Archives of Race-making: An Interview with Urvashi Chakravarty

Interview by Brandi K. Adams in conversation with Urvashi Chakravarty, author of Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

Urvashi Chakravarty’s award-winning first monograph Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England initiates a seismic theoretical shift in early modern English literary and cultural studies in general and premodern critical race studies in particular.

Her capacious work specifically answers Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall’s 2016 call to “continue expanding and theorizing the archive of race, seeking out new texts, questions, and vocabulary,” and considers carefully the role of race in the prehistory of slavery in ways that fundamentally change our collective understanding of the broad category of race. Fictions embarks on an extended archival and literary study on the genesis and eventual widespread social acceptance of the transatlantic slave trade by closely examining representations of early English servitude in literature and culture in the forms of service and bondage.

Chakravarty argues that the English acceptance of enslavement was not a gradual process initiated by the capturing and trafficking of humans on a global scale in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather, the conditions of enslavement were omnipresent through English educational practice, the household (through service and servitude), and the conditions of family. Throughout the project, Chakravarty charts how the history of enslavement and race may be told through a prehistory of a country that was predisposed to construct its constituents ostensibly in terms of willing, cheerful, and free service to each other, religious institutions, and the monarchy. These fictions surrounding service and servitude then become normalized and racialized in ways that affected how English people saw ‘strangers.’

Always cognizant of the long history of intellectual labor on race and race-making, Chakravarty’s work is propelled by and in continual conversation with a remarkable genealogy of scholars who have dedicated themselves to understanding the relationship(s) between and among race, history, literature, and culture in the early modern world.

In order for Sundial readers to learn more about her intellectual process that provoked this theoretical shift in the study of race and the prehistory of slavery, I interviewed Chakravarty and asked her a few questions about her award-winning work.

Brandi K. Adams: Your work terrifically highlights the complicated role that children played in structures of service and servitude in early modern England — in families, in schools, and even in apprenticeships, especially as you think through the term magister, which can be representative of parental or educational power (and yet strangely at times of servitude as well). Do you think that the research you’ve done could help to navigate the complicated moments when children have two roles within these structures — as the children of magisters and also servants/slaves born to women not married to the magister?

Urvashi Chakravarty: Thank you for your careful reading of the book and your incredibly generous questions! The issue of when children inhabit two roles is a really interesting one, and I think it looks ahead to the afterlives of these roles in the contexts of Atlantic enslavement. Much of my research in this book considers how the structural role of children lies at the heart of logics of servitude and hereditary slavery. For instance, I argue in Chapter 4 that the very project of natality and reproduction is central to the construction of hereditary frameworks of slavery: in order for slavery to be understood as a heritable condition, you have to re-imagine and re-configure the role of childbirth and what reproduction itself means, which becomes particularly apparent in the canonical text at the center of this chapter, Milton’s Paradise Lost. My third chapter, meanwhile, proposes that what we see taking place in early modern texts is the cultural work of reimagining the family — as a structure increasingly understood in terms of sanguinity rather than service — in order to lay the foundation for the crucial and violent ruptures of reproduction and family that take place under the operations of enslavement.

At the same time, children more broadly occupy a contingent position in English systems of consent and servitude. In other words, they are a kind of limit case both for the exercise of consent, and, I argue, for the English appetite for coercion and servitude. One of the instances I discuss in Fictions of Consent are the late seventeenth century orders against ‘spiriting’ (the illegal practice of transporting people across the Atlantic under duress or without full consent), which seemingly work to protect children but which, I note, quite clearly reveal their own limitations — and which are far more concerned with guarding against the accusation of spiriting than safeguarding its victims. What these documents reveal is the strategic manipulability of children in the development of structures of coerced labor, anticipating how the production and management of children will become central to slavery. And I end the book by returning to the schoolroom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on both sides of the Atlantic, to explore how white and Black children learned about slavery and its legacies, and were (and continue to be) conscripted into its afterlives and enduring fictions.

