ODSECS 36: Deanna Koretsky & Manu Chander

How Black Vampires Help Us Rethink Race in the Long 18th Century: A Conversation

Abstract:

Professors Deanna Koretsky and Manu Chander discuss the function of race in foundational efforts to define the human by considering the limit case of the black vampire. With particular attention to Uriah Derick D’Arcy’s The Black Vampyre; A Legend of St. Domingo (1819), they consider whiteness and blackness, slavery and freedom, sexuality and futurity. Key to their discussion is what these seemingly simple concept-pairings leave out: the dynamics of race irreducible to static categories of difference. Attendees can access the novella at https://jto.americanantiquarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Black-Vampyre-for-JTO.pdf.

Bios:

Deanna P. Koretsky is a scholar of literature, film, and television. As an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Spelman College, she teaches in the areas of critical race, gender, and sexuality studies, cinematic and literary horror, and literatures in English of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her first book, Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism, shows how cultural representations of suicide inherited from the nineteenth century continue to reinforce antiblackness in the modern world. Currently, she is editing a project on race and racism in The Vampire Diaries franchise and developing her next monograph, having recently completed a new edition of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda. Dr. Koretsky's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. In addition to her solo work as a scholar, she is a founding member of the Bigger 6 Collective and occasionally pops into the Dear Vampire Diaries podcast.

Manu Samriti Chander is the author of Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell, 2017), the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (Cambridge UP, 2024), and the co-editor, with Tricia A. Matthew, of the Oxford University Press book series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. His second monograph, Browntology (SUNY Press, under contract) considers the philosophical groundings of brownness in Enlightenment European thought in order to show how the figure of the model minority haunts foundational efforts to define the human. Chander is also currently editing the Fulbright- and NEH-funded Collected Works of Egbert Martin (Oxford UP). Recent and forthcoming talks include the Republic of Guyana Distinguished Lecture in Georgetown, Guyana; the Kane Lecture at Ohio State; and keynotes and plenaries at the annual meetings of the International Conference on Romanticism, North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, and British Association for Romantic Studies. He is a founding member of The Bigger 6 Collective, formed in 2017 to challenge structural racism in the academic study of Romanticism.

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