The Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance (SSWR) and The Center for the Study of Women and Society (CSWS), are pleased to present Urvashi Chakravarty on “Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England.” This event will take place on Thursday, April 14, 2022 from 6-7:30 PM EDT.

This talk explores the ideologies of slavery in early modern England, and the fictions of consent that structured and secured them. Despite the persistent narrative that England was innocent of racialized slavery, Urvashi Chakravarty argues that the ideologies of slavery were seeded in the quotidian spaces of early modern English life and the everyday contexts of England’s service society, from the family to the household to the grammar schoolroom, which inherited and reimagined the legacies of classical slavery and race. The Roman freedman’s figurative “stain of slavery” was conscripted by and in the English terms of epidermal race in order to register an immutable sign of bondage and to secure slavery to somatic difference. Thus, as England negotiated its classical inheritances and contemporary contexts for bondage, it also laid the conceptual groundwork for the futures of racialized slavery. And the fictions of consent that organized early modern service and servitude in turn provided the strategies for the insidious frameworks of “happy slavery” in the Atlantic world.

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 the history of slavery. Her first book, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (Penn Press, 2022), explores the ideologies of Atlantic slavery in early modern England; her second book, currently in progress, is titled From Fairest Creatures: Race, Reproduction, and Slavery in the Early Modern British Atlantic World. Her articles appear or are forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Spenser Studies, postmedieval, Literature Compass, and the edited collections Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture, Shakespeare/Sex: Contemporary Readings in Gender and Sexuality, and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race.

This event will take place online using Zoom.

For more information and to RSVP, click here: https://bit.ly/SSWRUrvashiChakravarty2022

This event is free and open to the public. Please distribute widely.

Many thanks to our co-sponsor: CUNY Academy for Humanities and Sciences.

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