BKA: Do you consider yourself a labor historian or a literary historian of labor?

UC: I love this question because it points to the larger matter of disciplinarity. I would say that I consider myself a literary historian of labor, but I think we also really benefit when we expand our understanding of what labor historians look at and the methodologies they (we!) employ. Some of the most generative and stimulating conversations I’ve had have occurred in cross-disciplinary structures (for instance, in the wonderful ‘Writing Class’ project helmed by Jessica Clark and Amanda Herbert, which seeks to excavate the genealogies of class through transhistorical enquiry). I would love to see more exchanges between historians and literary scholars around questions of labor and especially bound labor and enslavement. The question of what is and isn’t in the archive, and whose histories are erased, is so central to these enquiries, and I think it’s essential to pool all our disciplinary resources and methodologies in examining the history of slavery. It’s imperative that we think about the history of race and the history of labor as intertwined genealogies that cannot be disarticulated, and there, too, we need all the collaborative and cross-disciplinary tools at our disposal.

BKA: If Humanism is a master class (pun absolutely intended) in the structures of power (generally whiteness) that produce and ultimately prepare the English to accept the brutality of transatlantic slavery, do you think that other modes of thought — I’m thinking about scientific empiricism, which is developing right alongside/slightly after humanist reading practices that you thoughtfully consider — contribute in similar ways?

UC: I think that’s an excellent question and speaks to the layers of acculturation to the violence of enslavement. My argument in Fictions of Consent is that we see a palimpsest of cultural and literary discourses that legitimate the work of slavery. If we regard such cultural work as sedimented, as an accretion of authorizing fictions, the early modern humanist curriculum emerges as the bedrock of that ideological work. Fictions of Consent proposes that it is through the reception of classical slavery in the early modern schoolroom, in the reading of Roman slave plays, that early modern readers and audiences encounter slavery but also come to develop (and then disseminate) an idea of a somatically marked and hereditary bondage. What I find so important and insidious about the work of the humanist classroom is how naturalized its teachings are, and the book therefore also shows that ideologies of racialized slavery are very much homegrown, and are cultivated in the crucible of nation and identity formation that is the Renaissance schoolroom. Even as you learn how to become an English (and white) civil subject, you simultaneously, inevitably learn the ideologies of racial formation and racialized slavery.

Where I see the work of humanism to be most effective is as a kind of legitimating canvas for the ideologies of scientific enquiry that follow. If in the very frameworks of analysis, in the learning of Latin, you encounter and essentialize the logics of servitude and slavery, that authorizing mechanism will undergird any and every sort of knowledge production that follows. Consider, for instance, our own schoolroom experiences: our originary frameworks of language and analysis are probably so deeply ingrained in us that we can barely identify them, never mind undo them. And like us, Renaissance schoolchildren absorbed and naturalized lessons about power, race, and class, all of which prepared them not just to accept but to perpetuate the violence of enslavement.

BKA: What compelled you to find the earliest stories connected to a broad history of the transatlantic slave trade in your book? What fictions did you want to dispel — beyond that which you associate with consent in the face of servitude?

UC: I began with a conundrum: how did an entire nation come to be so invested — materially, financially, culturally, politically — both in an organized, brutal trade in enslaved peoples and in its utter disavowal? Throughout my own schooling (in the UK, and I suspect this is the case elsewhere, too!), I learned absolutely nothing about Britain’s involvement in slavery. Eric Williams famously remarked that British historians write as though Britain only invented slavery in order to abolish it. I was fascinated by how central abolition was (and is!) to the British national character at the same time as it was (is!) so consistently disavowed. It takes a significant amount of work to do that kind of cultural erasure. How and why did this process happen — and how and why has it been so seemingly successful?

