Mimbres School Monsoon Session 2026, Aug 10-14.Slavery’s Domestic Economy

The Mimbres School for the Humanities invites applications to participate in our first in-person Monsoon Session Symposium. This symposium takes recent historical and theoretical work on slavery in the Americas as an occasion to ask what it would mean to take the family and the household, rather than labor or industrial profits, as the primary point of departure for understanding the slave power and its various afterlifes in the present.

Recent work in the economic history of slavery has increasingly challenged what might be called the ‘labor theory of slavery’–the idea that the value of enslaved people for their enslavers can be primarily explained by their role as industrial laborers. Occupying an unstable position between chattel and real property, slaves could be collateralized, hypothecated, inherited, and strategically positioned within kinship structures in ways that linked household organization directly to expanding systems of credit and finance. In light of this history, it has become more and more untenable to explain the durability of slave power primarily by reference to the profitability of industrial commodities like cotton, sugar, and tobacco. Rather, it depended on the capacity of slaveholding households to function as dynastic units: to consolidate assets, manage reproduction and inheritance, secure political influence, and transmit wealth and authority across generations. The enslaved person’s ambiguous location within the household—simultaneously laborer, asset, and object of inheritance—created a set of non-fungible options for valuation and control that were irreducible to industrial labor.

Despite some important recent interventions by scholars like Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers and Patrice Douglass, these dynamics remain undertheorized. Often, when they are theorized at all, their significance is treated only negatively, as an illustration of the limits of labor-centered accounts of slavery and capitalism. At the same time, dominant theories of modern wealth and power tend to presuppose a model of accumulation centered on the production and exchange of commodities, marginalizing the household and the intergenerational transmission of wealth and power as secondary or pre-modern concerns. Within such frameworks, slave power appears as an anomaly or determinate negation, rather than as a phenomenon that calls for a different theory of property, kinship, and political economy—one in which household-based, dynastic accumulation is understood to be central rather than peripheral.

This symposium takes the slave’s relation to the household and family as its core theoretical problem, and invites participants to think collectively about how that relation reorganizes questions of value, property, finance, and power.

Rather than soliciting work on slavery and capitalism in general, the symposium is organized around a set of tightly linked questions, including:

• How did the enslaved person’s position within the household—as belonging to but not in the family—shape their valuation as property and asset?

• In what ways did slaveholding households operate as dynastic institutions, enabling intergenerational accumulation, inheritance, and political power beyond the logic of commodity production?

• How did legal distinctions among chattel, real, and “real-adjacent” property emerge from, and reinforce, household-based strategies of accumulation?

• How should histories of credit, banking, and finance be rethought when enslaved people are treated as inheritable household assets rather than as labor inputs?

• What alternative theories of wealth and power become possible when slavery is approached as a constitutive case of household-centered accumulation?

Contributions engaging empirical examples drawn from law, finance, or history are especially welcome insofar as they bear directly on the household, kinship, and intergenerational dynamics of slave power.

Format and Structure

This symposium is designed as a deliberate alternative to the standard conference-panel model. Rather than presenting pre-written papers, each participant will be asked to provide one or more readings to serve as shared material for collective thinking about the symposium’s central problem.

Each day of this five-day symposium (Aug 10-14) will be structured around discussions of specific participant-provided texts, with the afternoon reserved for meals, informal conversation, and dedicated reading time. This structure is meant to support a slower, more generative mode of scholarly exchange—closer to an intensive reading group than a conventional symposium—and to create space for intellectual risk-taking and exploratory theorization.

To apply, please submit a brief statement introducing yourself, your broader research interests, and the suggested readings you would bring to the table and how they bear on the symposium’s central concerns. Further details regarding page limits and scheduling will be provided upon acceptance.

Six total applicants will be accepted to introduce readings at the symposium, in addition to the following Mimbres School Faculty: Colin Drumm, Sean Capener, Sara-Maria Sorentino, Tapji Garba.

Please note that audio from discussion sessions will be recorded and available to Mimbres School Patron-tier subscribers.

Lodging and meals will be provided to all accepted applicants. Participants must contribute to a rotation of light chores for the duration of the symposium. The symposium will be held at NAN Ranch, NM-61, Faywood, NM 88034. The nearest airport is El Paso. Participants should arrive in time for dinner on the evening of the 9th.

In addition to accepted applicants who will put readings on the table, additional participation tickets (including meals and lodging) will be available for sale at a later date.

Send applications to apply@mimbres.org by March 1, 2026.