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Bridgerton: What the Show Gets Right about Sex, Gossip and Race in Regency London || Madeleine Pelling (2021)

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Bridgerton: What the Show Gets Right about Sex, Gossip and Race in Regency London || Madeleine Pelling (2021)

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Bridgerton: what the show gets right about sex, gossip and race in Regency London

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The Regency period was full of gossip and scandal, something Bridgerton gets right. However, it leaves out the period’s grim record on slavery.

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Hallmark Brings the Black Diaspora Into Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility || Amanda-Rae Prescott (2024)

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Hallmark Brings the Black Diaspora Into Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility || Amanda-Rae Prescott (2024)

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Hallmark Brings the Black Diaspora Into Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

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The historical advisor and creative director of Hallmark’s Sense and Sensibility discuss preserving the essence of Jane Austen.

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How Dangerous Liaisons Rejects Bridgerton’s Historical Alternate Universe || Amanda-Rae Prescott (2022)

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How Dangerous Liaisons Rejects Bridgerton’s Historical Alternate Universe || Amanda-Rae Prescott (2022)

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How Dangerous Liaisons Rejects Bridgerton’s Historical Alternate Universe

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Starz’s Dangerous Liasions casts a spotlight on late 18th century Black French history.

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Doctor Who and The Regency || Amanda-Rae Prescott (2024)

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Doctor Who and The Regency || Amanda-Rae Prescott (2024)

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Doctor Who And The Regency #VirtualJaneCon 2024

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A radically inclusive Jane Austen event. Made for and by fans.

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Adultification Bias Within Child Protection and Safeguarding || Jahnine Davis (2022)

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Adultification Bias Within Child Protection and Safeguarding || Jahnine Davis (2022)

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Black Like Me? Bridgerton and the Fantasy of a Non-Racist Past || Gary Younge, The Nation (2022)

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Black Like Me? Bridgerton and the Fantasy of a Non-Racist Past || Gary Younge, The Nation (2022)

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We can imagine a world where the only thing wrong with racial inequality is that non-white people are not allowed to share in the spoils of empire-but would we really want to live in it?

This article appears in the April 18/25, 2022 issue.

When I first moved to the US from London, I asked an American journalist what kind of reception I might expect as a Black Briton. "Well, when they hear an English accent, Americans usually add about 20 points to your IQ," he said. "But when they see a Black face, they usually don't." Recalling that the authors of the book The Bell Curve had claimed that Black people have an IQ 15 points lower than whites, I figured that, at the very least, I would still come out at least five points ahead.

There were moments during my 12 years as the US correspondent for The Guardian when I needed all the help I could get. It could be a particular challenge when reporting from Republican events. Englishness, the American journalist had made clear, carried cultural cachet; Blackness did not. The two arriving in the same body could mess with some people's heads. When I introduced myself as a British journalist, I was occasionally subjected to an interrogation of my credentials. "Were you born there?" they'd ask. "I don't hear an accent." (I sound like Ricky Gervais, with nary a hint of a transatlantic twang.)

But my point here is not partisan. Republicans could be, as it happens, ruder than most. But despite Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen, acclaimed author Zadie Smith, and actors Idris Elba, David Oyelowo, and Thandie Newton-to name but a few-the general American image of Britain (particularly outside the big cities) remains ossified in a time before the large-scale migration of Black people to Britain following the Second World War. (My parents came from Barbados in the early 1960s.) When I wrote an article for The Washington Post about being Black and British in the US, it ran alongside a picture of a Black man in a bowler hat carrying an umbrella in one hand and a cup of tea in the other.

So I can imagine that Bridgerton, the Netflix period drama set in 1813, which portrays a multiracial British elite complete with a Black queen, duke, and dowager aunt as well as debutantes and suitors of virtually every hue, might test credulity in the US and beyond. (Growing up in Britain, where I was born, people would frequently ask me where I was really from, too.) Whatever issues people may have had with this clearly didn't stop them from watching the show: Its first season was the second-most-watched Netflix original series of all time; the second season will be available from March 25.

Bridgerton's appeal is not difficult to fathom. Set in some of Britain's grandest stately homes, with elaborate costumes, flamboyant coiffures (Queen Charlotte's wigs deserve a series all to themselves), quaint rituals, and plenty of sex, it promises a great deal. (It didn't hurt that it was released in December 2020, during what was then the deadliest month of the pandemic, when we had little else to do but watch TV.) To the undiscerning eye, it's basically Downton Abbey with a bigger budget, better locations, more bonking, and a diverse cast.

While the series is named after the Bridgerton family, it might better be named "Lady Whistledown." That is the nom de plume of the anonymous scandalmonger whose newsletter spreads well-informed word of the 19th-century haut monde's romantic entanglements-as well as tart commentary on their consequences. Each new edition provides fresh gossip, revealing secrets, exposing trysts, and assessing the progress of the (debutante) season in all its lustful, scheming glory. We learn at the end of the first season that Lady Whistledown is Penelope Featherington, the youngest daughter of a family struggling to escape ruin.

Season 1 is set, appropriately enough, at the beginning of the "social season" of 1813, when debutantes and eligible bachelors are presented to high society in what is essentially a marriage market. Male suitors call on young ladies for a delicate courtship dance in which status is key. The Bridgertons are a family of eight children (named, in alphabetical order, Anthony, Benedict, Colin, Daphne, Eloise, Francesca, Gregory, and Hyacinth, and headed by Violet, a widowed viscountess). Queen Charlotte crowns Daphne, the eldest daughter, the season's "diamond," making her the most sought-after maiden of the moment. Along with welcome attention, this gives her the onerous responsibility of making a match worthy of both the queen's favor and her own affections.

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Sex is as key to the spectacle as it is incidental to the story line. Virtually all the main characters are at it like undergrads on spring break in Cancún. There is almost nowhere they won't do it: against a tree, on the stairs, on a ladder, on a desk, beneath the bleachers, or in the immaculately tended gardens. From time to time they even use a bed. There is oral sex, masturbation, a threesome, sex education (even as Daphne seeks a husband, it transpires she does not know about the birds and the bees), sexual assault, and an attempted abortion.

Season 1 charts Daphne's fraught romance with the Duke of Hastings. Though they profess to despise each other, a fissile courtship ensues after they concoct a mutually beneficial pact to hoodwink high society. Daphne calculates that encouraging the belief that she's already being pursued is her best hope of buying time to find the right match. Hastings-a gorgeous, brooding, Byronic figure-has no interest in marriage, but the prestigious title attached to such an Adonis makes the debutantes swoon. He believes that his only hope of avoiding the besotted hordes is if they think he is already attached. So the pair decide to pretend-including with their closest relatives-they are embroiled in a serious but yet-to-be-sealed courtship. Only the ruse works a little too well, and they fall in love with each other.

Season 2 starts with the beginning of the next year's "marriage market" events. Daphne's oldest brother, Anthony, the season's most eligible bachelor, decides this is the year he shall take a bride. But a romantic connection couldn't be further from his considerations, as he sets about interviewing the candidates for future Bridgerton matriarch with clinical rigor.

"Love is the last thing I desire," he declares at a ball, describing his future wife in language a horse breeder might use to refer to a prize mare. "But if my children are to be of good stock, then their mother must be of impeccable quality. A pleasing face, an acceptable wit, genteel manners enough to credit a viscountess. It should not be so hard to find. And yet, the debutantes of London fall short at every turn."

The rest of the season essentially tests this proposition, as Anthony is torn between his duty to marry a woman with the appropriate attributes and his barely repressed desire to give himself to a woman on whom he has developed a monumental crush. Unfortunately for him, those two women are related. Related Articles

The Sharma sisters, Kate and Edwina, have arrived from India and, along with their mother, Lady Mary Sharma, are guests of Lady Danbury, the dowager godmother to Hastings from Season 1. Kate effectively acts as Edwina's governess and has come only to secure her sister the marriage she deserves. Headstrong, sharp-tongued, and quick-witted, she insists she has no interest in finding a husband for herself-many consider her too old at 26 anyway.

Demure, accomplished, and intelligent, Edwina ticks all of Anthony's boxes. He courts her determinedly, and she falls in love with him. Everyone up to Queen Charlotte herself agrees it's a great match. There is only one dissenter: Kate, who overheard Anthony's comments at the ball and was not impressed. "I take issue with any man who views women merely as chattels and breeding stock," she tells him. "When you manage to find this paragon of virtue, whatever makes you think she will accept your suit?"

But Kate's loyalties are divided: Not only does she believe Anthony is too arrogant; she also fancies the breeches off him. Anthony feels similarly, though it takes both a while to admit it to themselves, let alone each other. Several times-too often to be plausible-they are caught in romantic near misses with fingers touching, eyes locked, breathing into each other's mouths, only to be interrupted or rein themselves in. At one point Kate clasps his hand to her breast and holds it there to prove she has not been stung by a bee-which, unless things have changed radically in terms of courtship in the last couple of centuries, is a pretty unambiguous play for a straight man's attention.

Elsewhere, Queen Charlotte becomes obsessed with discovering the identity of Lady Whistledown, whose commentaries she finds increasingly impertinent, while Penelope tries to remain anonymous and her family, the Featheringtons, still struggle for money and respectability. The only really standout actor is Adjoa Andoh, who plays Lady Danbury-an omniscient elder and friend of the queen whose mixture of tough love, hard truths, strategic ploys, and playful manner are made credible by Andoh's consistently robust performance.

That the Duke of Hastings, Queen Charlotte, and Lady Danbury are Black and the Sharma sisters South Asian are facts that do not intrude into the story line. Their presence is not entirely fanciful. Some Black people did make it into British high society at the time. It has been argued that the real Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, had some African ancestry, through a branch of the Portuguese royal family who supposedly mixed with the Moors in the 13th century. After six centuries the phenotypic evidence would have been negligible. But according to the historian Mario De Valdes y Cocom-who has done more than any other to extol Charlotte's African heritage-the royal physician described Charlotte as having "a true mulatto face," while one prime minister wrote of the queen that "her nose is too wide and her lips too thick."

Of course, there have been Black people in Britain since Roman times-even if they began arriving in significant numbers only in the 1950s. Initially, their presence usually centered around the ports of Cardiff (home of Shirley Bassey), Bristol (home of the slave importer Edward Colston, whose statue was torn down during the Black Lives Matter protests), Liverpool (home to the country's oldest Black community), as well as London. They numbered in the hundreds during the 16th century, rising to 20,000 as the Atlantic slave trade took off, only to subside with abolition itself. Across Europe throughout this time, a handful of Black people made their way, through one fashion or another, into the elites. There was Juan Latino, of Ethiopian descent, embedded in the Spanish court in the 16th century; Joseph Boulogne, made a member of King Louis XV's Royal Guard in the 18th century; and Abram Petrovich Gannibal, brought to Russia (probably from Cameroon) as a gift for Peter the Great in the late 18th century, eventually rising to become a military engineer, a nobleman-and the great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin.

Few made it that far in Britain, but in literary classics set only slightly later, Black characters are scattered among the beau monde, usually coming from the colonies. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) includes the character Bertha Mason, a Creole from Jamaica described as having "dark" hair and a "discoloured," "blackened" face-whose parents approved of her marriage to Edward Rochester because he was "of a good race." Bertha, portrayed in bestial terms, is hidden from view as she rages with mental illness in the attic before throwing herself from a burning building. In William Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848), there is Rhoda Swartz, the "rich, woolly-haired mulatto" heiress from St. Kitts whom Mr. Osborne tries to force his son George to marry. George refuses: "I don't like the colour, sir," he says. "Ask the black that sweeps opposite Fleet Market, sir. I'm not going to marry a Hottentot Venus."

Britain's colonial relationship with India also produced a significant, if relatively small, Indian community in Britain long before the arrival of the post-World War II migrants. With a broader range of classes, including seafarers, scholars, and diplomats, there was less need for white patrons (though Queen Victoria's favored attendant, Abdul Karim, became famous after a film about him, starring Ali Fazal and Judi Dench, was made in 2017). Indian maharajas even funded the sinking of wells in a range of British towns during the early 19th century. Their presence in high society is thus more plausible, if only as visitors.

But such Black characters did not-indeed, could not-exist in the number and rank suggested in Bridgerton, set less than a decade after the abolition of the slave trade. The creation of a diverse world in which race is not an issue is both one of executive producer Shonda Rhimes's commercial superpowers and narrative kryptonite. There is a lucrative market, particularly on-screen, for the depiction of racial difference in the absence of racial inequality, which one can only assume will grow with the proliferation of global media platforms, like Netflix, that want to sell shows all over the world in which different peoples can see themselves represented. Sex Education, another Netflix original, which focuses on the sexual habits and anxieties in a high school located in the fictional rural English town of Moordale, has a notably multiracial cast. The show deals with issues of class, disability, sexual assault, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, and body shaming-pretty much everything, in fact, apart from race.

Rhimes's other hit shows- Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder-have for the most part followed the same logic. " Grey's Anatomy has differentiated itself by creating a diverse world of doctors-almost half the cast are men and women of color-and then never acknowledging it," wrote the New York Times critic Matthew Fogel in 2005.

This omission, Rhimes explained to Broadcasting and Cable a year later, was deliberate. "I don't think anybody is color-blind in this world. I think I'm a product of being a post-feminist, post-civil-rights baby born in an era after that happened, where race isn't the only thing discussed. And I just felt like there's something interesting about having a show in which your characters could just be your characters."

This is problematic. It suggests that your characters live in a void in which a key determinant of their life chances is irrelevant: that they can either be themselves or have a racial identity-but not both. It reminds me of the crowd of Barack Obama supporters in South Carolina chanting "Race doesn't matter!" after he beat Hillary Clinton in the primary there. It didn't make sense, not only because they were in the only state that, at the time, still flew the Confederate flag from its capitol. But because if it really didn't matter, then why shout about it in the first place? By the time Obama's tenure was over, it was pretty clear that race did matter: not least because nine African Americans had been shot dead in a church in that very state by a young white supremacist. Race matters.

"The success of [ Grey's Anatomy] and of Rhimes as a producer," argues Kristen J. Warner, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama, in a 2015 paper, "is tethered to the use of racialized bodies as signifiers of historical progress in the struggle of televisual racial representation, as well as undermining the diversity of those bodies through a laundering or whitewashing of social and cultural specificity."

There is an important debate to be had that goes beyond popular television to the kind of diversity we'd like to have: one where the world looks different-or one where the society actually operates differently. But since this is fiction and not a documentary, it should also be stressed that Rhimes can create whatever world she pleases and is not bound by the constraints of social realism.

The world she creates in Bridgerton is not post-racial-after four years of Trump, a place where race no longer matters and people can just be themselves seems not hopeful but deluded. But, at first sight at least, it does pose as pre-racial: a society in which race was never an issue and people wouldn't know any other way to be. The fact that slavery has only just been abolished and colonialism is in full throttle-meaning race was very much an issue-is a point for pedants and killjoys. A world where people are this handsome and life is this plush that has not been contaminated by "race" is too good to pass up.

However, what Rhimes can't plausibly do is create a world in which racial difference has no meaning-only to then subject her creation to a racial critique. This is precisely what she does, twice, in Season 1, rendering the entire premise untenable.

First comes a conversation between Lady Danbury and Hastings in which she tries to convince him that romantic love has made "a new day to begin to dawn in this society."

"Look at our queen. Look at our king," she says, referring to Charlotte and George III, as though Charlotte were Nelson Mandela and Meghan Markle all rolled into one. "Look at their marriage...everything it is doing for us. Allowing us to become. We were two separate societies divided by color until a king fell in love with one of us. Love, your grace, conquers all."

Hastings is not convinced. "He may have chosen his queen," he replies, "and elevated us from novelties in their eyes to now dukes and royalty. But with that same whim he may just as easily change his mind. A mind that is hanging on by one very loose and tenuous thread."

These "separate societies" are never mentioned again in the series-and we see no evidence of them. In the absence of any reference to or sign of an old day, this "new day" remains a peculiar abstraction.

The second time is when Baron Featherington attempts to persuade the Black boxer Will Mondrich to take a dive. "I know you have a fighting spirit, passed down by your father, no doubt: a soldier [who] managed to flee the colonies after serving in Dunmore's regiment. Do you think he sought his freedom all for his future son to become some exhausted fighter, stumbling into the ring to put food on the table for his family?" Without any other mention of colonialism or racism, the reference simply does not make sense.

When it comes to gender, we are presented with the opposite narrative contradiction. Rhimes creates a world in which antiquated gender norms not only govern society but drive the story. Men pursue women, who literally drop their handkerchiefs and feign fainting so that they might be assisted or literally caught mid-swoon. For a woman, merely to be alone with a man without a chaperone is to risk disgrace. At one point, the brother of a fallen soldier who impregnated his girlfriend before going to war marries the girlfriend to preserve her honor. "You have no idea what it is to be a woman," Daphne tells Anthony at another point. "What it might feel like to have one's entire life reduced to a single moment. This is all I have been raised for. This is all I am. I have no other value. If I am unable to find a husband, I shall be worthless."

But when the rules of such a society have not only been laid down but form the basis for the ensuing drama, you cannot then have a man tell a woman how to masturbate (possibly the worst case of mansplaining ever). Nor does it make sense, at the very end, to have Hastings in the room holding Daphne's hand as she is giving birth-a practice still frowned upon in the PBS show Call the Midwife, set 150 years later. The problem here, once again, is not one of accuracy but of dramatic consistency. It is difficult to take their buttoned-up courtship seriously when Hastings has told Daphne, just a few episodes earlier "When you are alone, you can touch yourself...anywhere on your body, anywhere that gives you pleasure.... But especially between your legs."

The second season avoids both such jarring commentaries and contradictions-and pretty much all of the sex. But it doesn't replace them with much. Anthony is fond of Edwina and thinks she'll make a good wife, while she is enamored with him. Given the prevailing culture, that's as close to a love match as most are likely to get. Anthony and Kate, on the other hand, have barely had a civil conversation and have spent most of the time sparring. The downsides of consummating their infatuation grow with each episode. In a culture that sets so much store by propriety, pursuing their relationship is as impulsive and reckless a scenario as you're likely to get. Since they are neither impulsive nor reckless, their mutual obsession is unsustainable.

The general issues of status, love, class, marriage, and gender-masculine arrogance and restraint pitted against feminine emotion and comportment-provide the essential ingredients to both seasons, as they do in almost every 19th-century literary classic, many of which have been made into TV dramas.

That's also part of the problem. We have seen this show before, many times, only better. Indeed, the key elements of Bridgerton can be reduced to the single scene in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice where Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth) emerges dripping wet from Lyme Park lake in body-clinging linens and riding boots and bumps into a flushed Elizabeth Bennet (Jennifer Ehle) en route to Pemberley. (There is a moment in Season 2 where Anthony Bridgerton falls into a lake, only to be eye-humped by Kate and Edwina as he comes out. The sheer lack of subtlety in the scene nicely illustrates the point.)

Repression is a central element of the drama in both Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Seduction in these novels is a subtle, socially distanced affair. There may be cads and mistresses, damaged reputations, falls from grace, and dishonorable conduct-but all matters of direct sexual engagement are barely alluded to, let alone explicitly depicted. Britches remain firmly buckled; bodices remain securely bound. Happily for the novelist, the suggestion of, prelude to, and promise of sex is often more sensual than the act itself.

Besides explicit sex, what Bridgerton adds to the aesthetic is racial repression. Rhimes creates a world in which the historical crime of racism has been resolved, through a royal love match, and non-white people are fully integrated into the dominant classes. We find its modern iteration in the royal wedding between Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, which some commentators claimed illustrated just how far Britain had come racially-and which took place even as the Windrush scandal, in which thousands of elderly Caribbean citizens were deported or deprived of their citizenship, was unfolding. Bridgerton suggests that the only thing wrong with racial inequality is that non-white people are not allowed to share in the spoils-as though adding points to my IQ for having an English accent would be OK so long as they didn't take them away for being Black.

It offers viewers a society in which color is segregated from race-so that things look different but remain the same. "There's a model of diversity," Angela Davis once told me, "as the difference that brings no difference and the change that brings no change." For all the frock coats and corsets, bonking and balls, that's precisely the kind of diversity we can do without.

Can we count on you?

In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump's authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win.

We've already seen events that fill us with both dread and cautious optimism-throughout it all, The Nation has been a bulwark against misinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives. Our dedicated writers have sat down with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for interviews, unpacked the shallow right-wing populist appeals of J.D. Vance, and debated the pathway for a Democratic victory in November.

Stories like these and the one you just read are vital at this critical juncture in our country's history. Now more than ever, we need clear-eyed and deeply reported independent journalism to make sense of the headlines and sort fact from fiction. Donate today and join our 160-year legacy of speaking truth to power and uplifting the voices of grassroots advocates.

Throughout 2024 and what is likely the defining election of our lifetimes, we need your support to continue publishing the insightful journalism you rely on.

Thank you,
The Editors of The Nation

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We can imagine a world where the only thing wrong with racial inequality is that non-white people are not allowed to share in the spoils of empire-but would we really want to live in it?

So I can imagine that Bridgerton, the Netflix period drama set in 1813, which portrays a multiracial British elite complete with a Black queen, duke, and dowager aunt as well as debutantes and suitors of virtually every hue, might test credulity in the US and beyond. (Growing up in Britain, where I was born, people would frequently ask me where I was really from, too.) Whatever issues people may have had with this clearly didn't stop them from watching the show: Its first season was the second-most-watched Netflix original series of all time; the second season will be available from March 25.

