Join us for our first visiting speaker research seminar of the semester. Refreshments will be served, and all are welcome to attend.
Wednesday 23rd October at 5pm (Week 4)
Arts Building Room 104
Dr Chris Townsend (St Andrews), ‘The Value of Antislavery Verse: Mary Robinson’s “The Negro Girl”’
On Wednesday 23rd October, Dr Chris Townsend will be talking to us about his research on the poetics and politics of the abolitionist movement, and how concerns at the time around profit and motive have their echoes in today’s academic climate.
Abstract:
Does writing an antislavery poem make you an ‘abolitionist’ poet? From the establishment of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade onwards, abolitionist poetry often proved lucrative, a fact that would seem to muddy the relationship between several forms of value: ethical, political, aesthetic, and economic. Scholarship tends to agree that there was an ‘abolitionist bandwagon’ to be jumped on, but it isn’t always clear which individual writers were authentic abolitionists and which were mere opportunists. In this talk I turn to Mary Robinson’s 1800 poem ‘The Negro Girl’ to think through some of the problems of reading antislavery verse today, and to consider some of the forms of value that arise in relation to verse and verse features specifically. I first address a well-known aspect of her biography, and one of the reasons Robinson’s name turns up in histories of abolitionism so frequently: that she allegedly helped to write proslavery parliamentary speeches. Second, I turn to recent critical work on ‘The Negro Girl’ and think through some of the possibilities of the ballad form of her poem, from lyric voice to metrical arrangement, asking what it meant, for Robinson, to write about slavery and the slave trade in the first place.
You can read more about Chris’s work here: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/english/people/ct97/
If you’re unable to attend in person but would like to hear Chris’s talk you can try and join online via the link below. You should be able to join at any time, and will be muted on entry (but do double check!). You’re welcome to participate in the Q&A after the paper, of course.
https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/87819632732?pwd=h9N7sLg13FCU17xpS4m5u5e4BYMsOT.1
Meeting ID: 878 1963 2732
Passcode: 581533
