Plenary Collaboration #2
Black Studies In and Around Romanticism
1 Northeastern University.
2 Skidmore College.
3 Duke University.
Abstract
This group of plenarists sought to think beyond the binaries of canon/noncanon or outside/inside and instead consider how Romanticism and the Romantic era might be reconfigured, stretched, and transformed by authors, queries, and methods that were a “little off” Romanticism proper (in 2021). Each plenarist focused their question around a particular question: Annette Joseph-Gabriel considered “How might Romanticism and Black Studies meet in other ways, in other speculative futures?”; Bakary Diaby asked “How might Black Studies help us as we reconfigure Romanticism as a site of vital contemporary scholarship, pedagogy, and activism?” and Nicole Aljoe offered a response to this inquiry: “How might Black Studies show a history in this constructed period not constituted by whiteness?”
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Nicole Aljoe is Professor of English and Africana Studies at Northeastern University. She has published Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1836 (2012) and co-edited Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (2014) and A Literary History of the Early Anglophone Carribean: Islands in the Stream (2018).
Bakary Diaby is assistant professor of English at Skidmore College. His current book project turns to the year 1831 as a means to explore the problems Black life poses to historicity and literary critical method.
Annette Joseph-Gabriel is the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She conducts research and teaches courses on race, gender, and citizenship in France, the Caribbean, and Africa. She is the author of Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (2020), co-editor of Shirley Graham Du Bois: Artist, Activist, and Author in the African Diaspora, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press, and is at work on a new project, Enslaved Childhoods: Survival and Storytelling in the Atlantic World.