Season 1 is set, appropriately enough, at the beginning of the "social season" of 1813, when debutantes and eligible bachelors are presented to high society in what is essentially a marriage market. Male suitors call on young ladies for a delicate courtship dance in which status is key. The Bridgertons are a family of eight children (named, in alphabetical order, Anthony, Benedict, Colin, Daphne, Eloise, Francesca, Gregory, and Hyacinth, and headed by Violet, a widowed viscountess). Queen Charlotte crowns Daphne, the eldest daughter, the season's "diamond," making her the most sought-after maiden of the moment. Along with welcome attention, this gives her the onerous responsibility of making a match worthy of both the queen's favor and her own affections.

Current Issue

The rest of the season essentially tests this proposition, as Anthony is torn between his duty to marry a woman with the appropriate attributes and his barely repressed desire to give himself to a woman on whom he has developed a monumental crush. Unfortunately for him, those two women are related. Related Articles

Elsewhere, Queen Charlotte becomes obsessed with discovering the identity of Lady Whistledown, whose commentaries she finds increasingly impertinent, while Penelope tries to remain anonymous and her family, the Featheringtons, still struggle for money and respectability. The only really standout actor is Adjoa Andoh, who plays Lady Danbury-an omniscient elder and friend of the queen whose mixture of tough love, hard truths, strategic ploys, and playful manner are made credible by Andoh's consistently robust performance.

But such Black characters did not-indeed, could not-exist in the number and rank suggested in Bridgerton, set less than a decade after the abolition of the slave trade. The creation of a diverse world in which race is not an issue is both one of executive producer Shonda Rhimes's commercial superpowers and narrative kryptonite. There is a lucrative market, particularly on-screen, for the depiction of racial difference in the absence of racial inequality, which one can only assume will grow with the proliferation of global media platforms, like Netflix, that want to sell shows all over the world in which different peoples can see themselves represented. Sex Education, another Netflix original, which focuses on the sexual habits and anxieties in a high school located in the fictional rural English town of Moordale, has a notably multiracial cast. The show deals with issues of class, disability, sexual assault, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, and body shaming-pretty much everything, in fact, apart from race.

These "separate societies" are never mentioned again in the series-and we see no evidence of them. In the absence of any reference to or sign of an old day, this "new day" remains a peculiar abstraction.

The second season avoids both such jarring commentaries and contradictions-and pretty much all of the sex. But it doesn't replace them with much. Anthony is fond of Edwina and thinks she'll make a good wife, while she is enamored with him. Given the prevailing culture, that's as close to a love match as most are likely to get. Anthony and Kate, on the other hand, have barely had a civil conversation and have spent most of the time sparring. The downsides of consummating their infatuation grow with each episode. In a culture that sets so much store by propriety, pursuing their relationship is as impulsive and reckless a scenario as you're likely to get. Since they are neither impulsive nor reckless, their mutual obsession is unsustainable.

Can we count on you?

In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump's authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win.

We've already seen events that fill us with both dread and cautious optimism-throughout it all, The Nation has been a bulwark against misinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives. Our dedicated writers have sat down with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for interviews, unpacked the shallow right-wing populist appeals of J.D. Vance, and debated the pathway for a Democratic victory in November.

Stories like these and the one you just read are vital at this critical juncture in our country's history. Now more than ever, we need clear-eyed and deeply reported independent journalism to make sense of the headlines and sort fact from fiction. Donate today and join our 160-year legacy of speaking truth to power and uplifting the voices of grassroots advocates.

Throughout 2024 and what is likely the defining election of our lifetimes, we need your support to continue publishing the insightful journalism you rely on.

Thank you,
The Editors of The Nation

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Black Like Me? "Bridgerton" and the Fantasy of a Non-Racist Past

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We can imagine a world where the only thing wrong with racial inequality is that non-white people are not allowed to share in the spoils of empire-but would we really want to live in it?

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Decolonising Desire: The Politics of Love || Dalia Gebrial (2017)

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Decolonising Desire: The Politics of Love || Dalia Gebrial (2017)

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"The oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and another. Smoking, going to the baths, painting her eyelids and drinking coffee - such is the circle of occupations within which her existence is confined....What makes this woman, in a sense, so poetic, is that she relapses into the state of nature"
Gustave Flaubert on Egyptian women

"I'm so obsessed I want to skin you and wear you like Versace"
Katy Perry, referring to Japanese people in an interview with Jimmy Fallon

"Today, I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavour to trace its imperfections, its perversions"
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks

What does it mean to be lovable? Who is and is not deserving of particular kinds of love? How is love coded and reproduced? What, and who, is absent when love is represented?

There is a slowly growing body of work exploring what Averil Clarke calls the 'inequalities of love.' In her book, Clarke uses national survey data and ethnographic interviews to explore the unique difficulties faced by university-educated black women when seeking romance and marriage, as compared to their white and Hispanic counterparts. In 2014, OkCupid released data demonstrating how 'response rate' to dating profiles is profoundly affected by how you are racialised. There is a plethora of blogs and think pieces - particularly by women of colour - documenting traumatic and degrading experiences during dating and sex that specifically happens through and alongside their racialisation. Writer Junot Diaz - credited with coining the loosely defined term 'decolonial love' - explores in his novel Monstro the dynamics of a half-Dominican half-Haitian girl's "search for - yes - love in a world that has made it a solemn duty to guarantee that poor raced girls like her are never loved." Of course, getting attention on a dating website - or being married - is not an indicator of being loved. However, what this body of data and personal narrative tells us is that race profoundly structures your experience of desire, commitment and respect.

- OkCupid dating research, 2014

The primary social practice of love has been through heteronormative, monogamous dating and marriage; there is a compelling and important radical argument that these relationship structures are oppressive and predicated on the uneven and gendered distribution of emotional labour. What I'm interested in is further investigating is what it means to not be legible within even these problematic discourses of love. Exclusion from such frameworks is not always tantamount to liberation - in fact, exclusion denotes an entirely different set of racialised oppressions.

Looking back at my own experience, a nascent adolescent sexual curiosity was rapidly crushed by a combination of bodily mockery and - most often - total invisibility. A series of small lessons learned through film, television and personal experience, accumulated to the eventual understanding that people who look like me cannot be the subject of love. If lucky, we can be objects of fetishisation - but that is very different to being perceived as lovable.

What is often missing from accounts of the racial dynamics of 'love' and being 'loved' is an understanding of where these codes - of who can be loved, who cannot be loved and whose love matters - come from. Why do we have such a robust and universally understood racial grammar of desire, to the point where porn is literally categorised according to racist tropes?

In her essay on colonial sexual politics, Sandra Ponzenesi explores how the twin, sexualised images of the harem and the Hottentot framed almost all representations of women of Africa and 'the Orient' (the modern-day Middle East) in 19th century European art and literature. Within these colonial scripts we can find many of the origin stories of contemporary racial grammars and start to unpack the power relations they reproduce. Most importantly, we can build an understanding of how 'love', represented as an apolitical, transcendent realm of affect into which you unwittingly fall, is actually deeply politicized, and linked to broader structural violences faced particularly by women of colour globally.

-In the Harem by Frederick Arthur Bridgman (1904)

Embedded within the constituent discourses of love - of desirability, emotional labour, support and commitment - are codes of social value assigned to certain bodies; of who is worthy of love's work. The Hottentot and the harem in Ponzanesi's essay are quite different paradigms of the desiring gaze. The harem is marked by often multiple brown women's bodies viewed through a voyeuristic eye; tension is created through the intimation that their potent sexuality is "under lock and key" - their bodies are often loosely clothed, and it is implied they are unaware they are being watched. Erotic thrill is generated through the tantalising possibility of possession. In contrast, representations of the Hottentot woman provide a paragon of objectification: the focus is on the minute, invasive and dehumanising details of an individual woman's body. The archetypal narrative of the Hottentot is of course the case of Saartjie Baartman, a South African Khoikhoi woman, whose body was toured around 19th Century European circuses; her particular body shape put forward as representing the 'essence' of all African women, and as an object of sick European fascination. Even in her death she was not spared the racialised misogyny of the European gaze; her brain, skeleton and sexual organs remained on display in a Paris museum until 1974, more than 150 years after her death in 1815.

- Les Curieux en Extase by Louis Francois Charon (1815)

What connects these two paradigms is the total reduction of personhood to corporeality. The Hottentot is a silent, static image, presented from the pages of eugenics diagrams or from the pedestal of an exhibition. As for the harem's brown women - their bodies become sites of exploration and self-discovery; props signifying adventure and domination within colonial narratives. Edward Said's brilliant, gut-wrenching reflection on Flaubert's encounters with Egyptian courtesan Kuchuk Hanem - "a widely influential model of the Oriental woman" - cannot be improved upon:

She never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence or history. He spoke for her and represented her.... The Oriental woman is an occasion and an opportunity for Flaubert's musings; he is entranced by her self-sufficiency, by her emotional carelessness, and also by what, lying next to him, she allows him to think.

The European attraction to the colonised bodies of the harem woman and the Hottentot was paradoxically underscored by revulsion. The Hottentot - a hallmark image of 19th Century eugenics - was continually associated in both art and medical literature with unbridled, pathologised sexuality. Diagrams of African women's vulvas were preoccupied with what was perceived to be an 'overdevelopment' of the clitoris and labia. This was portrayed as a signifier of a biologically determined sexual excess 'proving' their pathological and animalistic nature. Such scientific racism toward African women was constituted almost entirely through and alongside portrayals of their sexuality and sexual organs in a way that was not the case for African men. Similarly in Flaubert's portrayals of the harem, the Oriental woman's 'machine-like' sexuality aligns her with primitivism; he speaks of the "nauseating odour" of the bed bugs that surround her and how her sexuality "relapses [her] into a state of nature."

The Hottentot archetype of late 17th Century European colonial discourse was easily adaptable to the racist ideology and specific material needs of chattel slavery in the Americas, which required an abundant, constantly growing labour force. Black women and black men were both perceived and treated as sub-human commodities, and in women, this was specifically constituted through ideas around their reproductive capacity to provide offspring that could be sold for the slaveowner's profit. Enslaved African women were routinely raped by crew members on the transatlantic voyage to the Americas. Once on the auction block, the reproductive and sexual features of women slaves were inspected for signs of being good 'breeders,' and forced 'breeding' with male slaves was not uncommon.

This mode of dehumanization within an institutional pattern of rape was mirrored in the broader, systematic treatment of their bodies. During slavery, the rape of black women - like native women - was not legally recognised: while white women struggled to bring proof violation of extra-marital consent, women of colour were unable to get a foot into the courtroom. After abolition, these legacies continued - particularly in the South. Whilst black men were being brutalised and criminalised in the name of defending white womanhood, black women continued to struggle to have sexual violence committed against them - particularly by white men - recognised as violence. The construction of black womanhood as animalistic, hypersexualised commodities made them situated them outside any discourse of consent or sexual agency, and excused the lack of legal and social support provided for African American assault survivors.

- Three Young White Men and a Black Woman by Christiaen van Couwenbergh (1632)

The construction of the racialised woman's body during colonisation and slavery as dirty, hypersexual and close to nature was specifically through their opposition to the chaste cleanliness of the Victorian woman, who, for her part, was bound to domesticity. As bell hooks writes in Ain't I a Woman:

The shift away from the image of white woman as sinful and sexual to that of white woman as virtuous lady occurred at the same time as mass sexual exploitation of enslaved black women - just as the rigid morality of Victorian England created a society in which the extolling of woman as mother and helpmeet occurred at the same time as the formation of a mass underworld of prostitution.

Indeed, representations of other marginalised women - such as sex workers and queer women - were constituted across similar lines. A gynaecology handbook by 19th Century surgeon Theodor Bilroth connected the stereotypical hypersexuality of African women to "those excesses" which are "called lesbian love." Similarly, as Sander Gilman notes in her excellent Black Bodies, White Bodies, becoming a sex worker was seen as biologically determined: a particular set of physiological traits confirmed inherent hypersexuality, which drew women towards sex work. The existence of sex workers in turn was seen as a public health issue, likened to pollution in the streets of the city. What connects these highly embodied categories of undesirable women is that they are specifically constructed in opposition to the discourses of love, romance, marriage and family. Their bodies are fascinations, adventures, scandals and pathologies - these subjects are not worth even the premise of the emotional labour of commitment.

The sexual deviancy and moral downfall of white women was often indicated by proximity to black and brown bodies in representations of European women from as far back as the eighteenth century; this was a central function of bodies of colour in art. Gilman refers to the famous Edouard Manet painting Olympia (1865) - depicting a nude white woman reclining on a bed, attended by a black servant - as an archetype of this trope. The painting caused moral outrage upon its exhibition, because a series of signifiers, including the presence of a black body, indicated that it was depicting an illicit context in a way that nude paintings of the era otherwise did not.

- Olympia by Edouard Manet (1865)

Today, the legacies of these colonial scripts have adapted magnificently to contemporary culture - and television, film and music videos allow for their wider dissemination, particularly in the West. Even when cloaked in the premise of affection, the language with which we speak about desire is entrenched in racialised instrumentalisation. Indeed, how different is David Bowie's ode to his 'China Girl' - " I could escape this feeling with my China Girl/ I feel a wreck without my little China Girl" - to Flaubert's musings on the "occasion and opportunity" of Kuchuk Hanem's body and what, lying next to him, it "allows him to think"? Similarly, 'feminist' justifications for the Iraq War were cloaked in the language of love and solidarity for a voiceless brown woman who - like Kuchuk Hanem - "never represented her emotions, presence or history."

In one of the more well-known instances, pop star Miley Cyrus' attempts to repackage herself from cute, infantile Disney do-gooder to edgy, grown-up provocateur involved highly strategic image changes: sexier clothes, sexier lyrics and - in a tale as old as Empire - the use of black women dancers. When pointed out to her that this could be viewed as instrumentalisation, I don't doubt she was authentically shocked: "those aren't my accessories. They're my homies!" Within her conceptual framework, this is what it means to express 'love' for black women.

- Miley Cyrus performing at the 2013 VMAs

So where to go from here? When it comes to envisioning a 'decolonial love,' a checklist behavioural guide for relationship etiquette is not sufficient. The problems of dehumanisation and fetishisation did not begin in individual relationships - they just come particularly to light within romantic or sexualised contexts - and will not end there. They began in a system of representation borne out of a power relation; a relation that existed for the purpose of material exploitation and resource extraction. Later, immigration policies, labour practices and distribution of resources would also feed into this racialised hierarchy of desire. The labour of decolonising these representative paradigms is structural, and involves addressing their material histories. To believe - as Fanon says - in the possibility of love, we must comprehend the fact that we do not obliviously fall into it, but are coded in and out of it, and that this has implications beyond our individualised experiences.

Dalia Gebrial is campaigns co-ordinator for the Undoing Borders campaign and a freelance writer. She is currently editing a special issue of Historical Materialism on 'Identity Politics,' and working on an edited volume on decolonisation in higher education.
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Decolonising Desire: The Politics of Love

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"The oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and another.

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Blackness, Dehumanized: A Black Feminist Analysis of ‘Bridgerton’ || Shaun Armstead (2021)

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Blackness, Dehumanized: A Black Feminist Analysis of ‘Bridgerton’ || Shaun Armstead (2021)

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AAIHS - African American Intellectual History Society

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Blackness, Dehumanized: A Black Feminist Analysis of ‘Bridgerton’ - AAIHS

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Since its release on Christmas Day, Bridgerton has attracted international attention for its racial cosmopolitan reenactment of early nineteenth-century Britain. In its first four weeks, 63 million households viewed the joint Shonda Rhimes-Netflix venture, making the series one of the top five most-streamed in the streaming service’s history. A multicultural reimagining of Julia Quinn’s novel,

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Ar'nt I a Woman? || Deborah Gray White (1985)

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Ar'nt I a Woman? || Deborah Gray White (1985)

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Living with the dual burdens of racism and sexism, slave women in the plantation South assumed roles within the family and community that contrasted sharply with traditional female roles in the larger American society. This new edition of Ar'n't I a Woman? reviews and updates the scholarship on slave women and the slave family, exploring new ways of understanding the intersection of race and gender and comparing the myths that stereotyped female slaves with the realities of their lives. Above all, this groundbreaking study shows us how black women experienced freedom in the Reconstruction South - their heroic struggle to gain their rights, hold their families together, resist economic and sexual oppression, and maintain their sense of womanhood against all odds.

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Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South

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Living with the dual burdens of racism and sexism, slave women in the plantation South assumed roles within the family and community that contrasted sharply with traditional female roles in the larger American society. This new edition of Ar'n't I a Woman?

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Bridgerton and Normal People Expose Romance’s Colonial Hangover || Alison Garden (2021) 

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Bridgerton and Normal People Expose Romance’s Colonial Hangover || Alison Garden (2021) 

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Bridgerton and Normal People expose romance’s colonial hangover | Racism | Al Jazeera

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We use cookies and other tracking technologies to deliver and personalize content and ads, enable features, measure site performance, and enable social media sharing. You can choose to customize your preferences.Learn more about our Cookie Policy.

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'Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/silencing the Demonic Ground of Caliban's Woman' || Sylvia Wynter (1996)

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'Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/silencing the Demonic Ground of Caliban's Woman' || Sylvia Wynter (1996)

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The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature

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The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature is an outstanding compilation of over seventy primary and secondary texts of writing from the Caribbean. Locating key writers within a specifically Caribbean framework, the editors Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh demonstrate that these singular voices have emerged not out of a cultural void or sparse literary background, but out of a wealth of literary tradition which until now was unknown or critically neglected.Writers from 1900 to the present

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Black Bodies, White Gazes || George Yancy (2016)

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Black Bodies, White Gazes || George Yancy (2016)

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Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America, Second Edition

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Drawing from the lives of Ossie Davis, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as his own experience, and fully updated to account for what has transpired since the rise of the Blac...

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Adrienne Garcia-Specht || Writer, Anti-Colonial Approaches to Film and Literature, Jane Austen / Elizabeth Gaskell Fan

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Adrienne Garcia-Specht || Writer, Anti-Colonial Approaches to Film and Literature, Jane Austen / Elizabeth Gaskell Fan

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Twitter - https://x.com/barelytolerabIe

JaneCon - https://youtu.be/Mi69rNAsV1Q?si=jxM0D_A99_MMtAA5

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Legacies of British Slaveownership || Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Colleagues (2014)

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Legacies of British Slaveownership || Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Colleagues (2014)

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This book re-examines the relationship between Britain and colonial slavery in a crucial period in the birth of modern Britain. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of British slave-owners and mortgagees who received compensation from the state for the end of slavery, and tracing their trajectories in British life, the volume explores the commercial, political, cultural, social, intellectual, physical and imperial legacies of slave-ownership. It transcends conventional divisions in history-writing to provide an integrated account of one powerful way in which Empire came home to Victorian Britain, and to reassess narratives of West Indian 'decline'. It will be of value to scholars not only of British economic and social history, but also of the histories of the Atlantic world, of the Caribbean and of slavery, as well as to those concerned with the evolution of ideas of race and difference and with the relationship between past and present.

'This is an important book which contributes significantly to modern British history. It, and the data which underpin it, have the potential not only to re-construct our national memory but also to inform related projects in countries such as France and the Netherlands, studies of re-investment in Britain's 'informal' empire in the Americas, and demands from Caribbean states for reparations for the enduring suffering inflicted by the Atlantic slave trade.'

Mandy Banton Source: Family and Community History

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Cambridge Core - Economic History - Legacies of British Slave-Ownership

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New Love Island Rules Reveals Racism in Britain || Rhianna Garrett (2023)

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New Love Island Rules Reveals Racism in Britain || Rhianna Garrett (2023)

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New Love Island rules reveals racism in Britain

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We all see it, but why are we not talking about it? Love Island is a popular dating TV show in the UK, which places ‘attractive’ contestan…

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Review: ‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’: A Character Study about Sex, Aging, and Objectification || Jeanine Abraham

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Review: ‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’: A Character Study about Sex, Aging, and Objectification || Jeanine Abraham

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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is deliciously sexy and overflows with middle-aged white female body positivity, but I just couldn't get past the glaring colonist overtones.

Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson, Sense and Sensibility) has been a widow for 2 years after 30 years of marriage. She has never had an orgasm and is now ready to rumble. Nancy chooses a handsome young Black biracial sex worker, Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack, Peaky Blinders) to cross some sexual experiences off her bucket list. She books the time at a fancy hotel, puts on her sexiest retired school teacher lingerie, and approaches the task like any proper British schoolmarm would - with pained, proficient, guilt-ridden gusto.

As Leo Grande, Daryl McCormack is just lovely to watch. Combined with an unexpected Irish accent, he's perfect for this role. And, to be clear, I love Emma Thompson. Emma Thompson as this mother/teacher/widow who has never experienced sexual pleasure is funny, fearless, and fantastic. From the very first beat in this film, the audience feels Nancy's profound anxiety, excitement, and a million other feelings that a woman must have when meeting a sex worker for the first time. But writer Sophie Hyde ( 52 Tuesdays, Animals) misses the opportunity to write a sophisticated, nuanced story that includes the sexualized racial dynamic in this situation.

In the age of performative white liberal wokeness, "colorblind" casting seems to be all the rage. However, most white writers avoid building the reality of racial dynamics into their stories. If you're going to cast a biracial Black man in a role where his purpose is to be in sexual service to a white woman, why don't you incorporate the impact race has on the relationship?

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande only has two main characters and the run time of this film is ninety-seven minutes, which is more than enough time to acknowledge the racial dynamic. Why is it that dominant culture is so quick to not name the reality of our power structure where white women are simultaneously victims and victimizers? You can't just throw people of color on screen and ignore the fact that we live in a world where being a person of color impacts every relationship, particularly when the story deals with sex and, at the end of the day, power.

While Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is unapologetically brave when it comes to the issues of middle-aged white women who want to be seen beyond motherhood and be accepted with wrinkles and belly fat, writer Katy Brand basically treats Leo as Miss Nancy's human sex toy, glossing over her position of power as she exoticizes Leo. Why is it that the entertainment industry has completely normalized exoticizing men of color as an object of sexual pleasure for white women of all ages?

In shows like Bridgerton, race is ignored, which is unfortunate. We all know the long, deep history England has with colonization. We've always had white folks sexually dominating people of color in Western culture, and that power dynamic bleeds through in romantic interracial couplings in real life, but the majority of white writers don't ever allow themselves to reveal that in their work. This film was really good, but I just couldn't stop thinking about how I was getting emotionally attached to a story about a white woman finding her sexual liberation by purchasing a Black man's body for the evening to service her.

As Leo would comfort Nancy's lamentations about not being seen as a sexual being, I'd notice Leo's Irish accent and wonder what must it have been like for Leo to have grown up in Ireland as a biracial Black kid who I'm sure was the only child of color in his area. The film does go into Leo's relationship with his mother, but doesn't reveal if his mother was Black or white. Adding the small detail of his mother's racial identity would have layered in complex conflict to the story arc of these two characters, which would have made the ending feel earned. I wish the writer had done the work to go beyond her own personal experience and acknowledge Leo's racial identity. But I don't know if she has what is required to provide the racially nuanced storytelling the audience could really chew on.

Overall Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a great film. It's super sexy, it lightens the heart, and the main subjects are body image and ageism. But if you want to center body image and ageism without dealing with the racial aspect, you're going to have to cast a young white male actor in Leo's role or cast a middle-aged Black woman as Nancy. It's like Chekov says - if there's a gun on stage in Act 1, someone's gotta be firing it by the end of the play. It's there for a reason.

Back in the 1760s, white folks created "race" as a social construct to dominate everyone else and maintain power. When it comes to "race" as the descendants of its creators, white people are actually the experts. So, why aren't modern-day white folks able to incorporate their creation, "race," into their storytelling?

There is no such thing as " colorblind casting." We see color. Casting people of color and ignoring their color in your story is performative allyship, and it isn't enough.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande premieres June 17th on Hulu.

Jeanine T. Abraham

Jeanine is a Writer, Actor, member SAG/AFTRA, AEA, Podcast host, Producer, CEO VisAbleBlackWoman Productions, Certified Health Coach and Conscious Dance facilitator. Jeanine's mission, centering Black women's stories to preserve our legacies.

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Review: 'Good Luck to You, Leo Grande': A Character Study about Sex, Aging, and Objectification

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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is deliciously sexy and overflows with middle-aged white female body positivity, but I just couldn't get past the glaring colonist overtones. Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson, Sense and Sensibility) has been a widow for 2 years after 30 years of marriage.

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Slavery and the British Country House || Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann (2013)

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Slavery and the British Country House || Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann (2013)

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The British country house has long been regarded as the jewel in the nation's heritage crown. But the country house is also an expression of wealth and power, and as scholars reconsider the nation's colonial past, new questions are being posed about these great houses and their links to Atlantic slavery.

This book, authored by a range of academics and heritage professionals, grew out of a 2009 conference on 'Slavery and the British Country house: mapping the current research' organised by English Heritage in partnership with the University of the West of England, the National Trust and the Economic History Society. It asks what links might be established between the wealth derived from slavery and the British country house and what implications such links should have for the way such properties are represented to the public today.

Based on the latest scholarship, this wide-ranging and innovative volume provides in-depth examinations of individual houses, regional studies and critical reconsiderations of existing heritage sites, including two studies specially commissioned by English Heritage and one sponsored by the National Trust.
In order to improve access to this research, a complete copy of the text is free to download from the PDF link above.

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Slavery and the British Country House - Free download | Historic England

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The British country house has long been regarded as the jewel in the nation's heritage crown. But the country house is also an expression of wealth and power, and as scholars reconsider the nation's colonial past, new questions are being posed about these great houses and their links to Atlantic slavery.

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Boys to Men: The Cost of "Adultification" in Safeguarding Responses to Black Boys || Jahnine Davis and Nicholas Marsh

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Boys to Men: The Cost of "Adultification" in Safeguarding Responses to Black Boys || Jahnine Davis and Nicholas Marsh

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Davis, Jahnine and Marsh, Nicholas (2020) Boys to men: the cost of ‘adultification' in safeguarding responses to Black boys. Critical & Radical Social Work, 8(2), pp.255-259. ISSN (print) 2049-8608

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Austen After 200: New Reading Spaces || Kerry Sinanan, Annika Bautz, and Daniel Cook (2023)

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Austen After 200: New Reading Spaces || Kerry Sinanan, Annika Bautz, and Daniel Cook (2023)

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This book explores our contemporary relationship with Jane Austen in the wake of the bicentenaries of her death and the publication of her novels.

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Twitter: Chimene Suleyman and Sunny Singh (2022)

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Twitter: Chimene Suleyman and Sunny Singh (2022)

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https://x.com/chimenesuleyman/status/1346464627668836356

https://x.com/ProfSunnySingh/status/1502212979663720448?lang=en-GB

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What We Lose When We Focus On Whiteness In Interracial Relationships || Nylah Burton (2021)

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What We Lose When We Focus On Whiteness In Interracial Relationships || Nylah Burton (2021)

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In a world that places so much value on representation, it's important to point out when the representation we're given is shallow or toxic. To me, it's pretty clear that depictions of interracial relationships in pop culture and conversations surrounding these pairings are failures because they are binary and almost laughably predictable - like white partners asking their racialized partners to accept them for being white, or even using their relationship as a shield against accusations of racism.

Currently, interracial relationships are portrayed as social phenomenons to be fetishized and commodified. And perhaps most unforgivingly, this outlook strips the conversation of the only thing worth discussing: how power operates in our most intimate spaces. As a society, we've grown accustomed to viewing interracial relationships of all kinds through a lens of consumption and commodification. And proper recognition of power dynamics is completely at odds with the mission of commodification. Interracial relationship influencers on TikTok and Instagram are a prime example of this. Under #mixedfamily and #interracialcouple, one can find the most subtly noxious - and frankly, incredibly cringeworthy - discourse about race.

Interracial relationships are potrayed as social phenomenons to be fetishized and commodified. And perhaps most unforgivingly, this outlook strips the conversation of the only thing worth discussing: how power operates in our most intimate spaces.

In these videos, it's common to magnify the "othered" experiences of the white partner. For example, a white woman married to a South Asian man might create an online identity as an interracial relationship counselor, discussing all the problems she had adjusting to his "conservative" culture, which erases the harm she's capable of causing as a white person and reifies stereotypes people already have about Desi people. She might talk about how she felt like she wasn't ever going to be a "perfect Indian wife" but that her husband assured her that he "accepted her just the way [she] is."

It seems innocent, but racism and colorism are forces too powerful and widespread in our society for white partners to consistently equate their experiences of "adjusting" to their partner's culture to their non-white partner's experience of having an intimate relationship with someone whose very identity represents oppressive power structures that threaten them every day.

Not only are relationships between white people and people of color the focus of most conversations about interracial dating, there is a focus on the non-white partner being Black. Brianna Holt, an NYC-based author and writer who penned a New York Times article on how many Black people feel they need to code-switch in interracial relationships, points out that "we tend to focus on relationships between Black and white people because that's where the power disparity seems to be the greatest."

In many cases, that's true. But unequal - and intricate - racial or ethnic power dynamics can exist between any two people of different identities. When we erase the realities of non-white people in relationships, those power dynamics and instances of harm are allowed to flourish because they are often unexamined, unchallenged, and ignored.

Layla*, a Black woman who has been in a relationship with a Native American man for the past year says that although she and her partner found common ground in their experiences as racialized people, navigating race with him has been difficult. She's never seen a relationship like hers represented in media or even discussed much in real life. "People assume it will be easier than a Black and white pairing, and that isn't true. It's more complicated; familiar and complicated," she tells R29Unbothered.

For some people, that familiarity can make the power dynamics that do arise easier to navigate. Aditi Juneja, a South Asian lawyer and activist in New York City, says that she's almost exclusively been in interracial relationships with people of varying races and ethnicities, but never a white person. These relationships have shown her that shared experiences matter a great deal.

Media commonly makes the mistake of portraying interracial relationships with white people as shining examples of racial progress [and] assuming interracial relationships between people of color are devoid of any need for progress, or even learning.

"I think that a big thing people in interracial relationships - including friendships - have in common when neither are white are their experiences of racism and marginalization by white people. The experiences are different but we can talk about colonization, colorism, white beauty standards and respectability," Juneja says. Layla agrees. "There is a sense of familiarity given the history of Black folks and Indigenous folks in this country," she says.

Drawing from my own romantic and platonic relationships with non-Black people of color, I know that sharing experiences of racism do provide us with common ground. But so do more positive things like cultural traditions, habits, and memories around family. However, it is those same shared experiences that make it harder to discuss problematic or hurtful things that might come up. It feels almost like turning your back on something that previously bonded you together.

Radhika G, a South Asian university student, says that in her previous relationship with a Filipino and Uruguayan man, she wasn't prepared to have to deal with issues of race, but they did come up. "I feel like there are dynamics between various ethnic groups that sometimes complicate things. With white people you may assume and prepare for some backlash, but I was not prepared for that from my partner's family, especially the Filipino side," she says, noting that she was shocked when his step-grandmother commented on how dark-skinned Radhika was.

If media commonly makes the mistake of portraying interracial relationships with white people as shining examples of racial progress, then it also makes the mistake of assuming interracial relationships between people of color are devoid of any need for progress, or even learning. It's assumed that the two people are coming to the table with enough shared history of oppression to overcome any harm that might arise.

So when problematic things are said, it can be difficult to know whether we should give more grace, because isn't this person dealing with the same internalized racism due to white supremacy and colonization that we are? With white people, it feels more cut and dry. The intimacy of interracial relationships between people of color can lead to more complex and fulfilling discussions, but also more conflict over how to deal with it.

In her relationship, Layla sometimes feels this tension and doesn't always know how to handle it. Her partner's parents intentionally distanced themselves from their Indigenous community and passed as white, and her partner grew up in an anti-Black household. "As a teenager, when he tried to date a Black girl, his dad beat the shit out of him," Layla says, adding that their relationship taught her how pervasive anti-Blackness can be in many Indigenous communities, something she was previously unaware of due to lack of public discussion around it. Although her partner has reclaimed himself in many ways, he's still unlearning things from his upbringing.

Aisha is a Black woman married to an Indian-American man, and she says that she and her husband never see themselves represented in the media. "Most of the discourse is about Black men and white women," she tells R29Unbothered. Because of that, she feels a lot of the challenges Black people face in relationships with non-Black people of color can be erased by the public. "I think that the amount of anti-Blackness [in those communities] is usually glossed over," Aisha says.

It's painfully obvious that we're not given much of a road map when it comes to navigating interracial relationships with non-white people. But even in social media and pop culture representation of interracial relationships with white people, white racism is heavily sanitized or ignored. Often, the burden of prejudice is laid on the non-white partner's shoulders through stereotypes, e.g. a Desi family that is too conservative, an East Asian family that is too emotionally withholding, or a Black family that is too ignorantly suspcious of white people. Or even, in perhaps the most egregious example, an Indigenous family that's too resistant to their own genocide.

There is also the festishization of interracial relationships on full display on Instagram, where there are "mixed baby" accounts where parents can submit photos of their children with details about the parent's ethnicities. Here, biracial children - and particularly those without white parents - are exotified. When they exist outside of whiteness, people in interracial relationships and multiracial people are often denied their humanity. However, from my observation, the people harmed most by our current discourse around interracial relationships are often dark-skinned, monoracial Black women, whether they're in interracial relationships or not.

Take for example, the show mixed-ish. For Wear Your Voice Magazine, I pointed out that the family the show centered is "shown as frustratingly innocent and never capable of causing harm, because their very existence" as a mixed couple - a white man and a Black woman - "is shown as the ultimate good deed." Whereas Aunt Denise (Christina Anthony), a monoracial, dark-skinned Black woman on the show, was consistently portrayed as ignorant because of her hesitancy about relationships with white people.

Perhaps the most harmful fiction the media has pushed is that interracial relationships are special. At their core, interracial relationships are deeply boring.

When we hold up relationships with white people as a sign of radical social change - they most definitely are not - we position Black women with no proximity to whiteness and no distance from Blackness as the enemy of racial progress. Black women's distrust of others' white partners - especially if they are women - is recast as a combination of hate, ignorance, and bitter jealousy. I've seen countless Black women teased and harassed online if they dared to say anything that might be seen as hostile towards interracial relationships, and this harassment has often devolved into anti-Black insults about their appearance or intelligence. Black women become the obstacle holding everyone back, a figure to be mocked and derided and ultimately ignored, even though it is Black women's particularly keen understanding of gender and racial power dynamics that often causes their wariness in the first place.

"I felt really invisible," Evan Lewis, a Black queer writer, tells R29Unbothered about growing up watching unhealthy depictions of interracial relationships like the ones in or How To Get Away With Murder. "Positive representation for me is anything that portrays a relationship that is actually supportive of the Black woman, where she's able to be vulnerable," they continue. Race, Evan Lewis says, doesn't even have to be a factor in TV representation of Black women in relationships. And if they're in interracial relationships, positive representation is still when "human problems or even race problems [exist to] add spice to the conflict, they aren't the whole conflict. Because that's real life."

And perhaps the most harmful fiction the media has pushed is that interracial relationships are special. At their core, interracial relationships are deeply boring. They can be a different lens to examine and reflect on power, but after that, all you're left with is a couple like any other. These relationships won't eliminate racial bias. Implying that interracial relationships are revolutionary, inspirational, or enlightened is "silly." Latina journalist Nicole Fiore, says, "My individual choice to date a white person isn't actually changing things on a structural level. I am just a person living my life with my partner, and to say all of that is a political act or that it's anti-racist, is really lacking in nuance."

Seeking freedom and acceptance within your own romance is something we all must do, but seeking a world that extends freedom and acceptance to the most vulnerable people requires moving away from the myopia often present in these relationship dynamics and being willing to have actual conversations about power, accountability, and revolution. And you definitely don't need to be in an interracial relationship to have these conversations.

The revolution will not happen in the bedroom. It will not happen if we learn a new language or a new recipe. It won't happen if we learn how to address our partner's parents or what kind of music their family likes to listen to at reunions. Those are all nice and often necessary things, but to have real discussions, we have to start getting serious about discussing power and decentering whiteness.

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What We Lose When We Focus On Whiteness In Interracial Relationships

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The way we talk about interracial relationships in the U.S.- especially in pop culture - is often reductive and harmful. In these discussions, whiteness is constantly centered and anything outside of that is "othered." Talking about interracial relationships between people of color can lead to more complex and fulfilling discussions.

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Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South || Talitha L. LeFlouria (2015)

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Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South || Talitha L. LeFlouria (2015)

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"Leaves us with a radically new understanding of the historical dimensions of racism, gender, and state violence."--Elizabeth Hinton, The Nation

"This beautifully written book leads its readers on the journey from Emancipation to the devastating convict-leasing system in Georgia. . . . [and] examines the exploitation of black women's bodies, the beginnings of mass incarceration, and the rise of the modern New South."--Erica Armstrong Dunbar, The Nation

"Highly recommended."-- Choice

"A deeply researched and carefully crafted mouthpiece for black female convict laborers."-- American Historical Review

"An indispensable reference point."-- Journal of Southern History

"A much-needed and distinctly gendered perspective on carceral roots of both antiblack racism and resistance to it, a history that can be silenced no longer."-- Journal of American History

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Chained in Silence | Talitha L. LeFlouria | University of North Carolina Press

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"Leaves us with a radically new understanding of the historical dimensions of racism, gender, and state violence."--Elizabeth Hinton, The Nation "This beautifully written book leads its readers on the journey from Emancipation to the devastating convict-leasing system in Georgia. . . .

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Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica | Sasha Turner (2017)

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Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica | Sasha Turner (2017)

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It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves’ reproductive health after the British government banned the importatio…

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Dispossesed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive || Marisa Fuentes (2016)

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Dispossesed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive || Marisa Fuentes (2016)

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In the eighteenth century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbe...

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Gender and Absentee Slave-ownership in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain || Hannah Young PhD (2017)

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Gender and Absentee Slave-ownership in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain || Hannah Young PhD (2017)

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Amanda-Rae Prescott || Entertainment Journalist

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Amanda-Rae Prescott || Entertainment Journalist

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Twitter - https://x.com/amandarprescott

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/amandarprescott/

Den of Geek - https://www.denofgeek.com/author/amanda-rae-prescott/ [Doctor Who, Outlander, Austen, Gilded Age, and more...].

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Intersectionality: Race, Gender and Other Aspects of Identity in Social Work with Young People || Jahnine Davis and Nicholas Marsh (2020)

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Intersectionality: Race, Gender and Other Aspects of Identity in Social Work with Young People || Jahnine Davis and Nicholas Marsh (2020)

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Davis, Jahnine and Marsh, Nicholas (2020) Intersectionality: race, gender and other aspects of identity in social work with young people. Community Care,

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Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery || Jennifer L Morgan (2004)

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Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery || Jennifer L Morgan (2004)

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Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery

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When black women were brought from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, their value was determined by their ability to work as well as their potential…

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The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics || George Lipsitz (1998)

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The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics || George Lipsitz (1998)

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In this unflinching look at white supremacy, George Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes, a problem of property as well as pigment. Above and beyond personal prejudice, whiteness is a structured advantage that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation, employment, housing, and health care for minorities. Reaching beyond the black/white binary, Lipsitz shows how whiteness works in respect to Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws, the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization, and the effects of environmental racism, job discrimination and school segregation. He also analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. culture, and perhaps most importantly, he identifies the sustained and perceptive critique of white privilege embedded in the radical black tradition. This revised and expanded edition also includes an essay about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on working class Blacks in New Orleans, whose perpetual struggle for dignity and self determination has been obscured by the city's image as a tourist party town.

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In this unflinching look at white supremacy, George Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes, a problem of property as well as pigment. Above and beyond personal prejudice, whiteness is a structured advantage that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation, employment, housing, and health care for minorities.

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Letters on Slavery || William Dickson (1789)

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Letters on Slavery || William Dickson (1789)

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J. Phillips, George-Yard, Lombard-Street, and sold by J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church-Yard, and Elliot and Kay, opposite Somerset place, Strand.

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The White Possessive || Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015)

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The White Possessive || Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015)

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The White Possessive explores the links between race, sovereignty, and possession through themes of property: owning property, being property, and becoming p…

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Bianca Hernandez-Knight || Historical Costuming Expert + Content Creator

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Bianca Hernandez-Knight || Historical Costuming Expert + Content Creator

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Blog - https://bookhoarding.wordpress.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/biancahernandez/

Twitter - https://x.com/bookhoarding

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@bookhoarding

On Persuasion - https://www.k-saa.org/blog/netflixs-persuasion-falls-short-of-its-vision-but-isnt-all-agony

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They Were Her Property: White Women as Slaveowners in the American South || Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (2020)

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They Were Her Property: White Women as Slaveowners in the American South || Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (2020)

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They Were Her Property - Yale University Press London

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Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History: a bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy &#160…

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MISOGYNOIR: They Aren't Talking About Me... || Moya Bailey (2010)

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MISOGYNOIR: They Aren't Talking About Me... || Moya Bailey (2010)

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As a queer woman in love, sometimes it’s hard to relate to what my straight sisters are going through. What used to make me want to hold rap stars accountable is now likely to pass my ears without …

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Decolonizing Desire || Dr Han Ren (2022)

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Decolonizing Desire || Dr Han Ren (2022)

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We should always be asking ourselves “where did I learn that? How? Why?” 🤔

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@drhanren
We should always be asking ourselves “where did I learn that? How? Why?” 🤔
♬ Sunset Lover - Petit Biscuit

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Misogynoir Transformed || Moya Bailey (2021)

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Misogynoir Transformed || Moya Bailey (2021)

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Bron University Lecture - https://youtu.be/7EwUz0Ij0gE

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Black Women's Digital Resistance

by Moya Bailey

Published by: NYU Press

Imprint: NYU Press

248 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.00 in

Hardcover

9781479865109

Published: May 2021

$28.00

BUY

eBook

9781479890491

Published: May 2021

Request Exam or Desk Copy

Where racism and sexism meet-an understanding of anti-Black misogyny

When Moya Bailey first coined the term misogynoir, she defined it as the ways anti-Black and misogynistic representation shape broader ideas about Black women, particularly in visual culture and digital spaces. She had no idea that the term would go viral, touching a cultural nerve and quickly entering into the lexicon. Misogynoir now has its own Wikipedia page and hashtag, and has been featured on Comedy Central's The Daily Show and CNN's Cuomo Prime Time. In Misogynoir Transformed, Bailey delves into her groundbreaking concept, highlighting Black women's digital resistance to anti-Black misogyny on YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, and other platforms.

At a time when Black women are depicted as more ugly, deficient, hypersexual, and unhealthy than their non-Black counterparts, Bailey explores how Black women have bravely used social-media platforms to confront misogynoir in a number of courageous-and, most importantly, effective-ways. Focusing on queer and trans Black women, she shows us the importance of carving out digital spaces, where communities are built around queer Black webshows and hashtags like #GirlsLikeUs.

Bailey shows how Black women actively reimagine the world by engaging in powerful forms of digital resistance at a time when anti-Black misogyny is thriving on social media. A groundbreaking work, Misogynoir Transformed highlights Black women's remarkable efforts to disrupt mainstream narratives, subvert negative stereotypes, and reclaim their lives.

