This talk will examine representations of racialized gender and reproduction in early modern England, and their central role in constructing frameworks of heritable slavery in the Atlantic world. Looking at Milton's "Paradise Lost" alongside archival records of labor and enslavement, this talk explores how early modern English literature and culture advances the nexus of race, reproduction, and property that underwrites and authorizes the logics of partus sequitur ventrem and the violence of heritable bondage.
Urvashi Chakravarty is an associate professor of English at the University of Toronto and works on early modern literature, critical race studies, queer studies and the history of slavery. Her first book, "Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), explores the ideologies of racialized slavery in early modern England, and was awarded the Renaissance Society of America's Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize and the Shakespeare Association of America's First Book Award. She is currently working on a second book on the early modern nexus of race, gender and labor and the construction of heritable slavery.
Please join us in Hayes Hall 109 on Thursday, January 23, at 4:30 p.m.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies and Kenyon Campus Community Development Fund.