Urvashi Chakravarty University of TorontoAbstract: This talk explores the inter-relations of race, labour and genealogy in early modern England and the British Atlantic world to argue for the early modern construction of futurity as a racialised endeavour. Part of a book project which examines the nexus of race and reproduction, sanguinity and slavery, family and futurity in English and American literary and cultural discourses of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, this talk explores early modern literary texts alongside American plantation records, pedagogical material and anti-abolition propaganda to interrogate the imbrication of race and labour and to investigate how natality and bondage were entangled not only on the plantations of the New World, but also amongst the early modern English readers and interlocutors who effectively bound their imaginings of lineage to the futures of slavery.
Bio: Urvashi Chakravarty is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, University of Toronto Scarborough. Faculty profile.