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by Moya Bailey Published by: NYU Press Imprint: NYU Press 248 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.00 in Hardcover 9781479865109 Published: May 2021 $28.00 BUY eBook 9781479890491 Published: May 2021 Request Exam or Desk Copy Where racism and sexism meet-an understanding of anti-Black misogyny When Moya Bailey first coined the term misogynoir, she defined it as the ways anti-Black and misogynistic representation shape broader ideas about Black women, particularly in visual culture and digital spaces.

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Review: ‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’: A Character Study about Sex, Aging, and Objectification || Jeanine Abraham (2022)

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Review: ‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’: A Character Study about Sex, Aging, and Objectification || Jeanine Abraham (2022)

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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is deliciously sexy and overflows with middle-aged white female body positivity, but I just couldn't get past the glaring colonist overtones.

Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson, Sense and Sensibility) has been a widow for 2 years after 30 years of marriage. She has never had an orgasm and is now ready to rumble. Nancy chooses a handsome young Black biracial sex worker, Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack, Peaky Blinders) to cross some sexual experiences off her bucket list. She books the time at a fancy hotel, puts on her sexiest retired school teacher lingerie, and approaches the task like any proper British schoolmarm would - with pained, proficient, guilt-ridden gusto.

As Leo Grande, Daryl McCormack is just lovely to watch. Combined with an unexpected Irish accent, he's perfect for this role. And, to be clear, I love Emma Thompson. Emma Thompson as this mother/teacher/widow who has never experienced sexual pleasure is funny, fearless, and fantastic. From the very first beat in this film, the audience feels Nancy's profound anxiety, excitement, and a million other feelings that a woman must have when meeting a sex worker for the first time. But writer Sophie Hyde ( 52 Tuesdays, Animals) misses the opportunity to write a sophisticated, nuanced story that includes the sexualized racial dynamic in this situation.

In the age of performative white liberal wokeness, "colorblind" casting seems to be all the rage. However, most white writers avoid building the reality of racial dynamics into their stories. If you're going to cast a biracial Black man in a role where his purpose is to be in sexual service to a white woman, why don't you incorporate the impact race has on the relationship?

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande only has two main characters and the run time of this film is ninety-seven minutes, which is more than enough time to acknowledge the racial dynamic. Why is it that dominant culture is so quick to not name the reality of our power structure where white women are simultaneously victims and victimizers? You can't just throw people of color on screen and ignore the fact that we live in a world where being a person of color impacts every relationship, particularly when the story deals with sex and, at the end of the day, power.

While Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is unapologetically brave when it comes to the issues of middle-aged white women who want to be seen beyond motherhood and be accepted with wrinkles and belly fat, writer Katy Brand basically treats Leo as Miss Nancy's human sex toy, glossing over her position of power as she exoticizes Leo. Why is it that the entertainment industry has completely normalized exoticizing men of color as an object of sexual pleasure for white women of all ages?

In shows like Bridgerton, race is ignored, which is unfortunate. We all know the long, deep history England has with colonization. We've always had white folks sexually dominating people of color in Western culture, and that power dynamic bleeds through in romantic interracial couplings in real life, but the majority of white writers don't ever allow themselves to reveal that in their work. This film was really good, but I just couldn't stop thinking about how I was getting emotionally attached to a story about a white woman finding her sexual liberation by purchasing a Black man's body for the evening to service her.

As Leo would comfort Nancy's lamentations about not being seen as a sexual being, I'd notice Leo's Irish accent and wonder what must it have been like for Leo to have grown up in Ireland as a biracial Black kid who I'm sure was the only child of color in his area. The film does go into Leo's relationship with his mother, but doesn't reveal if his mother was Black or white. Adding the small detail of his mother's racial identity would have layered in complex conflict to the story arc of these two characters, which would have made the ending feel earned. I wish the writer had done the work to go beyond her own personal experience and acknowledge Leo's racial identity. But I don't know if she has what is required to provide the racially nuanced storytelling the audience could really chew on.

Overall Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a great film. It's super sexy, it lightens the heart, and the main subjects are body image and ageism. But if you want to center body image and ageism without dealing with the racial aspect, you're going to have to cast a young white male actor in Leo's role or cast a middle-aged Black woman as Nancy. It's like Chekov says - if there's a gun on stage in Act 1, someone's gotta be firing it by the end of the play. It's there for a reason.

Back in the 1760s, white folks created "race" as a social construct to dominate everyone else and maintain power. When it comes to "race" as the descendants of its creators, white people are actually the experts. So, why aren't modern-day white folks able to incorporate their creation, "race," into their storytelling?

There is no such thing as " colorblind casting." We see color. Casting people of color and ignoring their color in your story is performative allyship, and it isn't enough.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande premieres June 17th on Hulu.

Jeanine T. Abraham

Jeanine is a Writer, Actor, member SAG/AFTRA, AEA, Podcast host, Producer, CEO VisAbleBlackWoman Productions, Certified Health Coach and Conscious Dance facilitator. Jeanine's mission, centering Black women's stories to preserve our legacies.

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Review: 'Good Luck to You, Leo Grande': A Character Study about Sex, Aging, and Objectification

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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is deliciously sexy and overflows with middle-aged white female body positivity, but I just couldn't get past the glaring colonist overtones. Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson, Sense and Sensibility) has been a widow for 2 years after 30 years of marriage.

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In years hence, audiences will be able to point to this film, as the moment the world knew Gugu Mbatha-Raw was going to be big. Belle is Amma Asante's feature-length directorial debut, and her work here is astonishingly confident. Tackling a period piece may seem daunting to most, but in Asante's case, she has the benefit of a top-notch cast, and a truly fascinating story. Loosely based on the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, Dido was the daughter of an enslaved African woman and an English admiral.

As the film begins, although she is born illegitimate, Dido's father (Matthew Goode, Stoker) gives her over into the care of his great-uncle, William Murray, the first Earl of Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson), who acts as the Lord Chief Justice of the British courts. As she grows into a young woman, Dido's life at the palatial estate of Kenwood is full of mixed blessings. While her uncle and aunt (Emily Watson, Breaking the Waves) treat her as if she were their own-they raise her alongside their other niece, Elizabeth Murray (Sarah Gadon, A Dangerous Method)-social conventions of eighteenth century society are immovable; no matter how much they love her, Dido feels the sting of being forced to eat with the servants, when company comes calling.

The greatness of the film comes in its intricate plotting, and in the parallels drawn between gender and race. Author Jane Austen dealt with the position of women in English society through the use of dry humor-though the rage at a young woman being forced into marriage in order to secure a safe future was always very much present. In Belle however, there is no satire to soften the blow. As Elizabeth comes out, venturing to London in search of a husband, she points out to Belle the inherent unfairness of a system that allows women to be treated as male property. Dido doesn't necessarily have the problem of a search for a husband, as the inheritance of her father's fortune ensures that she is financially secure; but for a radiant young woman in the prime of her life, her uncle's insistence on keeping her out of sight understandably rankles her.

Matters are complicated by the arrival of John Davinier (Sam Reid), the son of a local clergyman. Ambitious and wide-eyed, John wants to try to rise in station, training with Lord Mansfied to become a lawyer. His outspoken, radically abolitionist views on a notorious legal case Lord Mansfield is trying annoy the Lord considerably; but he rouses all the passionate feeling in Dido that she has been forced for so long to suppress.

As Lord Mansfield, Wilkinson (Batman Begins, Michael Clayton) plays the exasperated father figure with the correct touches of humor and warmth. As a judge, he projects the inner conflicts of a man with the weight of the entire economic system on his shoulders; you can see him try to deflect from the strong-arming of local politicians, who want to ensure that the presence of the "mulatto" in his house will not affect his ruling on the case. As Elizabeth, Gadon takes what could have been a very stereotypical role of the flighty, romantic English girl, and brings a deep sense of hurt to it. Having been left with her uncle after her new stepmother successfully wrote her out of her father's will, Elizabeth's cheery exterior hides an emotionally hurt young girl.

And finally, there is Mbatha-Raw. As Dido, the engine that drives the film, you may deeply feel her two-fold frustration as a woman, and as a person of color. You will be carried away by her passion-her belief that things should not remain the same. On a more general level, the camera absolutely adores her. She moves and projects with a vitality and ease that forces one to stop at several points. Her characterization and her performance are so accomplished, that her independent-minded heroine could stand toe-to-toe with the multiple incarnations of Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennett. If Belle is any indication, and if there is any fairness in this world, there should be more great things to come from her.

-Nick Kostopoulos - See more at: http://www.mediumraretv.org

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Belle: Directed by Amma Asante. With Matthew Goode, Lauren Julien-Box, Natasha Williams, Alan McKenna. The biracial daughter, Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), of Royal Navy Captain Sir John Lindsay (Matthew Goode) is raised by aristocratic Great-uncle Lord William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) in 18th century England.

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The Confessions of Frannie Langton || ITVx (2022)

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The Confessions of Frannie Langton || ITVx (2022)

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The Confessions of Frannie Langton (TV Series 2022– ) - IMDb

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The Confessions of Frannie Langton: Created by Sara Collins. With Karla-Simone Spence, Sophie Cookson, Patrick Martins, Pooky Quesnel. It explores the beautiful and haunting tale about one woman’s fight to tell her story.

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The book wasn't good and the movie fairs the same. The characters are pretty bland and both book and therefore script read like a bad Jane Austen fan fiction. There didn't seem to be any real conflict driving the story. I hate that other reviewers are blaming the race of the actors for this film being boring when really it's the fault of the story itself. No one could save this. At least it's better than Netflix's new "persuasion."

The costumes are nice tho I'm not sure why Frida looks pregnant in her all of hers. Showing she is poor and frumpy doesn't mean pregnant. Need a better designer.

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By what name was Mr. Malcolm's List (2022) officially released in India in English?

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The book wasn't good and the movie fairs the same. The characters are pretty bland and both book and therefore script read like a bad Jane Austen fan fiction. There didn't seem to be any real conflict driving the story.

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Persuasion: Directed by Carrie Cracknell. With Dakota Johnson, Cosmo Jarvis, Richard E. Grant, Yolanda Kettle. Eight years after Anne Elliot was persuaded not to marry a dashing man of humble origins, they meet again. Will she seize her second chance at true love?

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About Charlotte Heywood, a spirited and impulsive woman, who moves from her rural home to Sanditon, a fishing village attempting to reinvent itself as a seaside resort. About Charlotte Heywood, a spirited and impulsive woman, who moves from her rural home to Sanditon, a fishing village attempting to reinvent itself as a seaside resort. About Charlotte Heywood, a spirited and impulsive woman, who moves from her rural home to Sanditon, a fishing village attempting to reinvent itself as a seaside resort.

Review

Bring on Season 2!

With social media being as it is, you cannot help but get roped into all the controversy going on about this show. So I took a look at some YouTube clips and other things going around on Twitter and Instagram etc and got the general gist of what the show is all about. All I can say, is that I was hooked - right from the very first clip. Whoever had the brilliant idea to cast Theo James as the tall, dark, mysteriously brooding Sidney Parker should be applauded. He is absolutely brilliant in this role. I have seen him in other things, but I think this has really showed how good of an actor he really is. Of course he is handsome (any red blooded female can see that) but that didn't even matter to me, because he brought Sidney Parker to life for me. He made me fall in love with him just as Charlotte did and he made me irritated and annoyed just as Charlotte was. He is just an amazing actor and he suited this role to a tee. Charlotte's character (played by Rose Williams) took me a while to warm up to but I found her maturing with each episode and I liked her spunk and charisma but I also liked her softer more vulnerable side which came out slowly as she begun to realize her true feelings for Sidney. Rose is a very talented actor as well. She is exactly how I would picture Charlotte to be.

So to all you people saying how horrible it is and that Jane Austen would be turning in her grave etc etc, I say - SO WHAT! I have a sneaky suspicion that she really isn't worried about it in the slightest. Get over yourselves, get a glass of wine, sit back and just enjoy this wonderfully lovely romantic story. I did! Bring on season 2!!!

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Sanditon: Created by Andrew Davies. With Rose Williams, Kris Marshall, Crystal Clarke, Kate Ashfield. About Charlotte Heywood, a spirited and impulsive woman, who moves from her rural home to Sanditon, a fishing village attempting to reinvent itself as a seaside resort.

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No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity || Sarah Haley (2019)

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No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity || Sarah Haley (2019)

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No Mercy Here | Sarah Haley | University of North Carolina Press

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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imprisoned black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economi…

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Black England || Gretchen Gerzina (2022)

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Black England || Gretchen Gerzina (2022)

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In the 1990s, an assistant in a London bookshop informed the African American historian Gretchen Gerzina that there "were no black people in England before 1945". Gerzina effectively disproved that assertion by going on to write the classic book on black people in Georgian London, Black England

<br> Wonderfully vivid, multifaceted and engrossing . . . this book brings history alive

<br>Black England taught me more history than I ever learned at school. This book helped me to understand the history that my generation are making now. To say that it is groundbreaking is stating the obvious. Black England is part of our canon. With books like this to guide us, we are unstoppable. Gretchen Gerzina tells it as it was, so we know how it is. Black England is a book that will be relevant for ever

<br>A classic that deserves to be read . . . indeed, needs to be read, Black England is deeply researched, lucidly written and utterly fascinating. If you ever thought Black British history began with Windrush, read this book - this is a story we should all know

MIRANDA KAUFMANN, author of Black Tudors

<br> Gerzina brings the world of the Black Georgians to intriguing life, introducing us to the era's most fascinating individuals while placing them in the wider story of the struggle against enslavement. It is a treat to have a pioneer of the field bring together all the latest scholarship to tell this important part of British history for a wide audience

<br> The admirable clarity of Black England should win it many admirers. Gerzina's book should take its rightful place alongside the work of her predecessors

Black England is well-researched, with interesting quotes throughout and has a number of 'I didn't know that!' moments as Gerzina throws up surprising snippets of information, such as the existence of an entirely black brothel in London catering for the nobility . . . charting the progress of the anti-slavery moment in England, Gerzina highlights the mixed and often murky motives held by white abolitionists who are often less altruistic than might be expected. This is echoed in Zadie Smith's passionate and insightful foreword

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How Slavery Made Manchester the World’s First Industrial City || Matthew Stallard (2023)

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How Slavery Made Manchester the World’s First Industrial City || Matthew Stallard (2023)

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Present-day Manchester is home to 552,000 residents, at the centre of a wider region of 2.87 million, the product of three centuries of migration and economic change.

It is a city with a global reputation for its cultural and sporting influence, a long list of world firsts in science and technology, and as a centre of political reform movements.

Cheek-by-jowl with the rising Manc-hattan skyscrapers stand many of the old warehouses and mills, repurposed into modern apartment and office blocks along the outward-creeping fringe of gentrification. A few remnants of the pre-industrial market town remain around the Cathedral Quarter while the grand late-Victorian warehouses and civic architecture recall a time when cotton was king and Manchester was its capital.

Still poorly acknowledged and understood is how essential the system of slavery was to the emergence of Cottonopolis, the world's first industrial city, and how it can still be witnessed in today's built environment.

Here is a brief history of the growth of Manchester from a Lancashire manorial town of about 9,000 residents in 1700 to the "shock city" of industrial capitalism by the mid-19th century.

We start with a visual exploration of the city's development.

From small-time township to sprawling metropolis: a visual tour

A closer look

The story of Manchester's rise is also the story of global industrialised capitalism, and it reveals the essential underpinning role of colonisation and slavery to the processes that completely transformed societies, cultures, and the environment.

As technology advanced, manufacturing moved from the home to mass production, bringing increased transport capacity and connectivity across the globe. Higher levels of productivity required markets and investment, land and labour.

The produce of enslaved labour and profits from slave trading and plantation agriculture drove the Industrial Revolution, created this city, and left local and global legacies we are still only beginning to understand and repair.

Traditional industries go global

The importation of south Asian chintzes and decorated textiles in the 1600s drove demand in Great Britain and particularly in west Africa for cotton manufacturers. With an established skills base and trade links in textile manufacture, Manchester was ideally positioned to meet this demand and the town started to expand.

Technological improvements in spinning and weaving increased productivity and, in 1734, the River Irwell Navigation provided direct shipping to Liverpool, which was fast becoming Europe's leading slave-trading port.

Raw cotton was imported from the eastern Mediterranean and, increasingly, from the Caribbean, where it was grown by enslaved labourers. It would arrive at the foot of Quay Street on boats laden with goods from across the world, particularly slave-grown sugar.

Until the 1780s, production had taken place in homes or in units with just a few machines. Increased employment opportunities led to the population almost doubling between 1717 and 1758.

How important was slavery to Manchester's growth?

Seminal historian Eric Williams, who later became the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, outlined in 1944 how it was a "tremendous dependence on the triangular trade that made Manchester". Up to 1770, one-third of Lancashire's exports were used in the slave trade to west Africa and half were sold to the plantation colonies in the Caribbean and North America.

In 1788 the privy council estimated that Manchester exported £200,000 worth of goods a year to west Africa, representing an investment of £300,000 and supporting 180,000 jobs for men, women and children across the wider region. Converted to today's prices that is £26.9m of exports and £40.3m of investment a year.

Merchants and manufacturers such as Robinson & Heywood, William Hanson and John Parke advertised themselves as specialist "Africa goods" or "Africa checks" suppliers, while Manchester's key financial institution in the 1790s, Heywood's bank, was funded by the profits of the Heywoods' slave-trading activities.

The mill and the gin

The development of steam power heralded the age of the cotton mill. Manchester's first was established at Shudehill in 1782, followed by the Salvin's and Piccadilly mills in the late 1780s.

The construction of the Bridgewater canal provided regular, cheaper coal supplies to power the new machinery and improved transport links to Liverpool.

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 proved crucial in shaping Manchester's future. From that moment, the spread of the plantation slavery complex across North America and the booming Lancashire textile industry became symbiotically linked.

The annual US cotton crop grew from 9,000 bales to 210,000 between 1790 and 1800. During the same period, the number of cotton mills in Manchester had grown from three to 19 and the population had increased to more than 70,000. Even though Britain ended involvement in the slave trade in 1807, the reliance of the town's development and prosperity on enslavement actually deepened year-by-year.

From virtually zero in 1790, raw cotton from the US made up 40% of British imports in the 1800s, 50% during the 1810s, and 71% in the 1820s.

Production, poverty, protest

McConnel & Kennedy's and Murray's mills on the banks of the newly built Rochdale canal were some of the first in Ancoats, the world's first industrial suburb, which emerged in the early 19th century.

Child and adult workers moved between deafening, dangerous factories and cramped slums with poor sanitation and little open space. In 1819, 41% of children born to men working at McConnel & Kennedy had not survived to adulthood. From 1832, regular deadly cholera outbreaks hit Manchester's working-class communities.

Irish migrants, often pushed into the lowest-paid, most insecure work, had a major impact on the town's growth and culture. Important centres of Irish residence included Angel Meadow and Little Ireland, near the Chorlton Mills complex.

The Peterloo massacre of 1819 sent shockwaves through Britain, as peaceful working-class protesters demanding universal manhood suffrage were attacked by the authorities. The Manchester Guardian was founded by a group of cotton merchants and manufacturers in reaction to the massacre.

Intensifying growth in the age of reform

Manchester's middle classes moved to the suburbs, while the industrial centre became increasingly overcrowded, the population growing by 50,000 over 10 years to reach 163,700 in 1831 - a 132% increase since 1800. British cotton exports had increased almost eightfold in the same period.

The 1830 opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway - the world's first intercity line - further expanded import and export capacity. Manchester gained parliamentary representation two years later, electing Mark Philips, cousin to the Guardian founder and enslaver George Philips, although only one-fifth of adult men were eligible to vote.

The Abolition Act of 1833 replaced slavery in the British empire with a system of apprenticeship, with full emancipation following in 1838. Former enslavers received a total of £20m of government compensation for their former human property which was reinvested into railways, industry, and key local institutions. The formerly enslaved received no compensation.

Cottonopolis

The success of the Anti-Corn Law League and establishment of the Free Trade Hall in the 1840s burnished the reputation of Manchester's middle classes as leading proponents of Victorian political and economic liberalism. The working classes formed trade unions and Chartist organisations to advance their rights.

Writers such as Tocqueville and Engels established Manchester's reputation as the "shock city" of industrial capitalism, detailing the emergence of an entirely new mode of social and economic life and the unprecedented pollution created by mass fossil-fuelled production.

The number of cotton mills peaked at 108 in 1853, the year Manchester was granted city status. The name "Cottonopolis" - literally, the city of cotton - came into use around this time.

The US cotton crop grew by a factor of seven from 1830 to 1860 while UK cotton exports grew five times larger. Meeting labour demands, Manchester's population reached more than 344,000 in 1861.

Cotton famine to warehouse city

As the United States descended into civil war in 1861 over the issue of slavery, 440,000 cotton workers across the north-west of England, and their wider families and communities, experienced unemployment, poverty, and hunger as the Union blockade of Confederate exports created the "cotton famine".

Public opinion remained generally favourable to abolition thanks to 15 years of organising and campaigning. Abraham Lincoln's public declaration of thanks "to the working-men of Manchester" for their solidarity is commemorated by the statue in today's Lincoln Square.

The Union victory in the US civil war led to emancipation in 1865, but slave-grown cotton from Brazil continued to make up a minority of imports until 1888.

Much of the Victorian architectural and transportational fabric of central Manchester today derives from its role in the late 19th century as the commercial and warehouse hub of the wider Lancashire manufacturing region.

