CANCELLED: White Masks, Dead Poets

Romanticism is commemorated as a movement celebrating political and imaginative liberty—the human mind freeing itself from the shackles of tradition. But Romanticism also coincided with the apex of the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery on Caribbean plantations.

This talk reconnects Romantic poetry of freedom to contemporary practices of enslavement, aiming to revise our conceptualisation of cultural production in the period. Taking its cue from Frantz Fanon’s classic Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the talk reflects on a selection of Romantic-era white masks: a carnival mask worn by Lord Byron at the carnival in Ravenna in 1821, a death mask of John Keats produced in Rome in the same year and contemporary Jamaican Jonkonnu masks that testify to West African masquerade traditions being brought across the Atlantic by African captives. Establishing a direct, physical link between the Romantic past and our own present, these masks prompt a wide-ranging exploration of how we engage with the undead legacy of Romanticism in our own present—its poetic ideals as well as its atrocious realities.