Please join us
at the Early Modern Workshop
on
Friday, April 15 | 12-1:30pm EST
for a presentation by
Noémie Ndiaye
Assistant Professor
Department of English Language and Literature
University of Chicago
“Afro-Romani Connections in Early Modern Drama (and Beyond)”
This event is co-sponsored by:
Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures
Department of English
Department of French
Our events are free and open to the public. Please register on the Zoom link below:
https://virginia.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0qd-mprDIvHtBk3qnQd_RZTjMirgzWkDlz
Bartolomeo Manfredi, “The Fortune Teller” (1616/1617), oil on canvas.
Abstract
This talk brings to light a hitherto unnoticed network of Afro-Romani connections in later seventeenth century French and English drama, and it construes that network as conceptual and ethical genealogy for the bonds that exist today between Black studies and the fledgling field of Critical Romani studies. Close reading, among other objects, Molière’s Les fourberies de Scapin (1671) and its 1677 adaptation by Edward Ravenscroft through the lens of Critical Race Theory, I will show how theatrical culture across the Channel reckoned with the similar positionings of enslaved Roma and Sub-Saharan Africans within the logic of early modern white supremacy.
Noémie Ndiaye is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She works on early modern English, French, and Spanish theatre and performance culture, with a critical focus on race and gender. Her first monograph Scripts of Blackness: Early modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race is forthcoming with University of Pennsylvania Press (August 2022). She is the co-editor of Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Pre-modern World (ACMRS Press, forthcoming, Spring 2023), and she has published articles in journals such as Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Early Theatre, English Literary Renaissance, and Literature Compass, Thaêtre, and in various edited collections.
The Early Modern Workshop is a multidisciplinary forum where scholars working on the early modern period (broadly defined) can discuss their work with colleagues across departments. The aim is to foster conversations that go beyond departmental, disciplinary, and regional parameters, and to create an active community of early modernists here at the University of Virginia. We convene once a month on Fridays, 12-1:30pm, on Zoom. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, please contact us. Please visit our website for an archive of past presentations and for information about future events.