Source notes
Historical maps
All the historical maps in the visual tour have been provided by Manchester Libraries, Information & Archives, with special thanks to Dr Martin Dodge, department of geography, University of Manchester. The publication date of each historical map shown should be treated with a degree of caution as the street geography and surveying may be older and inconsistent. The publication dates and full map titles are as follows:
Casson and Berry, 1750.
Green's map, 1794.
Aston's map, 1816.
Slater's map, 1848.
Bradshaw's map, 1879. The data for the locations highlighted on the maps has been provided by Dr Matthew Stallard. The visualisation of the locations of the known Manchester business suppliers includes 31 addresses; there are a further US raw cotton export data
Source: James L GB/UK manufactured cotton exports
Source: Edward Baines, History Of The Cotton Manufacture In Great Britain (London, 1937).

Satellite imagery
Via Google maps: ©2023 TerraMetrics, CNES/Airbus, Getmapping Plc, Infoterra Ltd & Bluesky, Landsat/Copernicus, Maxar Technologies, The GeoInformation Group Watkins, King Cotton: A Historical and Statistical Review 1790 to 1908 (New York, 1908) five known suppliers for which the addresses are not documented in sufficient detail to include on the map. The addresses are compiled from Manchester directories between 1781 and 1800 and include all Manchester suppliers to 50 voyages owned by the Liverpool trafficker William Davenport, all businesses in the directories specifically listed as focusing on the African market, and the well-documented slave trade suppliers the Hibberts, Touchets, and Rawlinsons.

This article was amended on 26 June to correct an error relating to the year in which the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was opened; the correct date is 1830.

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Cotton Capital: how slavery made Manchester the world's first industrial city

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A visual exploration of historical Manchester's rapid growth into a 'shock city' - and how slavery was key to the emergence of Cottonopolis

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Kerry Sinanan || Historian-Literary Scholar

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Kerry Sinanan || Historian-Literary Scholar

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Winnipeg- https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/english/faculty-and-staff/kerry-sinanan.html

Twitter - https://x.com/kerry_sinanan

See: "Austen After 200" (Palgrave Macmillman).

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How The Long Song Spotlights Ignored Black Caribbean History || Amanda-Rae Prescott (2021)

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How The Long Song Spotlights Ignored Black Caribbean History || Amanda-Rae Prescott (2021)

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How The Long Song Spotlights Ignored Black Caribbean History

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PBS’ The Long Song highlights the history of slavery in Jamaica, an aspect of Black History rarely depicted on American television.

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Fashion, Race, Identity, and Power: Black Dandy Beginnings by Monica Miller || Dyckman Farmhouse Museum (2024)

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Fashion, Race, Identity, and Power: Black Dandy Beginnings by Monica Miller || Dyckman Farmhouse Museum (2024)

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Fashion, Race, Identity, and Power: Black Dandy Beginnings by Monica Miller

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In the Wake: On Blackness and Being || Christina Sharpe (2016)

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In the Wake: On Blackness and Being || Christina Sharpe (2016)

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"This could have been a one thousand page book, filled with 'evidence,' citations and systematic 'proof,' but instead it is an earned, slim volume of poetic, intellectual and, in fact, spiritual enactment of struggle. In this way, In The Wake is an effective, personal conversation with the reader that uses both fact, image, and emotion, legitimately, to illuminate argument." - Sarah Schulman, Lambda Literary Review

"With In the Wake, Christina Sharpe looks out from the text and really tries to see us, both those here and gone, living and dead, in the wake, for all we are. We might begin, anew, by carefully looking back-double emphasis on care."
- John Murillo III, Make

" In the Wake is a necessary chapter in a lengthy tome of ending white supremacy." - Jonathan Russell Clark, Literary Hub

"Mourning can be and has been a politics, but it must avoid becoming only a litany of horrors. Refusing melancholy in favor of care, In the Wake understands mourning as a practice embedded in living, and vice versa. Sharpe's beautiful book enacts this indistinctness through pulling language apart and putting it to new purposes." - Hannah Black, 4Columns

(Best Books of 2016) "The book that will live on in me from this year is Christina Sharpe's In the Wake, on living in the wake of the catastrophic violence of legal chattel slavery. In the Wake speaks in so many multiple ways (poetry, memory, theory, images) and does so in language that is never still. It is, in part, about keeping watch, not unseeing the violence that has become normative, being in the hold, holding on and still living." - Madeleine Thien, The Guardian

" In the Wake is work that holds space for what is unbearable and insists on letting it remain unbearable."
- Johanna Hedva, Mask Magazine

"[A] masterclass on form, and a must-read for those of us committed to the beautiful sentence, as well as the work of what is commonly called theory." - Joshua Bennett, Poets & Writers

"Christina Sharpe [is] one of the boldest and most brilliant academics of our time. . . . In the Wake is one of those rare academic books at once rigorously argued and multiply engaging: intellectually, stylistically, emotionally." - David Chariandy, Transition

"The present is saturated with grief about black lives in the wake of violence, being awake to the deaths and erasures can potentially create a future that can expand on being in the wake for more liveable lives of the black diaspora. It can also be the site of wake work, of attempts at creating social justice out of the metaphor Sharpe gives us.... Sharpe's work has come at the right time." - Angelina Eimannsberger, Indulgence

"In Sharpe's probing work, the specter of slavery continues to haunt black subjects long after its abolition.... Sharpe's book ... creates fruitful lines of exploration for political theorists concerned about the ethos of citizenship necessary for confronting white supremacy." - Alex Zamalin, Political Theory

" In the Wake is at times difficult to read - not because of the prose, which is superb, but because of the unending tragedy. Yet the book leaves the reader energized. Works of intellectual daring tend to do this. They point the way to further inquiry and further feats of the imagination. The book kept reminding me of William Faulkner's line: "The past is never dead. It's not even past" ( Requiem for a Nun) and anyone who reads it will revel in the intelligence, the lyricism, the research, and understand that the wake work has just begun." - JJ Amaworo Wilson, PM Press blog

"[A]t once meditative and theoretical, stylistically meticulous and spacious, intensely personal and a work of assembly." - Matt Hooley, Antipode

"Sharpe's project operates as a praxis of attendance that requires one to be with and to carry-not to watch, but to hold-the present traumas and indignities forced upon Black people and to simultaneously persist, to insist Black life, expression, love, and future in and through the wake of deliberate antiblack trauma that is ?rmament, soil, water, and climate." - Elizabeth J. Cali, Papers on Language and Literature

"Sharpe's poetic and accessible prose can serve as a model for anyone who wants to challenge traditional conventions of academic writing. This book is perfect for a graduate seminar about 'The Black Atlantic' and complements texts by Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Frantz Fanon, and Claudia Rankine. With the continued and encouraged proliferation of black death in the global diaspora, Sharpe's study will, hopefully, usher in more woke scholarship that questions pervasive antiblackness." - Dana Horton, Lateral

"One of the gifts of this book is Sharpe's dexterous handling of orthography; wake comes to have multiple meanings, including the trail of waves of a ship as a metaphor for ongoing traces of the violence of slavery as well as the period of sitting and tending to the dead." - Jocelyn Fenton Stitt, Meridians

"My most valuable discovery [in 2018] was the work of Christina Sharpe, a scholar of breathtaking range whose most recent book is In the Wake, about the aftershocks of chattel slavery in the Americas." - Parul Sehgal, New York Times

"Sharpe's analytic is an intervention that invites us to revisit, interrogate, and reconceptualize what it means to perform intellectual labor with an element of care, attending to the complexities and contradictions of Black being in the world." - Cornel Grey, Critical Ethnic Studies

"Sharpe's work contributes a generative theoretical language to the vast corpus of scholarship on the ongoing relegation of Black subjects to zones of political, social, and ontological non-being. Unlike much of this literature, however, Sharpe's work forgoes concerns with melancholia, mourning, and memorial . . . Instead, Sharpe seeks out ways of seeing, imagining, and accounting for the 'modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, and despite Black death' (20)." - Sarah Fong, e-misférica

"A refreshing intervention into contemporary work in black studies on the afterlife of slavery. . . . Sharpe's work offers a precise, concise formulation that is both and neither optimism and/nor pessimism, offering a possibility for work in black studies to not need to declare a 'side' of this binary." - Jesse A. Goldberg, ASAP/Journal

"So many contemporary artists and scholars have been changed by the book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, by Christina Sharpe, which examines the legacy of black death in the context of chattel slavery. Before, you would hear people talk about and quote Audre Lorde as if black feminist thought were something in the past, and not happening now. There has been some focus on black radical thought, but there has never been a focus on black feminist theory, which seems to be starting to happen. And I'm really happy about it." - Simone Leigh, in, New York Times Magazine

"Sharpe traces every wound back to every knife back to every bladesmith. I've been both protector and prey, both war and prayer: In the Wake helps answer each clash, it draws a thread through the multitudes of our grief. How Black life pays for its offering and for its pain and for its gift. . . . This book here is a guide, a deeply personal and intellectual exploration of Blackness, it gives us a complete look at how our beginning shapes our end." - Mustafa, CBC Books

"This is a book that feels necessary and also generative: it works with ideas and metaphors that have lingered in my mind and that are clearly lingering the mind of writers who have read it."
- Rebecca Hussey, Reading Indie

"Christina Sharpe brings everything she has to bear on her consideration of the violation and commodification of Black life and the aesthetic responses to this ongoing state of emergency. Through her curatorial practice, Sharpe marshals the collective intellectual heft and aesthetic inheritance of the African diaspora to show us the world as it appears from her distinctive line of sight. A searing and brilliant work." - Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

"Christina Sharpe's deep engagement with the archive of Black knowledge production across theory, fiction, poetry, and other intellectual endeavors offers an avalanche of new insights on how to think about anti-Blackness as a significant and important structuring element of the modern scene. Cutting across theoretical genres, In the Wake will generate important intellectual debates and maybe even movements in Black studies, cultural studies, feminist studies, and beyond. This is where cultural studies should have gone a long time ago." - Rinaldo Walcott, author of Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada

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“This could have been a one thousand page book, filled with ‘evidence,’ citations and systematic ‘proof,’ but instead it is an earned, slim volume of poetic, intellectual and, in fact, spiritual enactment of struggle. In this way, In The Wake is an effective, personal conversation with the reader th…

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Colonial slavery shaped modern Britain and we all still live with its legacies. The slave-owners were one very important means by which the fruits of slavery were transmitted to metropolitan Britain. We believe that research and analysis of this group are key to understanding the extent and the limits of slavery's role in shaping British history and leaving lasting legacies that reach into the present.

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Keats-Shelley Association Interview with Joanna Brown Author The Lizzie and Belle Mysteries: Drama and Danger (2024)

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Keats-Shelley Association Interview with Joanna Brown Author The Lizzie and Belle Mysteries: Drama and Danger (2024)

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Migration, Boundaries, and Belonging: Histories of Glass and Race | GEEX Talks Q&A Podcast (2023) 

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Migration, Boundaries, and Belonging: Histories of Glass and Race | GEEX Talks Q&A Podcast (2023) 

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Migration, Boundaries, and Belonging: Histories of Glass and Race | GEEX Talks Q&A Podcast

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Race and Racism in Austen Spaces || Adrienne Garcia-Specht with Bianca Hernandez-Knight, Kerry Sinanan, Amanda-Rae Prescott and Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2022)

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Race and Racism in Austen Spaces || Adrienne Garcia-Specht with Bianca Hernandez-Knight, Kerry Sinanan, Amanda-Rae Prescott and Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2022)

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Race and Racism in Austen Spaces || #VirtualJaneCon [CC]

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Silencing the Past || Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995)

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Silencing the Past || Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995)

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"A sparkling interrogation of the past. . . . A beautifully written, superior book."
- Foreign Affairs

"Trouillot is a first-rate scholar with provocative ideas. . . . His work [is] a feast for the mind."
-Jay Freeman, Booklist

"Now that so many grand projects of the past are up for reappraisal, Michel-Rolph Trouillot interrogates history, to ask how histories are, in fact, produced. . . . A beautifully written book, exciting in its challenges."
-Eric. R. Wolf

"An accessible book filled with wisdom and humanity."
-Bernard Mergen, American Studies International

"Aphoristic and witty, [ Silencing the Past] shows that the two senses in which history is made, by doers and by tellers, meet in moments of evidentiary silence. . . . A hard-nosed look at the soft edges of public discourse about the past."
-Arjun Appadurai

"Written with clarity, wit, and style throughout, this book is for everyone interested in historical culture."
- American Historical Review

"[Trouillot was] a transformative presence in multiple fields [who] redefined the meaning of scholarship. . . . Trouillot taught us all how to read carefully, argue passionately, and write responsibly."
-Colin Dayan, Boston Review

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Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot: 9780807080535 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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Now part of the HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, written and directed by Raoul Peck The 20th anniversary edition of a pioneering classic that explores the contexts in which history is produced-now...

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Watch free lectures with historical and literary scholars and authors. Talks include "The Black Woman in Nineteenth Century Studies," "Lord Mansfield and the Slave Ship Zong," and "Abolition, Wedgwood, and the Female Consumer."

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The Real Black British History Behind #DoctorWhoBlackout || Amanda-Rae Prescott (2020)

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The Real Black British History Behind #DoctorWhoBlackout || Amanda-Rae Prescott (2020)

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The Real Black British History Behind #DoctorWhoBlackout | Black TARDIS

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New Who has continued the tradition of using the time travel episodes as a vehicle for history education. Learn some of the facts behind ‘Thin Ice’ and “The Haunting of Villa Diodati”

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"Regency History is Black History": Easter Eggs  in Sense and Sensibiity || Tiffany Cruz (2024)

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"Regency History is Black History": Easter Eggs  in Sense and Sensibiity || Tiffany Cruz (2024)

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“Regency History is Black History”: Easter Eggs in Sense & Sensibility ~ Virtual Jane Con 2024

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Persuasion Discourse Has Revealed Racism in Jane Austen Fandom || Amanda-Rae Prescott (2022)

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Persuasion Discourse Has Revealed Racism in Jane Austen Fandom || Amanda-Rae Prescott (2022)

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Features
There may be valid criticisms of Dakota Johnson's Persuasion, but the gleeful vitriol leveled against the movie and its inclusive cast reveals insidious gatekeeping of the Jane Austen canon by so-called fans.

Photo: Netflix

Netflix's Persuasion starring Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot and Cosmo Jarvis as Capt. Wentworth has become a very controversial adaptation of Jane Austen's novel since debuting on Netflix, with many critics and writers already debating the pros and the cons of the movie. However, in my personal opinion as an Afro-Caribbean American Austen fan, there has not been enough discussion of the harm racists and gatekeepers have done with the way they have engaged in discussing this movie.

I personally experienced the wrath of Austen fandom racists during "PineappleGate" and know that the debates over the merits of director Carrie Cracknell's Persuasion are hiding deeper issues. They also repeat the same patterns.

While the vast majority of good faith critiques by professional critics, as well as fan reactions, stuck to discussing elements of Persuasion that were separate from race, chatter on Facebook and other social media sites reveals that racists are hiding behind fair game adaptation critiques because they serve the purpose of convincing BIPOC and new viewers not to watch the film.

Although Johnson's Anne is white in the movie, she is surrounded by many more characters of color compared to past adaptations. Anne's sister Mary (Mia McKenna-Bruce) is married to Charles Musgrove (Ben Bailey-Smith), and their children are biracial. Charles' sisters Louisa (Nia Towle) and Henrietta (Izuka Hoyle, who is best known for her role in the West End cast of Six the Musical) are also diversely cast, and their melodrama, gossip, and hyperactivity represent the opposite of Anne's mourning and frustrated existence.

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Lady Russell (Nikki Amuka-Bird) who initially advised Anne not to marry Wentworth but then has a change of heart is also Black. Their presence in the space of the film is normalized and the film also wisely makes the choice to not break the escapism by answering questions of how the Musgroves and Lady Russell have obtained their status in society, thus avoiding some of Bridgerton's pitfalls with juxtaposing history and fantasy.

Meanwhile Henry Goulding as Mr. Elliot is a bold experiment in racebent casting in a Regency-set period drama. Goulding was offered both Wentworth and Mr. Elliott, and chose to stretch his acting skills and play an antagonist. In the story, Mr. Elliot has a roguish agenda to stop Anne's widower father Sir Henry Elliot (Richard E. Grant) from remarrying and disinheriting him. He's intrigued by Anne but Anne sees his presence as a distraction best kept at a distance.

While I will leave the ultimate call on stereotypes such as the " yellow peril villain" in relation to Mr. Elliot to Asian viewers, Persuasion is still going in the right direction in regard to expanding East and Southeast Asian representation in UK period dramas. It is clear some women wanted the chance to fetishize Goulding the way they did Regé-Jean Page from season 1 of Bridgerton and threw a tantrum at the trailer, because romance/period drama fandom struggles with rooting for antagonists/villains compared to other fandoms.

Persuasion picks up where Mr. Malcolm's List left off by featuring Ashley Park and Naoko Mori. Bridgerton in contrast mainly featured East Asians as very minor or background characters. East and Southeast Asian representation in UK period dramas in the past decade has focused on stories far away from the Regency era: the cleaned up but still problematic Yi Tien Cho story in Outlander Season 3, the blocked by copyright law from US viewing WWII era miniseries, The Singapore Grip, and more recently the Hong Kong set episode of the BBC/PBS miniseries Around The World In 80 Days. No matter what viewers decide on this adaptation's approach to Mr. Elliot, we need more diverse representation in future Austen adaptations and non-Austen period dramas overall.

Sources sent me these screencaps from a popular Austen Facebook group which proves that people are hiding behind dog whistles. "Historical accuracy" is a well-known dog whistle to justify attacks against inclusive casting. They also specifically reference Bridgerton as a negative influence, which is also pervasive, problematic element in fandom.

This two part thread shows how a BIPOC Austen fan was criticized by for pointing out racism. Fortunately they were supported by a white fan:

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Similarly, Austen blogger Black Girl Loves Jane faced passive aggressive comments on one of her Facebook group discussion posts. When she confronted other members for criticizing the movie over casting Black actors, admins shut off responses to her post. She also found racists disguising their feelings about the movie with meme humor. The meme maker Photoshopped the Persuasion cast into a poster for the UK "comedy" series Carry On. For those who are unaware after they click the image, the Carry On series on UK streaming services have content warnings for racist and sexist stereotyping. This sort of meme humor is another easy way for heinous sentiment in fandom to slip under the radar with a jeering nudge and "joke."

There has long been an established link between strict canonical interpretations of Austen and upholding white supremacist structures since well before Persuasion. Whether mainstream critics like it or not, there is a segment of Austen fandom that truly believes this necessary step toward racial inclusion is intolerable. There was even a previous racial backlash in fandom toward Sanditon, an adaptation of an unfinished Austen novel where Austen herself created Georgiana Lambe to be a Black heiress.

The focus of racial ire in that fandom turned to enforcing boundaries of who could participate in fandom. Those same elements of fandom also don't like Bridgerton and Mr. Malcolm's List for representing BIPOC as having money and status in the Regency, these two works are based on modern Regency romance novels and not Austen's books. (Regency romance has its own history of racism which is interconnected.) This is also combined with many of Austen's characters and the world around them having been built on slavery and colonialism.

The Jane Austen Museum at Chawton House has made strides to acknowledge this difficult history, but many in the UK media attacked the museum for it. The Black Lives Matter movement across Austen fandom and the Regency historical costuming community during June 2020 also brought into the light those who claimed their exclusionary tactics were motivated by religious fundamentalism. This was the result of such fans posting anti-Black Lives Matter posts on Instagram that were subsequently deleted. This context is key in understanding how fandom is interpreting Persuasion.

Closely related to this blatant racism, there is also the issue of driving away younger Austen fans. Many critics have argued that the modernization in the dialogue is "egregious," but these are the sort of changes Generation Z viewers are going to appreciate. These pronouncements ignore that many of the changes are actually closer to history than expected and are also faithful to Austen's spirit or intention.

"She's a 5 in London but a 10 in Bath" correctly points out the fact Bath was a resort town far away from the bustle of London, plus the scarcity of eligible young women in that community. Witty observations of social structures are at the heart of Austen's novels. An Austen historian pointed out on Twitter that the term "exes" first shows up historically in 1825, only a decade after the original publication of Persuasion. There are far worse anachronisms in all-white period dramas.

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Austen gatekeepers also are attacking the framing of Anne's melancholy about being forced to give up Wentworth. This also ties into the racism factor as Anne Elliot has been seen by many as a paragon of "white womanhood," which would naturally exclude BIPOC and other marginalized groups. White women weaponizing their identity against BIPOC in fandom has been well documented in other fandoms, however it wasn't until the Sanditon PineappleGate controversy that there was any attempt to document this in Austen/period drama circles. Many claim that Anne "wasn't funny," but they're missing the point.

It's clear the screenwriters of 2022's Persuasion combined the dark humor many younger fans used to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic with the examples of Austen's humor from the novel. Anne's role as a caretaker for the ill along with her frustrations over her sister's selfish ways resonates so much with our pandemic experience. These visual and dialogue queues were misinterpreted as Anne being a "girlboss." A girlboss character would be taken seriously by the supporting cast around her, not as an awkward fifth wheel until her skills are deemed important by others. Anne's calm when Louisa falls during the Lyme excursion, and Wentworth immediately praising Anne, is what proves the screenwriter actually "read the novel," despite the condescending skepticism of some reviews.

Persuasion represents the new generation of adaptations that will borrow more cinematically and thematically from other adaptations plus other movies in general versus relying solely on Austen's original novels. Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice (2005) is echoed in the costuming choices of Persuasion, and the cinematography and the modernized humor of the new film is clearly influenced by Autumn de Wilde's Emma (2020).

