UBC English Language & Literatures is pleased to invite you to “It Didn’t Have to Be This Way,” a visiting speaker lecture featuring Dr. Ian Smith (University of Southern California). Join us virtually or in-person on Monday, November 4th at 3:00 pm PT for an enlightened conversation about Blackness and humanism on the early modern stage.
Register via the link below and scroll to read the talk abstract and speaker bio.
Talk Abstract
Blackness has often been regarded with hostility on the early modern stage as found in writers as diverse as Peele, Shakespeare, and Rowley. This observation has been an enduring premise of premodern critical race studies, serving to galvanize the field’s formation and expansion. Part of its appeal derives from the history of subsequent centuries that makes clear the role of the embattled black body in the unfolding narratives of modernity. In this talk, however, I consider the role of humanism, itself the subject of much recent skepticism, in offering a vision of blackness that would afford an alternate history. In this examination, Erasmus’s “The Sileni of Alcibiades” plays an important role in helping us formulate a racial proposition: “It didn’t have to be this way.” Had early modernists taken humanist teaching seriously and not surrendered to the compromise of materialism, the precursor to abject moral failure, premodern civilians and dramatists might have had reason to posit a different, enlightened view of black humanity.
About the Speaker
Ian Smith is the Leo S. Bing Professor in English and American Literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (2022) and Race and Rhetoric in Renaissance England: Barbarian Errors (2009). He is also the collaborator on Othello Re-imagined in Sepia (2012). His scholarship on Shakespeare, premodern critical race studies, and queer studies has also appeared is several journals and anthologies. Smith is the recipient of multiple fellowships, and most recently held the Los Angeles Times Chair in the History and Culture of the Americas at the Huntington Library (2022-23). He is also a past President of the Shakespeare Association of America (2023-24).
