Urvashi Chakravarty – författare

In Fictions of Consent Urvashi Chakravarty excavates the ideologies of slavery that took root in early modern England in the period that preceded the development of an organized trade in enslaved persons.Despite the persistent fiction that England was innocent of racialized slavery, Chakravarty argues that we must hold early modern England-and its narratives of exceptional and essential freedom-to account for the frameworks of slavery that it paradoxically but strategically engendered. Slavery was not a foreign or faraway phenomenon, she demonstrates; rather, the ideologies of slavery were seeded in the quotidian spaces of English life and in the everyday contexts of England's service society, from the family to the household, in the theater and, especially, the grammar school classroom, where the legacies of classical slavery and race were inherited and negotiated. The English conscripted the Roman freedman's figurative "stain of slavery" to register an immutable sign of bondage and to secure slavery to epidermal difference, even as early modern frameworks of "volitional service" provided the strategies for later fictions of "happy slavery" in the Atlantic world. Early modern texts presage the heritability of slavery in early America, reveal the embeddedness of slavery within the family, and illuminate the ways in which bloodlines of descent underwrite the racialized futures of enslavement.Fictions of Consent intervenes in a number of areas including early modern literary and cultural studies, premodern critical race studies, the reception of classical antiquity, and the histories of law, education, and labor to uncover the conceptual genealogies of slavery and servitude and to reveal the everyday sites where the foundations of racialized slavery were laid. Although early modern England claimed to have "too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in," Chakravarty reveals slavery was a quintessentially English phenomenon.

This expansive volume examines the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and other formations of identity in early modern representations of queens.Race/Queer/Queens is a new intervention into the well-established field of queenship and royalty studies. Queens/(queans) are at once the epitome of royal power and the exemplum of gendered disenfranchisement. The essays in this volume address the interlocking methodologies of premodern critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer and trans theory to shed light on how gendered negotiations of power, reproductive politics, and embodied performance are determined by and inscribed within a hierarchy of gender, race, class, religion, nationhood, and sexuality. Ranging across early modern drama, poetry, and prose by the likes of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Lucy Hutchinson, and Hester Pulter, the essays in Race/Queer/Queens offer new intersectional approaches to studies of early modern history, genealogy, embodiment, and the nation, including model methodologies and directions for future scholarship.