Virtual
In her talk, entitled "Myths of Mastery, Race and Gender in the Black Atlantic" Dr Sinanan will give an overview of her main research projects on the archives, texts and material cultures of the Black Atlantic world of the long nineteenth century. Her first book, Myths of Mastery: Traders, Planters and Colonial Agents 1750-1833, explores the language of white selfhood in the diverse writings of selected enslavers. Their diaries, journals, autobiographies, and histories draw on Enlightenment discourses to support their trade in and enslavement of racialized others thereby revealing an immanent critique (Paul Gilroy) of the period’s Western myths in its master texts . Her second book, Beauty and the Breast: Representations of Women, Motherhood, and Breastfeeding 1660-1865, offers multidisciplinary readings of colonial and abolitionist texts and images. It focuses on mothers and children in slavery as figures of “immanent and imminent death” (Christina Sharpe) and of resistance while they are exploited to represent the lies of colonial power. Her third main project is a new edition of The History of Mary Prince. A West Indian Slave. Related by Herself (1831) for Broadview, and will situate Prince within a radical Black Atlantic tradition of intellectual resistance for educators and students.
