My Feet Are Chained: Settler Colonialism and Mobility in the Florida Borderlands, 1812-1866 (2014-2015)
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Description
Christine A. Rizzi received undergraduate degrees in both History and Philosophy at Flagler College in her native state of Florida. She earned her Master of Arts degree in History from the University of Mississippi in 2012. Rizzi remained at the University of Mississippi to continue working with its excellent faculty and she is now a Doctoral Candidate. Her research interests include race, class, gender, and identity formation in 19th and 20th century America. Her dissertation will explore the intersection of mobility and identity in Civil War Era Florida among Seminole Indians, white pioneers and investors, enslaved African Americans, and Civil War soldiers and civilians. Rizzi aims to draw Florida into a broad understanding of the Civil War Era that revolves around questions of belonging, citizenship, and the role of the state.
This project uses the framework of mobility to understand how settler colonialism functioned in a tri-racial southern borderland in the nineteenth-century. Nineteenth century Florida constituted a borderland characterized by competition for land and resources among Seminole Indians, African Americans, and white Americans. White Americans regulated mobility, i.e. the physical movement of peoples, in order to privilege their own settlement in Florida, divest native peoples of their land, and enslave people of African descent. Beginning in 1812 and lasting through the first half of the 1860s, white Americans used legislation, the settlement of white families, the solidification of a slave system, and warfare against the Seminole Indians to Americanize the Florida peninsula by creating a white supremacist settler colony. Native and black peoples, however, used their own idiosyncratic forms of movement to resist americanization and the settler colonial system. The Civil War, itself a settler colonial war in Florida, witnessed the last gasp of the settler colonial system in Florida as slavery ended in 1865 and the Seminole Indians secured their authority in the state. White supremacy, however, would continue to reign in Florida through violence, white political control, and the rise of the tourism industry alongside Jim Crow segregation. The following project demonstrates the overriding importance of physical mobility to the process of national expansion and settlement, the persistence of borderland conflicts in the South after the colonial period, and the existence of a tri-racial South wherein native peoples wielded significant power and influence beyond the Removal Era.
Publication Date
4-15-2015
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Recommended Citation
Rizzi, Christine, "My Feet Are Chained: Settler Colonialism and Mobility in the Florida Borderlands, 1812-1866 (2014-2015)" (2015). McMinn Fellowship. 5.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/mcminn_fellow/5
Comments
Link to dissertation in eGrove