From Fairest Creatures: Race, Gender, and Futurity in Early Modern England

How did early modern England imagine its future, and how are the conceptual horizons of futurity determined or delimited by the operations of whiteness? How did sixteenth- and seventeenth-century futurity rely on or resist the operations of race and reproduction, and how did they inform incipient architectures of imperialism and enslavement?

In this talk, Professor Urvashi Chakravarty reads a range of early modern texts, from Lyly’s Galatea to Shakespeare’s King Lear, in order to explore early modern English ideologies and iterations of gender performance, racial impersonation, and reproductive futurity. At a national moment that witnessed and structured the English expansion of empire and the trafficking of enslaved peoples, the racial regimes that dictated and disciplined gender, embodiment, and reproduction were, she argues, central to the early modern English imaginaries of white, imperial futurity.