Many reviewers have also compared Anne talking to the camera as reminiscent of Fleabag, but the comparison not only is a sly dig at recent pop culture trends younger viewers love but also ignores that there are examples of breaking the fourth wall during the historical Regency. Epistolary novels, or novels based on letters addressed to the general public to read, have the same function as a character talking directly to the camera. Austen's earliest works, such as Love & Friendship, were examples of the epistolary format.

Some Austen fans are even angry at the thought that younger fans will find the modernizations in the movie approachable, such as this Tumblr post mocking the screenwriter for writing with their 13-year-old daughter in mind. How is this not the very definition of ageist gatekeeping in fandom? It's depressing that I had to read hundreds of posts attacking the movie before I found someone excited for the film. Shouldn't we be happy for and eagerly welcome Gen Z into Austen fandom?

"Jane Austen Is For Everyone" was a slogan BIPOC Austen fans came up with a few years ago, because literary societies, historical costume groups, and academic spaces were prioritizing white comfort over making antiracist reforms. The founders of that slogan also hoped that one day there would be adaptations that reflected race/ethnic diversity. Persuasion is the first wholly based on one of Austen's novels to use racebent casting. While many media critics correctly pointed out this is a good thing, this fact in Austen fandom is intolerable. Racism in Austen fandom is defined by unspoken hostility, dog whistles, "tranquility," and maintaining discussion spaces that fail to ban white supremacist sympathizers.

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Although separating the fair critiques from the bad ones is difficult work, it must be done. If "Austen Is For Everyone," that should indeed include BIPOC and fans who like Persuasion. More must be done to confront racism and gatekeeping in Austen fandom.

Written by

Amanda-Rae Prescott

Amanda-Rae Prescott is a long time Outlander fan, period drama enthusiast and cosplayer. Her previous season Outlander commentary can be found at Blacklanderz and Nerdeek Life. When she's not...

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Persuasion Discourse Has Revealed Racism in Jane Austen Fandom

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Features There may be valid criticisms of Dakota Johnson's Persuasion, but the gleeful vitriol leveled against the movie and its inclusive cast reveals insidious gatekeeping of the Jane Austen canon by so-called fans. Netflix's Persuasion starring Dakota Johnson as Anne Elliot and Cosmo Jarvis as Capt.

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Get Out of Midsomer: How the Whiteness of Country Estates Should Go Bump in the Night || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2023) 

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Get Out of Midsomer: How the Whiteness of Country Estates Should Go Bump in the Night || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2023) 

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Get Out of Midsomer: How the Whiteness of Country Estates Should Go Bump in the Night

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In American filmmaking there has been a renaissance in horror that uses genre storytelling to commentate on racism. However, following…

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“I Am Kenough”: Guy DeBord, Barbie, and The Society of the Spectacle || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2023)

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“I Am Kenough”: Guy DeBord, Barbie, and The Society of the Spectacle

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Like any regular person after a hotly anticipated blockbuster film — this time Barbie — I left the screening thinking about French…

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Internal Affairs: White Bodies as Raced and Out of Space in “Post-Racial” Bridgerton || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2022)

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Internal Affairs: White Bodies as Raced and Out of Space in “Post-Racial” Bridgerton || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2022)

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Internal Affairs: White Bodies as Raced and Out of Space in “Post-Racial” Bridgerton

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This essay comes from an entry I submitted for a call for papers about Bridgerton that I did not end up using. It’s essentially a first…

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‘Micro/Aggression’: How Ant-Man and The Wasp Offers Longed-For Alt. Terminology || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2023)

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‘Micro/Aggression’: How Ant-Man and The Wasp Offers Longed-For Alt. Terminology || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2023)

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‘Micro/Aggression’: How Ant-Man and The Wasp Offers Longed-For Alt. Terminology

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When Black psychiatrist Dr Chester Pierce (1970) coined the term ‘microaggression’, he couldn’t have predicted its development into…

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Race and Racism in Austen Spaces: National Trust in Jane Austen’s Empires of Sugar || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2021)

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Race and Racism in Austen Spaces: National Trust in Jane Austen’s Empires of Sugar || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2021)

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Digital Commons @ University of South Florida

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Author Biography

I am a Northamptonian writer-poet, speaker and educator. Enthusiastic about anti-racism and social justice, my work is heavily focused on racism, identity, Black British history and inclusive curricula. My passion for these subjects has taken me into my community, including the educational sector, healthcare and criminal justice, delivering sessions to diverse groups - from young people to grown adults, having conversations about Black history, race and identity.

Keywords

Austen, empire, anit-blackness, white supremacy, heritage

Recommended Citation

Ventour-Griffiths, Tré (2021) "Race and Racism in Austen Spaces: National Trust in Jane Austen's Empires of Sugar," ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830: Vol.11: Iss.2, Article 11.
http://doi.org/10.5038/2157-7129.11.2.1292
Available at: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol11/iss2/11

DOWNLOADS

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Race and Racism in Austen Spaces: National Trust in Jane Austen's Empires of Sugar

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Author Biography I am a Northamptonian writer-poet, speaker and educator. Enthusiastic about anti-racism and social justice, my work is heavily focused on racism, identity, Black British history and inclusive curricula. My passion for these subjects has taken me into my community, including the educational sector, healthcare and criminal justice, delivering sessions to diverse groups - from young people to grown adults, having conversations about Black history, race and identity.

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Shondaland's Bridgerton: The Black History You Don't Learn at School || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2021)

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Shondaland's Bridgerton: The Black History You Don't Learn at School || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2021)

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Shondaland’s Bridgerton: The Black History You Don’t Learn at School

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Not wanting to get sucked into the recency bias that comes with new dramas, I waited three weeks to watch Bridgerton.

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Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic || Jennifer L. Morgan (2021)

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Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic || Jennifer L. Morgan (2021)

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"Jennifer L. Morgan examines the transition to racialized slavery in the early modern Atlantic world with innovative research methods and original analysis. She brilliantly accounts for the emergence of an unholy alliance between a novel proficiency with numbers and the hierarchical classification of human difference, which helped to make kinship into a commodity. This is essential reading for anyone who wonders how Black humanity ceased to matter to some, and why centuries later we must still proclaim the worth of Black lives." - Vincent Brown, author of Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

"Jennifer L. Morgan makes an original, innovative, and creative intervention in the study of race and gender that establishes the groundwork necessary for revising our knowledge of the systems of trade and the commodification of peoples in the nineteenth century. Reckoning with Slavery is essential reading for anyone in the social sciences and the humanities who wants to understand the formation of the modern world. A major work." - Hazel V. Carby, author of Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands

" Reckoning with Slavery challenges historians who have reckoned with slavery in the numerical sense without reckoning in the intellectual and moral sense with the subjectivity and intellectual work of enslaved people. . . . The threads of this rich and powerful work will generate new scholarship for years to come." - Diana Paton, Black Perspectives

"There is much about this book that's deeply impressive. The depth and breadth of the research give a solidity to the argument that belies the difficult and fragmentary sources." - Tim Lockley, Ethnic and Racial Studies

"One of the most illuminating aspects of Morgan's work is how it invites us to reconsider the data we have about the slave trade. . . . Many of the stories of enslaved women might never be recovered, but Reckoning with Slavery shows how their stories might still be told by reading their silences creatively. The absence of women from the history of slave revolts, for instance, might not necessarily mean that they failed to participate in these uprisings or that they only participated in tiny, quotidian ways. It might also mean that their deeds were erased because women were so foundational to these uprisings that they inspired unease. Such a creative methodology paves the way for new, provocative historical narratives to be written." - Li Qi Peh, Critical Inquiry

"As Black women lead worldwide movements to affirm the worth of Black lives in the face of white-supremacist violence today, Reckoning with Slavery illuminates some of the roots of this radical tradition of imagining Black futurity and making the world anew against the seemingly all-powerful forces of the state and the market." - Eduarda Lira Araujo, E3W Review of Books

"Jennifer L. Morgan's second book is one that will change the way scholars of slavery and the Black Atlantic think about the archives, enslaved women, and Black women's theoretical and methodological offerings then and now. . . . It should become essential reading for academic audiences, college students, and any organization interested in reparations." - Deirdre Cooper Owens, Studies in Romanticism

"[ Reckoning with Slavery] sets a new bar for historians of the early modern era and of Western modernity. Morgan helps us see capitalism as racial capitalism, the radicalism of the Enlightenment as Black radicalism, and African women as central to both - and now that we see, there is no unseeing." - Mariana L. R. Dantas, Journal of Early American History

"Morgan's book will be welcomed by scholars who study the history of slavery and women's history. She concentrates on women, their bodies, their experiences, their feelings, and their decisions. The book should be required reading in graduate courses on the history of slavery, economic history, the history of the body, and women's history. Finally, it should be included in historical methodology classes due to its excellent incorporation of theory and its outstanding analysis of primary sources." - Karol K. Weaver, H-Slavery, H-Net Reviews

" Reckoning with Slavery is a valuable addition to the studies of enslaved women, slavery, slavery and capitalism, and the violence of the archive. It is a wonderful example of the importance of centering the lives and experiences of enslaved women and their own understanding of the connections between kinship, slavery, and capitalism." - Allison Madar, H-Early-America, H-Net Reviews

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"Jennifer L. Morgan examines the transition to racialized slavery in the early modern Atlantic world with innovative research methods and original analysis. She brilliantly accounts for the emergence of an unholy alliance between a novel proficiency with numbers and the hierarchical classification of human difference, which helped to make kinship into a commodity.

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The Railway Children Return: White Terrorism and Race Riots in Wartime Britain || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2022)

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The Railway Children Return: White Terrorism and Race Riots in Wartime Britain || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2022)

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The Railway Children Return: White Terrorism and Race Riots in Wartime Britain

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The Railway Children is one of my favourite stories ever — and this sequel continues it admirably. The arrival of 150,000 Black American…

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The 'Whites' Who Loved Me: Interracial Romance, Hollywood, and Bridgerton's "Post-Racial" Fantasies || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2022)

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The 'Whites' Who Loved Me: Interracial Romance, Hollywood, and Bridgerton's "Post-Racial" Fantasies || Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2022)

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Problematic Texts (to varying degrees)

Bridgerton
Scandal
Grey's Anatomy
3000 Years of Longing
Good Luck to You Leo Grande
Empire of the Light

There are more!

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Premise

Seeing as we have now had two seasons of Bridgerton, I believe that is sufficient time to comment on how it follows in the footsteps of other Shondaland productions - including the ABC series as it is a textbook example of the white-centring interracial relationships on prime time television. Particularly the on-screen relationship between Fitz Grant and Olivia Pope revisits how whiteness continues to discipline Black people, in this case it's the 'disciplining' of Olivia Pope. Shondaland is no stranger to the centring of romance arcs around white feelings and emotions when producing interracial relationships, but it must be acknowledged that even in superficial diversity - the inclusion of Kate and Edwina Sharma in season two of Bridgerton validated many dark-skinned South Asian women (important).

That being said, Bridgerton is not an anomaly, but part of an American film and television complex in Hollywood where whiteness dictates who is worthy of love on screen. Such programmes include Master of None, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Girlfriends, Dear White Peopleand Modern Family - which 'legitimise' the desire of Black and Brown people as only possible in proximity to a white person - accredited their 'human status' via affiliations with 'white others'.

Building on a previous essay which discusses whiteness more generally amid Bridgerton's families, this article considers the role of the whiteness of interracial relationships in the Netflix show and the wider industry. In the wider social context, I also saw Good Luck to You, Leo Grandewhich (un)arguably fetishises Black male bodies to accentuate white womanhood.

Jeanine Abraham writes:

"Writer Katy Brand basically treats Leo as Miss Nancy's human sex toy, glossing over her position of power as she exoticizes Leo. Why is it that the entertainment industry has completely normalized exoticizing men of color as an object of sexual pleasure for white women of all ages?"

Discussion

Following season one of Bridgerton, I was challenged at how it positioned the inclusion of Black characters as progress when in terms of numbers, they are still few. These were Black individuals moving through white spaces much in the same way Nirmal Puwar writes in her 2004 book Space Invaders - as there are no Black communities, but there are Black individuals left to navigate spaces that we have been historically and conceptually excluded from.

Moreover, from day one seeing Lady Danbury playing matchmaker for white families, I saw how the inclusion of Black debutantes is only accepted, should their 'desire' (for lack of a better term) be for a white person. Though, the inclusion of these characters may be a trojan horse for for more 'diverse' period dramas in the future - as the success of Bridgerton and possibly may be what gave us a 'diverse' Persuasion - we must ask how, even in a 'post-racial' fantasy, why is it still possible for white people to dominate?

In her book 'Good White People', Shannon Sullivan writes:

"As long as both white master and [B]lack slave observed the appropriate rules of address and gestural codes of behavior - etiquette is a code that binds both the dominant and subordinate, after all - then significant social distances could be maintained in the midst of intimate physical proximities."

Yet, the inclusion of Simon and Marina in season one (played by light-skinned Black actors) not only raised issues of colourism, but also as they eventually went on to get hitched to white people - raised issues of Black desirability accentuated only by its proximity to whiteness. This is compounded by the numbers of interracial relationships in other shows that are necessitated by white people. As Nylah Burton writes, "Media commonly makes the mistake of portraying interracial relationships with white people as shining examples of racial progress [and] assuming interracial relationships between people of color are devoid of any need for progress, or even learning."

Season two interrupts the Black-white binary and introduces audiences to Kate and Edwina Sharma. Nonetheless, under global colonial whiteness, Black and Asian people exist on different levels of the hierarchy, also considering other markers of difference including gender and caste. Kate ends up married to Anthony, with Bridgerton reinforcing the Great White Hope of interracial relationships on mainstream television.

In a Tik Tok video clinical psychologist Dr Han Ren discusses why attraction may not be accidental:

"It's just my preference" or is it?? We don't talk about this enough, but racialized s*xual capital and politics are very real, especially in multiracial societies. There's power and access on both sides of the pairing" - Dr Han Ren

Every time people praise Bridgerton for its 'diversity', I am reminded how the 'the diversity' ended up being married into white families and thus 'embodied property' - as Aileen Moreton Robinson discusses in her 2015 book The White Possessive. Though Bridgerton was hailed as a landmark show, I am uncertain if it does anything different to others that also position white-centred interracial relationships as progressive. If Bridgerton aimed to do anything provocative, it would have been more useful to have been a Wakanda-esque regency fantasy world with a token white character (heck, Black Panthereven has a token white man in Everett K. Ross played by Martin Freeman).

In the book Inequalities of Love, scholar Averil Clarke uses ethnographic interviews and data from national surveys to explore the challenges degree-educated Black women can have when seeking love, romance, and marriage in contrast to their white and Hispanic peers. Now, Bridgerton fans are swooning over Kate and Anthony as #Kanthony on Twitter -just months after Simon was sexually assaulted by his white wife before marrying her and fathering their child! Make this make sense. This still has not been resolved.

With the existence of race and coloniality in the Ton, and Simon (a Black man) sexually assaulted by Daphne (a white woman), he may represent what Dr Ren called "sexualised racial capital" where Simon is written as the symbol of capitalism - almost as an Austen-adjacent Darcy stand-in. At the same time, Marina was stigmatised from the get-go by Lady Featherington - being pregnant while Black, the microaggressions were evident. Lady Danbury was also constructed as the Mammy. And though the showrunners were criticised on elements of South Asian representation, what remains unclear is the future and if Bridgerton will have any Black leads. Further, to the presence of rampant anti-Blackness starting in season one and pervaded into season two.

For all its flaws, the first season of ITV's , however,did something Bridgerton has still failed to do - show Black love on screen with its lead characters (Will and Alice Mondrich are at the fringe). With Sanditon's Georgiana Lamb and Otis Molyneux, the show did something many period dramas peddling 'diversity' have not. The first season of The Spanish Princesson Starz is also a contender in its representation of Black Tudors in love in Early Modern England - and if the Bridgerton showrunners wanted to depict Desi women, where are the Desi men? Bridgerton is a show that has used the popularity of D&I to garner record viewing numbers and it has worked par excellence, while at the same it is a white show pretending to be a diverse.

In their article 'Decolonising Desire' academic Dalia Gebrial considers the "colonial scripts" that write people into and out of being lovable:

"Embedded within the constituent discourses of love - of desirability, emotional labour, support and commitment - are codes of social value assigned to certain bodies; of who is worthy of love's work. The labour of decolonising these representative paradigms is structural, and involves addressing their material histories."

With Bridgerton season three reportedly following Penelope and Colin, I wonder if a project that originally hooked people on the grounds of 'racial diversity' will eventually just become white. And with the ongoing assertion of whiteness as the rubric of being 'lovable' in American films and TV, Bridgerton has largely reproduced that effect - even if by through the inclusion of Black and Brown faces, showing how proximity to whiteness can do harm.

For us Black and Brown people that have grown up in Britain and the US, seeing characters that look like us loving each other on screen in all parts of their humanity - is a drop in the ocean of what it needs to be. Though, to varying degrees even as far as superficial visibility - the late 1980s up to the early to mid 2000s seemed to do more for me. While I am 1995 child, I grew up watching shows like That's So Ravenand The Proud Family.

While things like Black-ish do talk about 'Black issues', it still feels like a series tailored to the delicate sensibilities of the white people who do not have any Black friends!

In a British context, my parents' generation tell me about which was released in 1989 and can be watched on BritBox. HBO's is another example of depictions of Black intimacies. However, in a 2015 article, Kavita Bhanot writes that "The concept of diversity only exists if there is an assumed neutral point from which 'others' are 'diverse'." That default point is white. Yet, this may include language. Whilst I do grant that if us westerners broaden our horizons to things like Nollywood, Bollywood, and films and TV not in the English Language, the possibilities are limitless. Though it would be unfair to say all westerners (speaking about the US and UK) only view western media, a review of yearly film lists from UK and US sites is revealing!

These lists reveal what these big institutions view as important - largely UK and US films with an over-representation of white people in front and behind the camera. So, the colonial whiteness of media is revisited in the recentring of the English language as the norm.

Whiteness is necessitated in many ways. By the by, whether we like it or not, interracial relationships on screen continue to be almost exclusively upheld by a 'need' for a white person, asserting the role of whiteness in the possibility of love for Black and Brown individuals. Pertinently when Black and Brown love on-screen within white nations is lacking. Numerous films and television shows that get made in Britain and the United States are situated in what Ghassan Hage writes about as 'fantasies of a white nation'. This is what makes films such as If Beale Street Could Talkand (both by Barry Jenkins) so important - when leading white characters are absent from the story.

Moonlight - about the lives of Black gay men (additionally dark-skinned men) and Beale Street based on the James Baldwin novel featuring Black families being unapologetically Black - would we ever get that at blockbuster level, not on the independent screen? If we see how much diversity is contingent on profit and not 'because it's right', there will always be a business case for Diversity & Inclusion in media to be made. Netflix's Bridgerton is probably the closest a period drama has gotten to blockbuster status, and it shows.

In terms of thinking more critically about D&I, scholar Anne McClintock's Imperial Leathermay go some way in depicting how wider debates were useful in selling Bridgerton to non-period drama audiences, especially those who were not period drama fans - the many Black and Brown people who joined a fanbase that is overrepresented by cis white women. As far as season one, Black actors were used to sell Bridgerton (commodity). In effort to 'do diversity' with the introduction of Kate in season two - like Simon - was treated as an extra to white families. So endemic is "commodity racism" to media, I think Bridgerton was only criticised for it because it positioned itself as a post-racial - while at the same time discussing inheritance structures that are inherently built on capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy.

Period dramas routinely have failed to include Black and Brown potential audiences due to our exclusion from these texts. Season one of Bridgerton was a first for many. However, there is history: season five of received racist backlash for its inclusion of historically accurate Black character Kitty Despard. Through characters like Jocasta Mackenzie, sub-sections of the fandom also caused trouble when the Outlander showrunners wrote in Scotland's role in racist colonial enslavement. Yet, if you go to Scotland you will see colonial statues and streets named for enslavers.

Also, the casting of actor Sophie Okenedo as Queen Margaret in season two of the BBC's The Hollow Crownin 2016received racist backlash. The scandal known as #PineappleGate in the Sanditon fandom is also worth a look, as well as criticisms of having Black characters in the Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen's novel Persuasion. Racism amid wider period drama discourse is not an anomaly, and conversations around race and Bridgerton do not come divorced from a wider social context within period drama fandom.

In her journal article 'Notes on a Scandal' on racism and social media in the Sanditon fandom, journalist Amanda-Rae Prescott writes

"Bridgerton's premiere ... on Christmas Day 2020 changed the media environment and also revealed new divisions in Austen and Austen-adjacent spaces. The promo photos of Regé-Jean Page as Simon, Golda Rousheuvel as Queen Charlotte, and the other Black supporting actors quickly resulted in the "historical accuracy means no BlPOC actors in traditionally white roles" racists rushing to trash the series. [...] Bridgerton's depictions of sex and the rejection of key aesthetics of previous Austen adaptations also made the show a target for white period drama traditionalists. Bridgerton fans in Austen and Austen-adjacent spaces were forced to either make separate spaces for discussion of the series or join existing Bridgerton fandom spaces."

These wider criticisms from period drama racists - in some cases they are out and out white supremacists - come separate from my criticisms and those of other people on the white-centring of interracial relationships in the Netflix programme and wider industry. Whilst it is important to depict interracial relationships on screen, why are they mostly white-centring? As I wonder Britain today, the country I know appears even more Mixed-Race than when I was a child. Now, I see more Black and Brown people from ethnic minority groups in my community and others with mixed families.