At the same time as I was deeply interested in the mythos of British exceptionalism around slavery, I was also fascinated by what seemed to be an abiding interest (and traffic) in stories of service; indeed, ‘upstairs, downstairs’ stories are a notable British cultural export. In a recent article, I ‘confessed’ that one of my guilty pleasures is consuming these stories, but I also argued that what makes these fictions of ‘cheerful service’ simultaneously so powerful and so problematic is that they contribute to the cultural and political work of whiteness. So, another fiction I wanted to dispel was the idea that these long histories of service and slavery somehow stand apart from each other; rather, I wanted to show how the kinds of strategic narratives around service that we continue to absorb and enjoy to this day — of cheerful service, of almost familial affection, of sturdy protection and robust mutuality — provided the legitimating fictions and the conceptual architecture for the longer, larger justifications for slavery.

BKA: Although not legally possible in England (in the scope of time in your project), do you think there’s even a small chance that people were drawing connections between blackness and enslavement rhetorically or extra judicially?

UC: What’s so interesting about this question is that of course we have very little in the way of ‘solid’ documentary evidence, but there are three pieces of suggestive archival history to which I’d like to draw our attention: the first (which I note in the book’s introduction) is flagged by Imtiaz Habib in his field-changing work Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible, when he traces the first recorded use of the term ‘blackamore’ to refer to an African person to 1547, the year of a short-lived but nonetheless astonishing English Vagrancy Act that includes a provision for enslaving ‘masterless’ vagrants who refuse service.

The second is an image I came across at the Huntington Library in my research for the book, which I discuss in Chapter 2 of Fictions of Consent; I knew as soon as I saw it that it was significant, and it would eventually help me to understand the larger argument of the book itself. The image is a woodcut representation of ethiopissa, the Ethiopian servant/enslaved person from a fifteenth-century copy of Terence’s Eunuchus, and a reader has inked her face black. To me, this act symbolizes the attempt to comprehend enslavement with a somatic ‘stain of slavery’ that is legible to viewers. That ‘stain of slavery’ — again, an idea inherited from classical sources and rendered material and epidermal — is precisely what paves the way for an understanding of slavery as somatic and hereditary. And white people, I argue, are precisely exempt from the stain of slavery, even in bondage — and this, indeed, becomes part of what exemplifies whiteness (what we see in later contexts, of course, is precisely the inability to read the body accurately for markers of enslavement, which is why American abolitionists used images of white-presenting children to make their case for ending slavery).

Finally, I just want to emphasize the grant of arms to the sixteenth-century enslaver John Hawkins, which is depicted on the cover of my book and which represents a bound African man, clearly denoting the source of Hawkins’s wealth and status. I selected this image because to me it so clearly encapsulates how racialized slavery lies at the heart of the English nation and English exceptionalism, but it also affords inarguable, abiding visual evidence of the long genealogies of enslavement in English life, and how they are so often precisely hidden in plain sight.

Fiction of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England is now available in hardback, paperback, and eBook from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Brandi K. Adams is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. Her research includes book history, bibliography, and premodern critical race studies. She is currently writing her first monograph entitled Representations of Books and Readers in English Renaissance Drama.

Urvashi Chakravarty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto and works on early modern literature, critical race studies, queer and sexuality studies, and the history of slavery. Her first book, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (Penn Press, 2022), explores the ideologies of Atlantic slavery in early modern England, revealing the everyday sites where the foundations of racialized slavery were laid. Fictions of Consent received the 2023 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize for the best book in Renaissance studies from the Renaissance Society of America and the 2023 First Book Award from the Shakespeare Association of America. Her second book, currently in progress, is titled From Fairest Creatures: Race, Reproduction, and Slavery in the Early Modern British Atlantic World, and examines the nexus of race, futurity, and reproduction in the early modern Atlantic world, including the construction of white womanhood and white childhood and their relationship to the structures of imperial violence and enslavement. She is co-editor (with Ayanna Thompson) of a special issue of New Literary History on “Race and Periodization,” and her articles appear in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, and several other journals and edited collections.