Wednesday Talk: Nov. 6, 2024, 10am-12pm – hybrid

Speaker: Mary Nyquist, English/Comparative Literature, U of T

Title: “Early Modern Freedom, Tyranny, and the Rhetorical Power of ‘Slave’”

Abstract: Why is the word “slave” capable of causing such anguish for those whose ancestors have been enslaved. Why have English-language speakers recently but silently decided to replace it with “the enslaved”, who are ruled not by “masters” but “enslavers”? I will approach these questions, first,

by exploring the use of “slave” in Shakespeare, where it often operates as a verbal slur used by English characters to denigrate other English characters. What, if anything, does this pejorative usage have to do with the concurrent institutionalization of transatlantic racial slavery? Triadic relations among freedom, tyranny, and slavery, which originate in archaic and classical Greece, will occupy the remainder of the talk, which will ask a similar question of the figurative ethical and political “slavery” so prevalent in early modern literature by Western European Christian humanists. In this section, I will briefly challenge current well-known theorists of figurative slavery and reflect on the question, how do Judaic and Christian traditions inflect Graeco-Roman “freedom,” “tyranny,” and “slavery” in Euro-colonialist contexts?

Bio: U of T Professor Mary Nyquist has taught in the Department of English; the Centre for Comparative Literature; the Programme in Literature, and Critical Theory at Victoria College; and the Institute of Women and Gender Studies, of which she was formerly Director. Convinced that neither ‘postcolonial’ theory nor literature published globally since Europe and North America claimed to constitute ‘the West’ can be adequately understood without knowledge of the prior stages of Euro-colonialism, Nyquist practices an historically informed, contextualized mode of intertextual analysis of early modern literary and philosophical texts. Her work is driven by her involvement in anti-racist and anti-imperialist activism and the urgent need for careful, historically informed education on issues relating to the emergence and institutionalization of racialized discourses. Her research centres on 16th through 18th century literature as it intersects with Euro-colonialism, Atlantic slavery, law, and political philosophy. Since the publication of the internationally recognized Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (2013), she has published essays on Daniel Defoe, Olaudah Equiano, Shakespeare, the language of liberty and slavery, and two major essays on Hobbes. In 2011 she received the Milton Studies of America Honoured Scholar Award (an award not confined to scholarship on Milton; incidentally, Nyquist is the first at the University of Toronto to receive it since Northrop Frye in 1975). She is currently completing a book on Milton (Milton’s ‘Man’: Resistance, ‘Race,’ Reception), and, when finished, hopes to do a cross-over study (solicited by Oxford University Press) of racialized acts of obeisance. She has recently published a book of poetry, Wet Toes (2022). The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/RBcifAW7TX

The deadline to register is the Monday before the event at noon. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.