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UBC English Language & Literatures is pleased to invite you to "It Didn't Have to Be This Way\," a visitin g speaker lecture featuring Dr. Ian Smith (University of S outhern California). Join us virtually or in-person on Monday\, November 4t h at 3:00 pm PT for an enlightened conversation about Blackness and humanis m on the early modern stage.
Register via the link below and scroll t o read the talk abstract and speaker bio.
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Blackness h as often been regarded with hostility on the early modern stage as found in writers as diverse as Peele\, Shakespeare\, and Rowley. This observation h as 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 e mbattled black body in the unfolding narratives of modernity. In this talk\ , however\, I consider the role of humanism\, itself the subject of much re cent skepticism\, in offering a vision of blackness that would afford an al ternate 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 s eriously and not surrendered to the compromise of materialism\, the precurs or to abject moral failure\, premodern civilians and dramatists might have had reason to posit a different\, enlightened view of black humanity.
Ian Smith is the Leo S. Bing Pr ofessor in English and American Literature at the University of Southern Ca lifornia. He is the author of Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (2022) and Race and Rhetoric in Renaissance England: Barbari an Errors (2009). He is also the collaborator on Othello Re-imagin ed in Sepia (2012). His scholarship on Shakespeare\, premodern critica l race studies\, and queer studies has also appeared is several journals an d anthologies. Smith is the recipient of multiple fellowships\, and most re cently held the Los Angeles Times Chair in the History and Culture of the A mericas at the Huntington Library (2022-23). He is also a past President of the Shakespeare Association of America (2023-24).
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