, a woman of color who sued for freedom in 1656 on the grounds that her father was a free White man.
The lives of Key and other Black women who tried to protect themselves and their children offer an intimate window into the development of American slavery. Morgan has established gender as pivotal to slavery’s institutionalization in colonial America, and her attention to the full ramifications of slavery for Black women sheds light on the origins of harmful stereotypes about Black kinship and families that endure to this day.
Photo: Bond performing in 2019 at Joe’s Pub in NYC with Nath Ann Carrera on guitar.
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