Critical Race Conversations: Race and the Archive
Organized by Urvashi Chakravarty, who is joined by Brandi K. Adams
Originally recorded on March 8, 2021
Program Overview
This “Critical Race Conversation” addresses the meaning and implications of the archive for premodern critical race studies. What is the archive, and how do its spaces, artifacts, traces and absences affect the shape and terrain of critical race studies? What kinds of archival approaches does this work enable, reveal or require? This conversation explores the different methodological, conceptual, narrative and material affordances of the archive, interrogating how we see the archive, and how—and whether—it sees us.
About the Speakers
Dr. Urvashi Chakravarty is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto and works on early modern English literature, critical race studies, queer studies, and slavery and servitude in early modern England and the Atlantic world. Her first book, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and her second book, currently in progress, is titled Dark Futures: Slavery and the Reproduction of Race in the Early Modern British Atlantic World. Her articles appear or are forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Quarterly, the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Spenser Studies, postmedieval, and the edited collections The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, Shakespeare/Sex: Contemporary Readings in Gender and Sexuality, and Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture.
Dr. Brandi K Adams is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University. She has forthcoming work in Shakespeare on ‘unbookishness’ in Othello and Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor and on the ‘fairness’ in the fair/foul binary of early modern literary texts in Shakespeare/Text edited by Claire M.L. Bourne. Her research interests include the history of reading, history of the book, history of early modern theatre, premodern critical race theory, and modern editorial practices. She also writes about contemporary theatrical retellings of early modern drama and history.