Critical Race Conversations: Reading, Writing, and Teaching Black Life and Anti-Black Violence in the Early Modern World

Online conversation with Cécile Fromont, 2020-2021 Paris IAS Fellow, Jessica Marie Johnson, Johns Hopkins University, et Robin Mitchell, California State University Channel Islands, as part of a series of Critical Race Conversations hosted by the Folger Institute.

Across the 2020–2021 academic year, the Folger Institute will host a series of free online sessions to address an expansive range of topics in the field of early modern critical race studies.

Constructions of race have upheld racist structures of inequality for hundreds of years. These constructions were founded upon many types of difference, based on faith, on family, on blood and body, on ways of acting and thinking and being in the world. They were so pervasive that they became operative in lived experiences, medical discourses, founding principles, and legal statutes. Racial injustice has been and continues to be systemic and damaging. Today, premodern critical race studies scholars are offering new insights into the prehistory of modern racialized thinking and racism. They are helping to create anti-racist spaces. And they are furthering an overdue and necessary push towards reinvigorated investigations, innovative teaching agendas, and social and political activism, all with the goal of creating a more just, inclusive academy and society.

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