Numéro 82, spring 2024 Black Studies & Romanticism Sous la direction de Kate Singer

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This essay argues that both the anonymously authored novel The Woman of Colour (1808) and Hazel V. Carby’s memoir Imperial Intimacies (2019) telescope back and forth from the most intimate domains of family—especially motherhood—to the vast expanses of Britain’s global empire. They can be described, as Edward Said writes of Mansfield Park, as "very precisely about a series of both small and large dislocations and relocations in space,” but instead of finding themselves “spiritual mistresse[s]” of the home by the end of the narrative, Carby and Olivia, the protagonist of The Woman of Colour, remain mobile in ways that emphasize the instabilities and shifting forms of imperial relations. For Olivia and Carby, home is not the enduring English country house whose fate is secured through heterosexual marriage, as in Mansfield Park. Rather, it is everywhere and nowhere, a set of relationships that are continuously negotiated across centuries and continents, in the context of perpetual transit. Furthermore, when read together, Imperial Intimacies and The Woman of Colour illuminate how racialized femininity, as it intersects with motherhood, is at once a cornerstone and a problem of empire.

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Reading The Woman of Colour (1808) and Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (2019) together, this essay examines how both texts reveal the chasm between Black mothers and women and white mothers and women within racial capitalism. Abolitionist sentiment and white feminism posit a universal feminism that Carby and The Woman of Colour reveal to be exclusionary to women of colour. Imperial Intimacies and The Woman of Colour explicitly expose the domestic as a site of violent intimacy that is perpetrated on Black and Brown women by their white women relatives: far from the supposed thrust of feminist abolition, white women’s sympathies in both texts end at the hearth and home, and the violence of the racist state is repeated by them in the domestic sphere.

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This essay takes up and practices related methodologies from Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: correspondence and “always progressing backwards.” The essay posits that Imperial Intimacies and The Woman of Colour correspond across time, both as works about the enfleshment of “imperial intimacies” and as formal articulations of Black being in/through contradiction. Anachronisms in the novel demonstrate the contingency of historical understanding that allows The Woman of Colour to be read necessarily as both an imperial and anti-imperial work. Correspondence in both works to invert Hegel’s configuration of self-other, thereby creating the possibility for unfixed intersubjectivity. Reading The Woman of Colour with Carby (ac)knowledges Olivia Fairchild’s taxonomic shifting from human to animal to plant and back not only as reiterating the Linnean/Enlightenment threshold of Black life’s creation/destruction but also, following Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, a rupture of humanist unity through/to the mutability of Black being.

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Reading The Woman of Colour in conjunction with Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies exposes the racialized and exclusionary logic of the romance genre. Both works provide ramifying instances of the ways in which romance tropes, plot conventions, and sentimentalist gloss falter when brought to bear on racialized subjects. Following the insights of Margo Hendricks’ Race and Romance: Coloring the Past (2022), the article shows how the failures of romance conventions allow us to glimpse the “fictions of racial logic” (Carby, 61) underpinning the ostensibly universalist pleasures of the romance plot. Carby’s critical fabulation is an invaluable supplement to the novel, catalysing its critical insights. Imperial Intimacies adds historical and theoretical context which resonates with the romantic-era novel, prompting us to think about the recuperative possibilities of storytelling as well as the necessary limits on the works of the imagination. Both are ‘tales’: open-ended works which flaunt their lacunae to better evoke the fractured worlds they represent. Reading Carby’s contemporary work allows readers to better grasp the paradoxes of imperialist desire and the ways in which coercive power structures both conjure and abort The Woman of Colour’s romance narrative.

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Because part of the project of the "Black Studies and Romanticism" virtual conference was to shake up the structures and systems of regular conferences, we attempted to instigate “plenary collaborations,” giving two groups of scholars a space for a plenary, on a pre-meditated topic or set of questions, which might take shape in whatever way they together saw fit—whether a conversation, a scripted exchange, or something more creative. We were hoping that adjusting the format would better suit the virtual medium and likewise give everyone a break from the individualist, Romantic genius shape of usual plenaries. While each plenary gave extended time for individual responses, there were many touchbacks and nexus points, both during talks and during Q&A recorded at their ends.

The first group of plenarists wanted to think about the colonial and decolonial means of knowledge exchange among Romanticism and other fields, in particular between Romantic-era writers and scholars and Black writers and scholars, which necessarily included some transformational practices for Romantic-era thinking and writing. To begin, Kerry Sinanan suggests, through the purview of womb theory, that Black Studies does not need Romanticism, but Romanticism needs Black Studies to think foundationally about the enslaved lives have built the material realities and ideals of liberation, freedom, and abolition. Matt Sandler redresses the early twentieth-century Black women scholars who had already been studying the period, then continues to explore how and why nineteenth-century Black authors made European Romanticism open to thinking about Blackness. Eugenia Zuroski, finally, contemplates alternative citational practices learned from Black and Indigenous folx as a mode of site-tation, which rejects notional counting and instead reorients knowledge as shaped by places, affects, and relations.

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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?”