Further note:

The Blindian Project - which was constructed to build solidarity between Black and Brown communities, and normalise interracial Black and Brown relationships - is an indicator of what need to see more of on our TV screens.

With interracial relationships on television screens still necessitating the participation of a white person, it reminds us that as John Hartigan Jr writes in : "... white people are 'racially interested and motivated'." It tells us whiteness must be discussed always, even in the politics of love on and off screen. With the breadth of romance on screen still necessitating white people, there is a problem that in a dominant culture of white supremacy it says: 'Black and Brown people are incapable of love, unless when a white person is present, or if this text is a 'race show' or 'race film'.

The late scholar-feminist bell hooks in her 1994 book Outlaw Culturedescribed love "as a practice of freedom." In my 2021 journal article ' National Trust in Jane Austen's Empire of Sugar' , I discuss how the relationship between Sanditon's Georgiana Lambe and Otis Molyneux interrupts nineteenth century white patriarchal inheritance cultures known as primogeniture. For Bridgerton to 'include 'Black and Brown characters into this regency world without explicitly talking about race, is irresponsible - all while there are references to race and coloniality throughout.

Conclusions

Like in our critiques of white supremacy in other spaces- such as education and criminal justice - film, television, and media are other branches of this racist tree that holds sway on the ability for white people to see Black and Brown people as full humans. And white backlash to the last season of This is Usreminds us that many white people still do not see Black people as human - so not only do the stories we tell matter, but also how they are framed.

Adopted by white parents Jack and Rebecca Pearson, and growing up with his white siblings Kate and Kevin, and other white people - also going to a white private school - it would have been all too easy to have given Randall a white spouse. Meanwhile, Netflix series Lupin was criticised for its misogynoir via its exclusion of Black women. In its exclusion of leading Black women characters, Bridgerton, through its over-representation of white people and lack of leading Black women - is implicated in misogynoir.

By highlighting Bridgerton as part of an industry standard of white-centred romance, we can see how the possibility of being loved is not exempt from the race discussion. Few shows attract over 600m views in their first month, so it has a responsibility not to cause harm. Ultimately, it has recentred love-worthiness as white tied to a colonial script reproduced in Hollywood, and that is terrifying.

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The 'Whites' Who Loved Me: Interracial Romance, Hollywood, and Bridgerton's "Post-Racial" Fantasies

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Seeing as we have now had two seasons of Bridgerton, I believe that is sufficient time to comment on how it follows in the footsteps of other Shondaland productions - including the ABC series as it is a textbook example of the white-centring interracial relationships on prime time television.

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Pride and Racial Prejudice: Why the Far Right Loves Jane Austen || Danuta Kean (2017) 

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Pride and Racial Prejudice: Why the Far Right Loves Jane Austen || Danuta Kean (2017) 

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Pride and racial prejudice – why the far right loves Jane Austen

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Racists and bigots have tried to associate their dogma with the much-loved author – but don’t seem to have read the books

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Race and Racism in Austen Spaces || Amanda-Rae Prescott, Bianca Hernandez-Knight, Kerry Sinanan, and Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2021)

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Race and Racism in Austen Spaces || Amanda-Rae Prescott, Bianca Hernandez-Knight, Kerry Sinanan, and Tré Ventour-Griffiths (2021)

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Editors' Note on Conversations

The Conversations section of ABO was established during the COVID-19 pandemic to create an ongoing space for traditional and non-traditional authors to exchange ideas in informed, personal, timely conversation on issues of significance to eighteenth-century studies and feminist scholarship. Pieces in Conversations are not peer-reviewed or heavily edited, as we strive to represent the authentic voices of the authors. ABO does not tolerate hate speech at all in submissions or related social media.

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ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 | Vol 11 | Iss 2

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Editors' Note on Conversations The Conversations section of ABO was established during the COVID-19 pandemic to create an ongoing space for traditional and non-traditional authors to exchange ideas in informed, personal, timely conversation on issues of significance to eighteenth-century studies and feminist scholarship.

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Recognizing the Enduring Whiteness of Jane Austen || Marcos Gonsalez (2019)

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Recognizing the Enduring Whiteness of Jane Austen || Marcos Gonsalez (2019)

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After finding myself fatigued towards the end of the semester by all the British domestic drama of Austen's oeuvre, I zone out during a class period and think, "These novels are some big-time white people problems." I want to say this out loud in good fun, but then I take a good look around me. Everyone is white besides me.

Once a week I enter this room, and feel that whiteness, as professor and students run around the fact that Austen and her protagonists are women. As they rally around this shared understanding, I sit and ask myself: Does anyone else in this room know Jane Austen is... white? Do they even know they are all white?

They know what blackness is. They know what indigeneity is. They know Asianness. Unmarked, and universal, whiteness structures this classroom, this university, this world. It structures the topics they bring up, how they engage with one another, the ability for them to get along so well, and why I am on the outside of it all.

But they don't know what whiteness is because they have never had to see it before. To them, white students and white professors discussing white literature feels like nothing out of the ordinary; it's just the way things are, the way things are meant to be.

*

Informed by critic Edward Said's reading of Austen's novel in his book, Culture and Imperialism, I write one of my first seminar papers as a doctoral student in English Language and Literature on how Lady Bertram's pug symbolizes a kind of indolence and excess the Bertram family can have due to Sir Tomas Bertram's slave estates in Antigua. These are the only comments on the paper justifying why I receive a B letter grade: "The connection between Lady Bertram's pug, the luxury of their home, and colonialism in your reading of Mansfield Park, isn't a very strong one." The conclusion of my first semester in graduate school, like in undergraduate and high school, is a tale as old as time.
I want to read Austen. I want to read as many dead white writers as I can. But I must read them from this body.
I should have anticipated the professor's comments given that during class, when I bring up the ties between the transatlantic slave trade and the Bertram's wealth, she responds by telling me it's "merely a passing detail." My other classmates, all white, mainly women, say nothing to add onto the reading I am trying to bring into the classroom. All brush it aside to talk about topics they have deemed more pertinent like "feminist readings of Austen's novels" and "women's issues."

"That's bullshit," a peer tells me I after I inquire about the grade I receive. "No one gets B's in grad school unless you don't do the work. We're all colleagues here."

After she tells me this, I rip the paper into little shreds and flush it down the toilet.

I don't contest the grade with the professor. I don't bring it up to anyone after I tell this person. I am too embarrassed to tell anyone I have a B because, apparently, no one is supposed to get B's in grad school. I am too scared to bring it up to a higher up because I don't want to be blacklisted as the disruptive queer person of color who causes problems.

I flush the toilet and tell myself I will forget about it and move on, forgetting and moving on like the plenty of times I have had to do before, hoping it will somehow get rid of this problem so many of us have encountered time and time again.

*

This whiteness is nothing new, for I have known it in undergrad Shakespeare courses and in high school literature when reading Hawthorne or Steinbeck or Defoe. I am naive to believe doctoral study is a space where white professors and students are welcoming to readings of race and colonialism. I am naive to believe having a doctorate or pursuing one magically makes you any more aware or cognizant of the world than those who don't.

Literary critics of color have long taken to task the whiteness of literary study, examining how we have held certain canonical texts and authors on untouchable pedestals. In her essay, "The Question of Race in Beowulf," Dorothy Kim outlines how J.R.R. Tolkien and Toni Morrison took two very different analytic approaches to the study of Beowulf. For Tolkien, Beowulf becomes a, "non-politicized, close reading of monsters, asking critics to read it as a poem, a work of linguistic art," yet also somehow serves as a source of racial pride for the British. While Morrison sees how Grendel and his mother are figures of the marginalized, of the plights of people of color in a white supremacist world. Kim's article articulates how the reading, interpretation, and pleasure one derives from literature involves a particular kind of framing, a way of reading.

Lavelle Porter in, "Should Walt Whitman Be #Cancelled," addresses how to reconcile with the racism of Walt Whitman, and, in general, reconciling with a writer's racism when you enjoy their work. Porter sees reading Whitman through Black intellectual critique as proving a necessary corrective, an anti-racist way of talking back to the poet. Patricia Matthew similarly points out, in a 2017 essay for The Atlantic, that she grew up reading and enjoying the work of Jane Austen, and still does, but teaching and discussing Austen in academic spaces elicits a particular kind of protective fangirling over her work and image. This builds a romanticized vision of her work and constructs an exclusionary canon, pushing other kinds of earlier texts, like those by women of color which more openly express social issues, into the margins. What these critics all show is that one can read, appreciate, and study canonical literature with different analytic frameworks in mind.

My reading of Mansfield Park, which is nothing new as many before me have articulated similar critiques, challenged the legitimacy of the ways of reading this professor only knows how to do and wants others to do.

Marginalized readers have a hard time enjoying the classics because our teachers and professors, beginning in primary school and ending in graduate school, have for so long dictated our ways of reading. The study of literature has had, since its inception, an open investment in maintaining de-politicized and art-for-art's sake approaches to how we read these works. I learn a valuable lesson about pleasure from this Austen course and those comments on my paper, a lesson about cultivating ways of reading that is about pleasure, about my pleasure, a pleasure always and ever political, always and ever informed by the social and cultural worlds we live in.

When I first read Mansfield Park it is an experience of pleasure. I love the messy familial drama. I love to hate the annoyingly pious and therefore dreadfully boring Fanny Price. I love tracking the details of opulence and luxury the Bertrams are able to have, the spoils of imperialism and enslavement. I enjoy this experience of reading Mansfield Park by myself, in my small apartment or on the subway going uptown or in Central Park, not in class, because the dynamics of the classroom do not allow for it.
Mansfield Park with a cast of poor Puerto Rican and Mexican people that resemble my family.
We frequently hear teachers and professors complain that the younger generations don't like to read the classics anymore. This is of no fault but their own. I want to read Austen. I want to read as many dead white writers as I can. I have a voracious appetite to read literature from every historical period and place on this planet. But I must read them from this body. This body built of colonization. This body built from the pillaging and massacring and dispossessing of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. This body hundreds of years in the making which I now read from. Those like, and unlike me, are there in those pages. Those details of Caribbean islands and the plantations housed there generating wealth from the labor of enslaved African people scattered about in a 19th-century British novel. Those details which, according to the Austen professor, aren't strong enough to foster an argument.

*

What does it even mean to be a white author or to address whiteness in literature?

An experiment: I try to retell the story of Mansfield Park with a cast of poor Puerto Rican and Mexican people that resemble my family. I am poor like Fanny Price, but have no rich relatives in which to move to in order to increase my prospects. I need an uncle who is off away somewhere settling financial affairs based off exploitation, but I can't seem to make up one. Technically, I do have an aunt who has a small dog she brings everywhere who could be a stand-in for Lady Bertram but the kind of luxury or opulence ascribed to Lady Bertram and her dog is one my aunt doesn't have. More attempts happen to fit the narrative to some queer MexiRican retelling but I don't know how to make the template of the story fit the world I would need to create. I probably can but I don't know if I even want to. I don't want to fit into Austen's story-I want to fit into mine.

The remixing of white literature by writers of color has shown how these are stories can be ours, too, for our particular artistic and political goals. Ibi Zoboi's young adult novel, Pride, is a retelling of Austen's Pride and Prejudice, with women of color at the helm as protagonists. Victor LaValle does a retelling of Lovecraft's short story, "The Horror at Red Hook," an important counterpoint to Lovecraft's xenophobic rendering of the New York City immigrant neighborhood. Writers of color will continue to do compelling retellings of classic texts by writers like Austen and Lovecraft. Yet my suspicions linger over the politics of retellings because the dominating forces over our art and culture are notoriously guilty of telling those of us who are queer, disabled, trans, and of color, that our original stories are too particular and niche to reach a large enough audience. The stories these white writers craft are universal templates, apparently.

What does it look like to retell Lin Manuel-Miranda's In the Heights? Nella Larsen's Passing? Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior? The question becomes tricky because these works, like all works by any kind of writer, like Austen or Shakespeare, possess their specific social and cultural contexts, all of them their own beautiful specificity. Yet some of us are always more universal, always able to be just Art, just Literature, just Author, and never, lest we say it, lest we give up the ruse, white.

*

We must create our own relation to these texts, and our own ways of finding pleasure in reading them. I enjoy reading the dazzling lines of Beowulf, the flagrantly dandyish essays by Walter Pater, or the awkwardly delightful prose of Gertrude Stein. I read these writers with an awareness of their whiteness. Always. I attune my pleasure to this fact, attuning my appreciation of literature to the conditions of the world that has produced it, of the world operating within its pages. A pleasure of the text that is not willfully ignorant, or willfully ready to shut dissenting analyses down because they mar the prettied-up version of a writer or work we want to uphold. A pleasure ever apart of this world, responsive and attentive difference, and ever aiming for a world that doesn't have to be this one.

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Recognizing the Enduring Whiteness of Jane Austen

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After finding myself fatigued towards the end of the semester by all the British domestic drama of Austen's oeuvre, I zone out during a class period and think, "These novels are some big-time white people problems." I want to say this out loud in good fun, but then I take a good look around me.

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‘Sorry, We Don’t Want Lesbians’: Bridgerton’s Problem with Racism, Homophobia and Body-Shaming || Michaela Makusha (2024)

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‘Sorry, We Don’t Want Lesbians’: Bridgerton’s Problem with Racism, Homophobia and Body-Shaming || Michaela Makusha (2024)

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‘Sorry, we don’t want lesbians’: Bridgerton’s problem with racism, homophobia and body-shaming

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From petitions against LGBT romances to actors being deluged with racist comments, the Regency drama has a huge toxicity problem in its fandom – to the detriment of some of its stars’ mental health

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Unsilencing the Past In Bridgerton 2020: A Roundtable || Mira Assaf Kafantaris, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Jessica Parr, and Kerry Sinanan (2020)

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Unsilencing the Past In Bridgerton 2020: A Roundtable || Mira Assaf Kafantaris, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Jessica Parr, and Kerry Sinanan (2020)

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From the celebratory to the declamatory, there has been a range of responses to Netflix's much-anticipated Bridgerton series, which was released on December 25, 2020. As academics who research the histories and cultures of race, slavery, empire, and colonialism, we were intrigued to see how a prestige drama set in Regency England, spearheaded by the influential Black executive producer Shonda Rhimes, would approach the sensitive topic of race. After a summer of racial reckoning, where #BlackLivesMatter activists brought down statues of enslavers like Christopher Columbus, Edward Colston, and Cecil Rhodes, we know our students will come to our classes with this series in their culture-scape, particularly its treatment of race and the early nineteenth century. Simultaneously, calls for more diverse casting have been growing as fans become weary of seeing white faces in period dramas with few opportunities for Black and Brown screenwriters and actors.

Netflix's decision to air a series, adapted from Julia Quinn's romance novels, promised to remake the period drama with a multicultural cast. As Chris Van Dusen, the show's executive producer, asserted, "The show thrives in the space of being relatable to whoever's watching, no matter who you are, so having such a diverse group of characters affords us the ability to explore such an array of storylines. Race is as much a part of the show's conversation as class and gender are." The show promises multiracial equality, or "escapism", as Van Dusen tells us. We recognize that this multiracial casting - and the possibility of escape from the traumas of the present - has been deeply satisfying for many viewers. Nevertheless, as scholars, we are troubled that this escapist fantasy relies upon some deeply problematic myths of race, gender, and class that do not dismantle the overall frame of whiteness underlying so much period drama. If race, class, and gender are part of the deliberate conversation of Bridgerton then, we ask, what kind of conversation is it encouraging viewers to have? In a world where Meghan Markle endured insidious racism as soon as her relationship with Prince Harry became public, it might seem as if having Golda Rosheuvel play a Black Queen Charlotte is progress. However, simply placing Black faces in high places, to use Cornell West's phrase, is not revolutionary.

It is important to recognize that the pleasures that the series promises - sensual, visual, culinary, fashionable, and escapist - rest on the materiality of Regency Britain, the lavish and inordinate wealth of which came directly from its colonized territories, primarily via enslaved people's labour and the looting of India. As Saidiya Hartman and other Black writers tell us, the afterlives of slavery persist in our historical moment, and continue to be lived by Black people now - a fact that must be fully acknowledged in 2021. The escapism that Bridgerton promises, then, is one that asks viewers to ignore white supremacy's sway over Black and Brown lives, particularly in the period it depicts.

In this piece, a few scholars of race and slavery from the premodern era to the present, with a focus on the early nineteenth century, present and elaborate upon commentary we made on Twitter to discuss the erasures that may not be immediately evident in the series because of its much heralded diversity. Below, we present our individual perspectives in a roundtable format to offer additional views. We intend our contribution to add to the rich and divergent conversations already taking place about other aspects of the series, whether laudatory or critical; we recognize that the series has appealed to viewers from many backgrounds, even as we remain uncomfortable with other aspects of the series, as we discuss below.
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall: On Studios and Patterns of Erasure
I agree that it is necessary to interrogate Bridgerton's storyline and casting. It's so important that what we see on screen comes from diverse writers; it helps us get a more accurate depiction of the past. At the same time, it's crucial to recognize that writers and directors don't have total freedom to shape the stories we see; the corporate studios that fund and distribute content have tremendous power here. Producers and directors of color have talked candidly about changes made to scripts they have written or proposed. For instance, A'Lelia Bundles (the great-great-granddaughter and biographer of the pioneering Black entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker) shared her disappointment in 2020 when Netflix's miniseries on Walker was full of distortions. In a piece entitled " Netflix's 'Self Made' Suffers From Self-Inflicted Wounds," Bundles explained how the studio had insisted on inventing details - even adding stereotypes - to make the story more melodramatic. From doing the research for my forthcoming bookSlave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games, I also knew how often Black writers and directors have had studios press them to change storylines, to make them more palatable to white viewers - particularly involving stories about slavery.

I started watching Bridgerton thinking about these larger patterns. Though Shonda Rhimes is the show's executive producer, the show's creator, Chris van Dusen, is white, as are several of its writers; there is also a growing literature in Film Studies showing how Netflix shapes its programs. In addition, before I started watching, my friend Annette Joseph-Gabriel had hinted at aspects of the series that she found problematic, though she found it appealing in other regards. I tried to give myself over to this imagined world, and enjoy it as entertainment. But by episode 6, I was increasingly uncomfortable, and decided to type out some of what I was observing. Here's my tweetstorm from Dec. 28, 2020, unedited!

A thread on # Bridgerton (OR, why we get this shlock instead of a Haitian Revolution epic!).

# Bridgerton is a post-racialist fantasy. In its utopian world, Blacks & whites are equally powerful in Eng. Or rather, the scale is tipped toward Blacks, since Queen Charlotte...

..(rather than simply having been rumored to be of mixed racial heritage & passing as white) is presented as a Black woman reigning openly as one. There is no slavery or brutality - or acknowledged racism - in this world. Servants and aristocrats alike are of mixed hues.

The benevolent intention here was to repopulate London with POC - after so many "costume drama" productions which erased Black Londoners from history. GREAT! However, Bridgerton

OVERCORRECTS, to create a warped world in which (as Lady Danbury tells Hastings), the...

Black kingdom & white kingdom were simply united when Charlotte married King George - &now they all need to continue unity & mixing. THIS IS SHLOCK, I repeat. Where was all of this money coming from? Do we see the brutality of the enslavement that was actually going on...

...in the colonial plantations these aristos owned or invested in? Nope, nope, nope - that would be too stressful for white people.

@Netflix would not be going #ChaChing while the view count rolled up. In fact, Bridgerton

fits into a long Hollywood studio tradition...

...where films on Black history (I am using history loosely here) are funded only when they make white people COMFORTABLE. Slave revolt stories in which brutal enslavers receive retributive justice (like a Haitian Rev epic that would sympathize with enslaved Haitians)?

Too stressful for white people! So studios won't fund ("where are the white heroes?" they asked Danny Glover when he was trying to make his Toussaint Louverture epic). But stories in which whites and Blacks live together in racial harmony: studios love that sh*t!

Hence: the integrated costume drama. If you love British royalty & arist'y - but felt kind of bad b/c it was depicted as a thoroughly white world - feel guilty no more! Here's more of the same - but hip & integrated!! (let's NOT discuss how the wealth was produced...

...that gave us the sumptuous dresses & lavish buffets). This is part of a PATTERN of how films on Black history get funded by studios, as I discuss in #SlaveRevoltonScreen. Keep in mind, even as more showrunners & directors are Black, the balance is still tipped so that...

...funding decisions are made by largely white execs on the basis of what wh. audiences will not recoil at. This WARPS the history we see on screen. Formerly colonized countries & ppl - b/c of the econ. legacies of col'm & slavery- do not have the same power to greenlight

So we get benevolent revisionism that wipes away slavery (too controversial, too polarizing) in favor of racial harmony & utopia that tells us: we really can all just get along!

I could say much more (for instance on the sexualization of Bl women in the show v. white women's chastity), but needed to get that out now. I've been grateful to @AnnetteJosephG

for unpacking with me what's going on as we proceed through the episodes. I'd love to see

her share more (here or elsewhere) about the probs she sees. & I'm hoping that some of our specialists in Black Europe (no pressure @tnflorvil :)) also might write s'thg. I've got two eps to go, but having suffered 6 hrs of this - & thought about what FAILS TO GET FUNDED -

...I had a few things to get off my chest, that I hadn't read elsewhere yet! More on how whites' real (or perceived) disinterest in the history of slavery combines with funding inequities to warp what we see on screen, coming later this year in #SlaveRevoltonScreen. Fin

(one last thing - we know this is not real, b/c of the way that actual Black royalty - the Queen of Hayti, Marie-Louise & her daughters - were treated when they showed up in London in 1820! Ppl like Wilberforce were happy to support them FROM AFAR, but basically iced them out..

