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The Department of English Language & Literatures is pleased to i nvite you to the third event of the Literature & Legacies of Race lecture s eries\, organized by Dr. Dennis Austin Britton. In this series\, leading scholars wi ll help us consider how histories of racism\, colonialism\, and slavery hav e shaped cultural imaginations at different historical moments.
< p>While previous Literature & Legacies of Race events feature one speaker p er event\, "Race\, Gender\, and Representation in the Revolutionary Atlanti c" is fortunate to centre engaging talks by two brilliant scholars\, Dr . Patricia Matthew (Montclair State University) and Dr. George Boulukos (Southern Illinois University Carbondale).All lectures in this series can be attended virtually v ia Zoom or in person at the UBC Point Grey campus\, situated on the unceded \, ancestral\, and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam). Wh ether you plan to attend virtually or in-person\, please register for the e vent using the link below.
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This talk takes as its subject two portraits of Black men\, one produced in the final years of Britain’s abolitionist movement and a c ontemporary painting that reimagines race and eighteenth and nineteenth-cen tury masculinities. Both paintings reflect the intricacies of genre\, race\ , and power that are key to understanding how Britain’s abolitionist projec ts constructed Blackness as a philanthropic category. The paintings are obj ects where literary forms and aesthetic categories coalesce in the service of narratives designed to concretize hierarchies still in place today.
< p>Art historians have shown that the presence of black figures in eighteent h and nineteenth- century portraits and genre paintings not only tell us ab out British culture’s global encounters\, but also function as a barometer for the various ways that wealthy Britons signaled power. When paintings th at include Black figures depict performances of charity\, they reveal somet hing else—a particularly gendered matrix that represents a key moment in fe minist history. Britain’s abolitionist project is one of the first public c auses around which white women organized themselves. And\, alongside their benevolent desires\, they understood that abolitionist organizing was a pat h to power and influence. These portraits are a testimony to that complicat ed dynamic. They show how white women were depicted as ameliorative figures while Britons faced the threats of abolition and emancipation and how that visualization turned philanthropy into a property of white womanhood.< h4>"Clarissa After Haiti: Rape\, Revolution\, and the Origins of Metropolit an White Supremacy" by George BoulukosAbbe Raynal\, in an early edi tion of the History of the Two Indies invokes Samuel Richardson’s heroine\, Clarissa\, to elucidate his view of slaves’ rights. Rayn al criticizes Clarissa’s defending herself against Lovelace with a threat o f suicide\, arguing that slaves should stab their masters because “the deat h of a criminal is more conformable to justice than that of an innocent per son.” Still\, Clarissa’s ultimate fate – dying to validate her virtue – ech oes\, unintentionally\, Raynal’s underlying view of rebel slaves. They must rebel for liberty\; but when they rebel\, they must be killed to preserve society. As Jay Fliegelman has documented\, Clarissa also served to justify American colonists' filial rebellion against a parent nation that failed t o respect their autonomy. But Clarissa\, furthermore\, comes to symbolize t he threat to white colonists posed by rebel slaves. Propagandists for West Indian planters\, most influentially Bryan Edwards\, promoted a view of the Haitian Revolution as a race war characterized rebels’ genocidal fixation on murdering white children and raping white women. This propaganda was sho ckingly successful\, leading formerly radical novelists to promote a white supremacist view of slave uprisings as genocidal race wars and to challenge their readers to choose sides. Charlotte Smith\, for instance\, in The Letters of Henrietta\, reimagines Clarissa in a Jamaican setting\, as the story of a white woman\, who escapes from her tyrannical planter fathe r\, only to find her virtue imperilled by slaves and maroons intent on sexu al violence against her.
Patricia A. Matthew (she/her/hers) is associate professor of E nglish at Montclair State University where she teaches courses on British R omanticism\, the history of the novel\, and British abolitionist literature . She is the co-editor of a special issue of Romantic Pedagogy Commons\ , a cluster issue in European Romantic Review\, and editor of a special Studies in Romanticism issue “Race\, Blackness\, and Ro manticism.” She has published essays and reviews in Women’s Writing\, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies\, the Keats-Shelley Jou rnal\, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language and writt en about race\, portraiture\, and British abolitionist material culture for The Atlantic and Lapham’s Quarterly. Matthew is the edit or of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press\, 2016) and has published essays and b ook reviews on diversity in higher education in PMLA\, The Col lege Language Association Journal\, Signs: Journal < em>of Women in Culture and Society\, and The New Inquiry. She has written about race and television for The Los Angeles Review of Bo oks and The Times Literary Supplement. Matthew is co-editor o f Oxford University Press's new series Race in Nineteenth-Century Liter ature and Culture and will edit Mansfield Park for W.W. Norto n. She was a 2020-2021 Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiti ng Scholar at the University at Buffalo and currently holds the Anthony E\, Kaye Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. Her monograph about sug ar\, gender\, and British abolitionist culture is under advance contract wi th Princeton University Press.
George Boulukos (he/him/his)\, Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale\, is the author of The Grateful Slave (Cambridge UP\, 2008) and the editor of the never-b efore-published memoir by an eighteenth-century stableboy\, Memoirs on the Life and Travels of Thomas Hammond 1775-1782 (University of Virgi nia Press\, 2017). His current project\, A Vindication of the Rights of Monsters\, challenges received histories of human rights\, arguing th at the Enlightenment discourse of “the rights of man” held that slaves forf eited their rights if they did not rise up against slavery\, but also enjoi ned that rebel slaves must be killed.
CATEGORIES:Featured Homepage LOCATION:Buchanan Tower 323 GEO:49.260872;-123.113952 URL;VALUE=URI:https://english.ubc.ca/events/event/literature-legacies-of-ra ce-panel-race-gender-and-representation-in-the-revolutionary-atlantic/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://engl.cms.arts.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/2023/01/Screen-Shot-2023-02-01-at-8.47.58-AM.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 DTSTART:20221106T090000 TZNAME:PST END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR