Race B4 Race 2026, Seminar 2: What We’re Reading and Why

See previous installments in this series here.

The RaceB4Race Mentorship Network began its work in 2022, intended to ‘offer new scholars support as they develop the research that will drive the academic conversation forward’. This Mellon-funded initiative spearheaded by the Director of the Folger Institute Dr. Patricia Akhimie not only includes individual mentorship opportunities, but also ‘a semester-long virtual reading/research group, meeting monthly to connect participants with a larger network of premodern critical race scholars’.

What are we reading?

For our second seminar meeting of the 2026-2027 academic year, we read Abdulhamit Arvas’ award-winning book Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity (Duke, 2025).

ABDULHAMIT ARVAS is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and is also affiliated with Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Comparative Literature, the Middle East Center, Theatre Arts, and Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In addition to Boys Abducted, he co-edited the tenth anniversary issue of the journal postmedieval titled Critical Confessions Now in 2020, and his work appears in a range of journals and edited collections. He is completing work on the introduction to a new edition of Shakespeare’s Othello with Oxford University Press and is working on his second book, currently titled The Grammar of the Other: Translation and the (Un)Making of Gender, Sexual, and Racial Difference. Editor’s note: Abdulhamit Arvas is also a 2026-27 long-term fellow at the Folger.

Why are we reading this?

This book is an absolute masterclass in interdisciplinary scholarship, and has unsurprisingly drawn all manner of praise, including awards from both the Renaissance Society of America and the Shakespeare Society of America. Drawing careful, nuanced connections that counterpoise a wide range of texts from England and the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Boys Abducted interrogates the figure of the beautiful boy as he appears in both of these cultural traditions. Moving deftly between poetry, drama, chronicle, visual arts, cartography, and other records, Arvas highlights the intersection of desire and violence that underpins this fraught and controversial figure at a time when racemaking and racial thinking were in their development.

At the heart of this analysis is the contrapunctal relationship between English and Ottoman materials. Drawing on the foundational work of Fernando Ortiz on sugar and tobacco in the Caribbean, Edward W. Said uses the term contrapunctal to ‘trace transculturation by reading together cultural and literary texts from both colonizing and colonized contexts’ (10); in doing so, he is able to offer ‘a global analysis, in which texts and worldly institutions are seen working together, by avoiding a partial analysis offered by the various national or systematically theoretical schools’.¹ Arvas ‘extend[s] the method to put into counterpoint not the colonizer and the colonized but two empires on different levels of colonialism in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: English and Ottoman, and hence Christian and Islamicate, texts and contexts in a time frame when the two had intensifying mercantile and diplomatic encounters and exchanges’ (10).

Over its six chapters, Boys Abducted draws striking parallels between English and Ottoman archives, including a growing racial consciousness developing as both countries expanded their imperial ambitions. It also highlights the liminality of the Ottoman Empire itself—which, at its height, controlled large swathes of Europe along with its territories in Central Asia and North Africa. Tempting as it was for English writers to dismiss the ‘lustful Turk’, as Arvas makes clear, Ottomania could be found all over England, and the figure of the beautiful boy is just as prominent in Shakespeare’s sonnets as in Turkish poetry. The final section brings the analysis into modernity and into conversation with modern queer culture.

What this book also highlights are the rich possibilities inherent in truly interdisciplinary research and approaches, when we step away from the artificial divides that have defined our disciplines for so long. When we treat scholarship as a collaborative, rather than a competitive, exercise, we all benefit.

Further reading

While I will not be going into the particulars of the discussion, in order to preserve the seminar space as a safe and private one, below is a list of scholarship that came up at different points during the discussion.

Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Duke University Press, 2005).

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1978). Available for free in PDF on Archive.org.

———-. Culture and Imperialism (Vintage, 1993). Available for free in PDF on Archive.org.

Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900 (University of California Press, 2006).