Eighteenth-Century Intertexts in Marlon James’ Fiction and Antiracist pedagogy
Eighteenth-Century Intertexts in Marlon James’ Fiction and Antiracist pedagogy
Cassander Smith (U of Alabama), Sheri-Marie Harrison (U of Missouri), Rebecca Barr (Jesus College, Cambridge), and Kerry Sinanan (University of Texas at San Antonio) will offer a roundtable discussion on Marlon James’ *The Book of Night Women* (2009) and its 18th-century intertexts as a follow-up workshop to Professor Sinanan’s conversation with Professor Honoreé Fannone Jeffers on Monday, September 20 (12-1 pm EST).
Read a summary of the Eighteenth-Century Intertexts in Marlon James’ Fiction and Antiracist pedagogy event.
In this workshop, panelists will discuss how Jeffers’ work has brought to our attention the need to think more about periodicity and legacies of slavery, and about how all of this relates to anti-racist pedagogy as we focus on what James does with the 18th-century archive.
Readings will include Harrison’s chapter on James, “Creative Rewritings of Early Caribbean Texts,” in *Caribbean Literature in Transition* Volume 1 (Cambridge University Press). Further readings to be announced.
This roundtable panel will be followed by an interactive pedagogy workshop and discussion.
Readings
Sherie-Marie Harrison’s chapter on James, “Creative Rewritings of Early Caribbean Texts,” in Caribbean Literature in Transition, Volume 1 (Cambridge University Press).
Ashley D. Farmer, “Into the Stacks: In Search of the Black Women’s History Archive,” Modern American History 1 (2018): 289–293.
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 1–14.
Bios
Cassander Smith is Associate Professor at the University of Alabama. She is author of *Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World* (Baton Rouge: LSU, 2016)and is completing a monograph, *Emancipation and a Politics of Respectability in Early Atlantic Literature.*
Sheri-Marie Harrison is Associate Professor at the University of Missouri. She is author of *Difficult Subjects: Negotiating Sovereignty in Postcolonial Jamaican Literature* (Ohio State University Press, 2014) and has written several pieces on Marlon James, including “Marlon James and the Metafiction of the New Black Gothic,” *Journal of West Indian Literature* 29.2 (December 2018).
Rebecca Anne Barr is Lecturer in Gender and Sexualities at Jesus College, Cambridge University (UK) has edited with S. Brady and J. McGaughey, *Ireland and Masculinities in History* (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and with S. Kleiman-Lafon and S. Vasset, *Bellies, Bowels and Entrails in the Eighteenth Century* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). Her book in progress is “'Humoring Men: Gender, Laughter and Power in mid-18thc fiction”.
Twitter: @R_A_Barr
Kerry Sinanan is Assistant Professor of English at University of Texas at San Antonio. She has edited two collections, most recently forthcoming in *Austen After 200: New Reading Spaces* (Palgrave 2021), and has published many articles on Black Atlantic texts including ‘“The Wealth of Worlds”: Gender, Race, and Property in *The Woman of Colour* (1808)’ in *Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment* (vol. 2) and ‘The “Slave” as Cultural Artifact: The Case of Mary Prince’ in *Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture* (vol. 49). Her book in progress is called *Myths of Mastery: Traders, Planters and Colonial Agents, 1750-1834.*
Twitter: @kerry_sinanan
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