Colloque organisé par la Société d’études anglo-américaines des 17e et 18e siècles (Seaa1718) : Anne-Claire Faucquez (TransCrit, Paris 8), Tim Mc Inerney (TransCrit, Paris 8), Michael Roy (CREA Université de Nanterre)

This conference will question how developing discourses of race came to structure the societies of Britain and America in the early modern period. It hopes to explore the way discourses of race and class interacted with each other, and how the vocabulary of social strata overlapped with the language of race. How were the bodies and minds of the upper ranks considered to differ from those of other people during these periods ? How important indeed was the idea of the physical body in rank distinction, and how did this square with the notions of pure blood that underpinned both “race” and hereditary privilege ? In what ways were some groups “naturally” privileged or “naturally” excluded ? Were social minorities like indigents or women marginalized or stigmatized similarly to Africans or Native Americans ?

Encounters with new populations in Africa and America during the early modern period captured the interest of European naturalists, who developed various discourses of human variety theory in view of categorising the peoples of the earth. The premise of human classification, of course, was that one group was innately and inimitably better or worse than another – and that the most superior human beings on earth happened to be the white European elite. The taxonomies of human ‘race’ that took hold over the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in Britain and America were, and continue to be, inextricable from questions of class and social precedence.

This conference will question how developing discourses of race came to structure the societies of Britain and America in the early modern period. It hopes to explore the way discourses of race and class interacted with each other, and how the vocabulary of social strata overlapped with the language of race. How were the bodies and minds of the upper ranks considered to differ from those of other people during these periods ? How important indeed was the idea of the physical body in rank distinction, and how did this square with the notions of pure blood that underpinned both ‘race’ and hereditary privilege ? In what ways were some groups ‘naturally’ privileged or ‘naturally’ excluded ? Were social minorities like indigents or women marginalized or stigmatized similarly to Africans or Native Americans ?

Programme

Jeudi 22 mars 2018, Amphi x

13h45 : Accueil et inscription

14h : Mot d’accueil du directeur du laboratoire et des organisateurs
 Ignacio Ramos Gay, University of Valencia (Spain), “Canonising the Racialized Freak : Chang and Eng Bunker Redefine Nineteenth-Century American Citizenship”
 Camille Joseph, Université Paris 8, “An Ideal Figure : Race, Class and Composite Portraiture in the United States (1880s-1890s)”
 Mairin Odle, University of Alabama, “’Marks of distinction’ : the Perils and Promise of the American Tattoo”

15h30-15h45 : Pause café
 Nora Galland, Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3, “Race in the Renaissance and the Risk of Anachronism : A Diachronic Overview of Racial Discourses Leading Up to the Early Modern Period”
 Kevin Siena, Trent University (Canada), “The Intersection of Class and Race in Eighteenth-Century Stadial Theory”

Vendredi 23 mars 2018, salle b106

9h00 : Accueil
 Jose M. Armengol, University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), “The Racialization of Slavery : Race and/as Class in Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy”
 Ben P. Robertson, Troy University (AL, USA), “Race and Class in The Lost Virgin of the South”
 Juliette Bourdin, Université Paris 8, “‘The Chinese Must Go’ : Race and Class in the American Rhetoric of Chinese Exclusion (1850-1902)”

10h45-11h : Pause Café
 Anthony S. Parent Jr., Wake Forest University (NC), “African American Revolutionary War Veterans, Citizenship, and Colonization”
 Lawrence Aje, Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier 3, “Race, Class and Legal Status in the Social Space of Charleston, South Carolina, 1790-1861”

12h-14h : Pause déjeuner
 Maud Michaud, Le Mans Université, “Travelling Concepts : Race, Class and Religion in British Missionaries’ Anthropological Works (1875-1930)”
 Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay, Université Paris-Est Créteil, “The domestic and the alien in A. Conan Doyle’s “The Sussex Vampire” : the exhausted Anglo-Saxon yeoman stock and the transfusion of new foreign blood”
 Miloud Barkaoui, Badj Mokhtar-Annaba University (Algeria), “Racialized Epistemologies of the Frontier in Theodore Roosevelt’s Writings (1885-1893)”

15h30 : conclusions du colloque

Contact : Anne-Claire Faucquez [acfaucquez [at] gmail [dot] com]