Wednesday Talk: Oct. 30, 2024, 10am-12pm – hybrid

Speaker: Paul Stevens, English Department, University of Toronto

Title: “Robinson Crusoe and the Slave Trade: A Treatise against Adventure”

Abstract: The break-out of the Muslim slave trade into the Atlantic in the early seventeenth century coincides with the dramatic escalation of the European slave trade in Africa. The first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia only a few years before the first enslaved Icelanders arrived in Algiers in 1627. In the course of his adventures, Daniel Defoe’s hero Robinson Crusoe is enslaved by Arabs precisely as he seeks to enslave Africans. What enabled both these two moments of expansion in human trafficking, the critical link between them, was technology. And so while my general aim in this talk is to recontextualize these developments in order to understand why there was so little articulate opposition in seventeenth-century Europe to the resurgence of the slave trade, my immediate aim is to understand how in the case of Robinson Crusoe the relationship between technology and contingency contributes to this moral blindness. My argument falls into two parts: the first focuses on technology and the way its limitations or failures afford Crusoe a spiritual awakening or renewed religious perspective, and the second on the way that new religious perspective or moment of grace, somewhat surprisingly, actually serves to protect the slave trade. It does so because it shifts attention from the morality of slavery itself to a subsidiary moral debate over the rival claims of thrift and adventure in the pursuit of a good life – that is, a life that is both virtuous and commercially successful.

Bio: Paul Stevens, FRSC, has served as Chair of the Department of English at the University of Toronto, where he also held a Canada Research Chair, —and before that he was Head of English at Queens’ University. He is the author/editor of  Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War, co-ed (Cambridge UP, 2021);  Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, co-ed, U. of Toronto Press, 2008; Milton in America, co-ed, special issue of University of Toronto Quarterly 77:3 (2008); When is a Public Sphere? co-ed, special issue of Criticism 46:2 (2004); Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism, co-ed, U. of Toronto Press, 1998; Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in ‘Paradise Lost.’ (U of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Among the many awards and honours he has received: the Life-time Achievement Award, Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies, the Northrop Frye Award for Excellence in Teaching and Research–and the U of T’s President’s Teaching Award. He was a finalist in the TVO Best Lecturer Competition. His current research in progress: Sola Gratia: English Literature and the Secular Ways of Grace and Milton’s Shakespeare.

The link to register is  https://forms.office.com/r/LHanJtfEH7

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