...in person, as @NicoleWillson & @TabitaSurge can tell you in detail!)
Mira Assaf Kafantaris: Sugar and Consumption
In its desire to create a postracialist fantasy, Bridgerton erases the violent history of food, foodways, and race. One illustrative example is the beginning of episode three, "Art of the Swoon," where Lady Daphne Brigerton and Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings continue to plot their fake courtship inside Gunter's Tea Shop. It is a jarring scene that reproduces a variation of what bell hooks famously calls "eating the other," particularly the image of the delectable Black man consuming the loots of transatlantic slavery and colonial plunder: sugar and tea. Watching the Duke luxuriate in a service of afternoon tea, Daphne gasps at the erotic possibilities that such an act of ravenous consumption suggests. Accentuating the female gaze, this brief scene is supposed to echo and continue the theme of the innocent white woman's sexual awakening that the badinage with the Duke has provoked. However, to see Simon suggestively lick his silver spoon, a hint of the sexual pleasures to come, is problematic. What the show does not take into account, in its impulse to imagine a world without race, are the undercurrents of cannibalism that such a triangulation of Black man, sugar, and reproductive sexuality evoke. White cannibalism, whereby white slaveholders murdered and fed enslaved Africans to other enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage, has been discussed in the works of Vincent Woodard, Manuel Barcia, and others. The work of premodern critical race theorists like Kim F. Hall, Gitanjali G. Shahani, and Jennifer Park have troubled early modern England's local and global relations to the extraction of tropical food systems. To see this horrific crime sublimated into a sexy television moment, where the candied Duke is offered for Daphne's and our gratification, is not only insensitive, but more urgently, it coerces the Black body into a function, a utility, a narrative device that ritualizes and feeds, literally and figuratively, a white supremacist ideology.

What makes this brief scene doubly egregious is the dialogue that follows. In response to Daphne's delight in the success of their ruse, the Duke responds: "In the grand battle of the season, I am your trusted general, marshaling the troops"; to which Daphne adds, while peering over a sumptuous spread of tarts, macaroons, and scones: "Wellington could only hope for a soldier so brave." In a triumphant air, the Duke finishes the repartee with the words: "And handsome. You must not forget that."

We, the audience, cannot forget that a Black man is conscripted as a tool of empire, as an edible commodity, and as a propagator of white heteropatriarchy, despite the showrunners' insistence on a race-free world. Historians have told us that the Royal Navy defended the ships that carried enslaved Africans to British colonies in the Middle Passage. Historians have also told us the revenues of the transatlantic slave trade and the colonization of East Asia, including trade in sugar and tea, financed the British navy. In other words, the supply and demand of these culinary commodities, extracted through human trafficking, land theft, and free labor, cemented Britain's imperialist domination as the empire on which the sun never sets. What we witness in this scene is the Duke's transformation into a war machine - he is even compared to one of England's most famous military leaders, the Duke of Wellington - who contributes to the expansion of the white colonial state. In less than three minutes, the show presents a Black man enacting the violence of foodways, the violence of military might, and the violence of forced reproduction - all legacies of white supremacy that still affect our present. The question that I grapple with here is: to what extent can we gloss over the brutalities of chattel slavery, the horrors of empire, and the afterlives of racial trauma, in order to consume an aesthetically-pleasing, digestable postracial fantasy?

Jessica Parr: There's also a certain sexualized creepiness to this moment, of a Black man who winds up with a white woman. Set in 1847, Sherley Anne Williams' 1986 novel Dessa Rose discusses a plot by a triumvirate of enslaved African Americans to free themselves from bondage. As part of the plot, an enslaved Black man who becomes involved in an exploitative sexual relationship with his white mistress, Mrs. Rufel. While Hastings is not an entirely unwilling figure in the ruse between Daphne and himself to manipulate the meat market aspects of the London season in their respective favors (he to be left alone, and she to garner desirable suitors), it is impossible to not to think of Thomas Foster 's work on the sexual exploitation of enslaved Black men when thinking about this aspect of the story line. The ruse is heavily driven by the suggestions of Daphne Bridgeton, whose proposals more or less drive their public behavior. Moreover, while the young white society women are sexual prizes within the social scene, it is impossible to ignore the racial dynamics of an almost solitary Black nobleman as a desirable, yet unwilling "prize" for more than a few young white women and their mothers in the context of a British empire that was still engaged in slavery. It's one of the complexities of color-blind casting, a practice that allows non-white actors opportunities to play parts in film, television, or theatrical productions that have historically excluded them. The premise is that a production does not see race; that a multiracial utopia is possible; and that audiences accept race as a neutral, unproblematic identity marker.

Kerry Sinanan: The scene in which Simon licks the sugar spoon under the desiring gaze of an aroused Daphne is also an erasure of the fact that Black people in the Regency periods were by and large not the consumers of luxury but the unpaid producers of it. In many 18thc paintings, such as Bartholomew Dandridge's, "A Young Girl with an Enslaved Servant and a Dog", ca. 1725, we frequently see enslaved children in silver collars serving sweetmeats and exotic fruits while attending to their white masters. This is evident in the Figures of Empireexhibition by Esther Chadwick and Meredith Gamer. In 18thc-Visual culture Black people are definitively objectified as part of the material luxury of the time, not the recipients of pleasure.
Bartholomew Dandridge, "A Young Girl with an Enslaved Servant and a Dog", ca. 1725. Yale Center for British Art.
In most of these portraits, white people do not register the presence of enslaved people but in the sugar-spoon scene, Daphne consumes Simon with her white gaze that reduces him to an artifact. The scene pretends to display him as an entitled consumer: he is not and the series erases what many historians of slavery call "blood sugar", the sweetness made out of the blood of Black people. On 18thc-Britain's Caribbean plantations enslaved people were malnourished, forced to use their "free" time to grow their food, and punished in deeply violent ways for eating sugar. One notorious example of such punishment comes from the diaries of a British overseer in Jamaica, Thomas Thistlewood, kept between 1750-86 and discussed by historians such as Trevor Burnard and Douglass Hall. In his diary of 1756, Thistlewood notes Derby as a frequent runaway who does not turn up for work. Withholding labor was a frequent form of resistance for enslaved men and women. Derby repeatedly ate sugar canes, something that threatened the entire logic of the plantation as the enslaved person was definitely not to consume the products of their labour: the blood sugar was for white people. Thistlewood punished Derby severely for this by forcing another enslaved man, Hector, to defecate in his mouth: "made Hector shit in his mouth, immediately put in a gag whilst his mouth was full & made him wear it 4 or 5 hours." Bridgerton refuses to consider where the sugars and silks of its world come from, while still maintaining a class-based world of servants and poverty. Are we to suppose there is no labor there? That would be a pleasant fantasy if the series offered an alternative instead of denial and erasure. We consume much today made by enslaved labor, and we look the other way and Bridgerton faces the problem that one cannot dismantle race without dismantling capitalism. Reminding ourselves of pasts and presents of slavery is painful. But it is not the reminder of the past that is violent: we should object to its being sublimated and forgotten as we continue to consume.
Kerry Sinanan: Racism and Black Motherhood
Bridgerton, despite its promise of escape, trades in violent histories within a high-gloss set and world of beauty, something that the name of the second episode, ironically captures in its title, "Shock and Delight". This indeed opens shockingly with the death of Simon's mother who dies just after giving birth in a distressing scene that insists on showing us both her joy at her newborn, and her blood loss from maternal hemorrhage. As someone who very almost died from maternal hemorrhage myself after giving birth, I found this scene to be an obscene display that offered no real emotional engagement with the mother, only spectacle. The handling of this topic is so harmful when we know that Black mothers in the UK and US are over five times more likely to die during and after pregnancy and childbirth. Much work has been done on this, notably by ProPublica and NPR in their excellent series, Lost Mothers. The series' plot blames the Duchess' death on her tyrannical husband who is Black, and notably much darker-skinned than Simon and his mother, as the visuals repeat the hierarchies of colorism. This dangerously displaces the causes of Black maternal mortality on to the Black father when in fact the real cause of mothers dying today, are white systems of racist medical practice and the stress of living in racism, known as " weathering". Class is no protection as the tragic story of Shalon Irving makes clear and, indeed, we witness an aristocratic Black woman die while the series simultaneously suggests that rising in class and accumulation of wealth is the answer to erasing race. In the 18thc, transatlantic slavery relied on Black mothers to birth, while stealing their children and their lives as Hortense Spillers, Jennifer L. Morgan, Sasha Turner, and Saidiya Hartman tell us in an extensive scholarly repertoire focused on Black women's lives in slavery. In place of this history of white violence, Bridgerton harmfully projects a crude and violent attitude arising from adherence to primogeniture on to the Black Duke. But that system of male inheritance they make him the mouthpiece for is white. Simon's mother is displayed as dying from Black male violence, when the real cause of Black mothers dying is white supremacy. This is no escape from race but an exploitation of its violent lies.
Ambereen Dadabhoy: Racist Tropes of the "Broken Black Family"
If the specter of the prematurely deceased Black mother and the hard and loveless Black father haunt Hastings's psyche, to the extent that he refuses to participate in the economy of patriarchal lineage and peerage, Bridgerton is at pains to emphasize how much the white family at the center of the narrative is both loving and generative. Despite their own missing patriarch, we witness the deep care, affection, friendship, and rivalry between the Bridgerton siblings and their surviving parent. These relationships are given the time and attention to develop so that we get a distinct sense of each of the siblings. While it might seem necessary because they are the eponymous avatars of the show, the focus on the family intimacy, particularly as it is juxtaposed with the Hastings household reinforces the white supremacist belief that Black people don't feel the same level of love and care for their own kin. This logic made possible the dehumanizing degradations that were part and parcel of chattel slavery which allowed enslavers to indiscriminately sever familial ties by selling members of enslaved Black families to distant and disparate locales. We see this continue to play out in our own time with the racist belief that Black people don't value families, which is used to explain the "broken," nature of Black families, rather than the ways in which the state actively ensures such with the increased policing and criminalization of Black men.

Even the Featherington household, where we don't witness much love between family members, and we observe the matriarch, Portia, desperate to secure eligible men for her daughters, scheme and connive to make that a reality, we are meant to understand that underlying these comic and borderline despicable actions is care and concern. Because of Mr. Featherington's propensity for gambling, Portia is saddled with seeing Marina Thompson make her debut in polite society and contract an eligible marriage. What is significant here is that when Marina falls on hard circumstances, pregnant and unwed, she has no family to turn to. She must endure Portia's scorn and the humiliation of being matched with men twice her age. Her only salvation is either the return of her lover or contracting one of the distasteful marriages Portia has arranged. Confusingly, she can't return to her parents. We're given no explanation why the easiest option is unavailable to her, other than perhaps the fact her parents don't care. The absent parents establish a link between Marina and Simon, but whereas the Duke as options, Marina has none.

Out of all the young ladies on the marriage mart that is "the Season," Marina's situation is particularly dire because she is most trapped by the forces of race, gender, and class. While the show downplays race as a strategy of its colorblind production, it does come up in two important moments and both have to do with the Black characters. The first is in a conversation between Simon and Lady Danbury, where we are offered an explanation for this racially mixed society, and the second is between Mr. Featherington and Will Mondrich, where it is made quite clear that race is still a barrier to advancement for Black people. Within this nexus of race relations, we have Marina whose precarious situation must be negotiated not only through her gender and how that marginalizes her, but also the promiscuity seemingly attached to her race (as all of the other young white women are well-bred enough not to indulge in sex until he puts a ring on it) but also to her class. In this way, the show seems to unintentionally fall into racist tropes.
Jessica Parr: On Simon and Daphne 'interracial' relationship... and gender and race
Simon/The Duke of Hastings is also fetishized. A lot. The series focused on his "rake-dom" while The Viscount Bridgerton was involved in more sexual encounters, sometimes, quite publicly. I count maybe 1-2 discrete sexual dalliances by Hastings over the course of the first session of Bridgerton. There are at least double that with Viscount Bridgerton, including a scene early in the series where he is engaged in sex with a racially ambiguous young women up against a tree in a public park as his (white) coachmen pretend not to see what is right in front of them. The unambiguously white Bridgerton's sexual conquests are either racially ambiguous or plausibly light-skinned women of color and not the overwhelmingly blonde or red-headed milky-faced "chaste" young women that comprise the majority of the eligible women of his social set.

There were approximately 20,000 Black Londoners in 1800 (total London population of 1 million). In the first decades of the 19th century, increasingly strict laws were deter settlement of Africans displaced first by the transatlantic slave trade, and then the Napoleonic Wars in Great Britain. While Chamberlain's study does not offer data by race, Simon Hastings' mother died in a period where maternal mortality was on decline. And we have a motherless child whose care is mostly overseen by Lady Danbury on behalf of an absentee aristocratic father who was already disparaging and potentially abusive of the younger Hastings' mother. (The elder Hastings is a dark-skinned Black man and the late Countess is a lighter-skinned Black woman, so there is some colorism at play here.)

As a young boy, the junior Hastings (a lighter-skinned Black man) is soon rejected completely by the senior Lord Hastings, after it's revealed that his son has a speech impediment. The absentee Black father trope is solidified, and Lady Danbury continues to raise Simon and to prepare him for his eventual Dukedom. His mother's death and his father's abuse and negligence damages young Hastings, and as his father lays dying, he vows that he will never marry and have children, bringing the Dukedom to an end at his death. The expression on the dying elder Hastings' face reveals that the younger Hastings' vow has the desired effect, since preservation of the Dukedom and its relationship to power within the British empire were in essence, all that ever mattered to him. And it is also why Simon is determined to avoid the London Season as his Dukedom makes him an imminently desirable conquest.

Enter Daphne Bridgerton, whose brother's heavy handedness has scared off her expected large pool of suitors and left her promised by the same to a lecherous Nigel Berbrooke. She and Hastings begin the aforementioned ruse, which initially serves its purpose quite well. Daphne sees a big jump in suitors, including an Austrian Prince who is Queen Charlotte's nephew. Simon Hastings is mostly left alone. But the ploy backfires when the pair develops feelings for each other

Daphne's role in getting Simon Hastings through his childhood traumas where Black Lady Danbury has evidently failed (despite having been a steadfast support) more than hints at white saviorism. It is through Daphne's persistence that he overcomes his past trauma and is able to fulfill his socially-expected role of Duke, husband, and father. In the original novel, with white characters, Daphne reads as a young, strong heroine who managed to carve out her own place in a society with very specific expectations for her. She works within those expectations to gain the companiable marriage she so keenly desires. But the color blind casting that matches the Daphne Bridgerton character with a traumatized Black aristocrat complicates the storyline.

Marina Thompson is another critical figure in the treatment of race and gender in Bridgerton. Early in the series, we are introduced to a young, light-skinned Black woman who is described as a "distant cousin" and guest of the Feathering family for the London season. Prior to her arrival, we witnessed the three young white sisters of the family fail spectacularly in their efforts to earn the approval of a bi-racial Queen Charlotte, brilliantly played by Golda Rosheuvel. Marina is set up to be a charity case for the Featherington family to usher into a suitable marriage. Not long after her arrival, we learn that Marina is pregnant out of wedlock by her (white) absent war hero love interest, Sir George, who is off fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. When Lady Feathering discovers the pregnancy, a race begins to marry her off before her condition becomes public knowledge.

Marina Thompson is understandably reluctant and holds out hope that George will return for her. Her hopes are cruelly dashed by Lady Featherington, who forges letters from Sir George, denying paternity of the paper. Lady Feathering then drags her off to an impoverished part of London, holding up the fates of its inhabitants (and especially the children) to manipulate her to her will. Marina soon sets her sights on Colin Bridgerton, a younger sibling of the powerful and aristocratic Bridgerton family. His interest arouses the jealousy of Penelope "Pen" Bridgerton, who nurtures an unrequited crush on Colin and is also angry at Marina for not disclosing her pregnancy to her would-be husband. This jealousy destroys their friendship.

The "jezebel" who manipulates white men to her bidding is a longstanding trope. Historically, Black women have been heavily sexualized, and as Stephanie Jones-Rodgers wrote in her prize-winning book, They Were Her Property, were even sold into sexual slavery at the hands of white women. Marina's attempts to marry Colin without disclosing her condition plays into those tropes. "Pen" discloses that she has found her mother's forgeries, but Marina notes that the forgeries prove that Sir George hasn't replied. Marina bluntly tells "Pen" that she needs to cease her unrequited crush, and that Colin sees her like a brother and not a potential partner. Scheming and manipulation is not exclusively limited to Marina, but Daphne Bridgerton's ploy with the younger Duke of Hastings, to improve her marriage prospects is treated far more sympathetically. The series is quite clear that much of the ploy is masterminded by Daphne, who commands that the Duke of Hastings send her "expensive" flowers, dictates the number of dances per social event, and insists that they regularly be seen promenading in the park. That the Duke of Hastings is a disabled Black man of an absentee father who is available as the pawn (if not entirely unwilling) is another notable feature of the story. Moreover, the storyline emphasizes his "rakedom" by Viscount Bridgerton to a degree that eclipses Bridgerton's own extensive (and occasionally public) sexual dalliances.

Marina isn't sold, but her treatment as a sexual being who is imminently available to white men becomes a theme of Bridgerton. Lady Featherington tells Marina that she's to be married off to Lord Rutledge, a titled, eldritch, and utterly misogynistic Englishman. In a moment that will make more than a few watchers jump, the Feathering matriarch slaps Marina across the face when she objects to the match. Despite the Feathering daughters' own failures to attract suitors, Featherington's focus is heavily on the unwed pregnant Black woman.

Marina Thompson's examination by Lord Rutledge itself smacks of the slave market. He was not the only licentious male character. Daphne Bridgerton's would-be groom, the vulturine Nigel Berbrooke, attempts to sexually assault Daphne in the garden after the engagement is announced. The London season in itself is a bit of a meat market, but in a scene that invokes the demeaning physical examinations for "soundness" in the slave markets, Rutledge demands to see her teeth, as though he were examining livestock rather than seeking a wife. Rather than music, embroidery, and conversational skills, it is her physicality that becomes important. He also demands to spin her. It is an examination in her mobility and fluidity of movement. There are some sexual undertones to dance, but in this context there's a layered-ness to Rutledge's examination of Thomson's physical capabilities.
Contributor Biographies
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall is professor of history at California State University - San Marcos. Her newest book, Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games, will be published by the University Press of Mississippi in June 2021. Her previous work has focused on the French and Haitian Revolutions; modern Haitian history; the history of racism and slavery in France; and depictions of slavery and colonialism in cinema.

Jessica Parr is an Assistant Professor of history at Simmons University in Boston. Her previous work focused on the controversies over baptizing enslaved Africans. Currently, she's at work on an edited volume of the papers of eighteenth-century British physician-abolitionist-clergyman James Ramsay (under contract with the University of Georgia Press) and a monograph that explores the entanglements between Black anti-slavery activists and white identity politics.

MIRA ASSAF KAFANTARIS is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the Ohio State University. She is completing her first manuscript, titled Royal Marriage, Foreign Queens, and Racial Formations in the Early Modern Period. Her public-facing work has appeared in The Millions, Overland Journal, The Rambling, The Conversation, Synapsis, and Medium-Equity.

Kerry Sinanan is Assistant Professor, Department of English at University of Texas at San Antonio. She is completing a monograph on British enslavers, Myths of Mastery: Traders, Planters and Colonial Agents 1750-1833 for University of North Carolina Press, and has recently published an essay, "Slavery and Glass: Tropes of Race and Reflection" in, In Sparkling Company: Reflections on Glass in the Eighteenth-Century World, ed. Christopher Maxwell (Corning: Corning Museum of Glass, 2020). In Summer 2020 she collaborated with Peter Brathwaite's on his Black Portraiture Series. In 2017 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art where she researched representations of enslaved mothers.

Ambereen Dadabhoy is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Harvey Mudd College. She works on race and religion in early modern English drama. She also has a research and personal interest is premodern and modern Islamophobia. You can find out more about her work and writing at: ambereendadabhoy.com.

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Unsilencing the Past In Bridgerton 2020: A Roundtable

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From the celebratory to the declamatory, there has been a range of responses to Netflix's much-anticipated Bridgerton series, which was released on December 25, 2020. As academics who research the...

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Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism || Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000)

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A twentieth-anniversary edition of this tour de force in feminism and Indigenous studies, now with a new preface The twentieth anniversary of the origina…

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https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/adapting-bridgerton/

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Lecture + Q&A: Why Are Period Dramas So White?

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Nathaniel Wells || Archives Wales (2020) 

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Nathaniel Wells || Archives Wales (2020) 

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Gwent Archives holds a marriage settlement between Nathaniel Wells and Harriet Este, which details the names of the 146 enslaved men, women and children on one of his plantations.

Nathaniel Wells was born in 1779 on a plantation on St Christopher Island (St Kitts). He was born a slave, but went on to become the Sheriff and Deputy Lieutenant of Monmouthshire, a Justice of the Peace, a lieutenant in the Yeoman Calvary of Gloucester and Monmouth, and the churchwarden of St Arvans.

His father was William Wells, a plantation and slave owner from Cardiff, and his mother was Juggy - later Joardine Wells - a house slave. In 1783, Nathaniel was manumitted or 'freed' by his father and he was sent to England to be educated. When William Wells died in 1794, he left the vast majority of his estate to Nathaniel and manumitted Juggy.

Nathaniel Wells inherited an estate worth £200,000 - including several plantations and slaves. Shortly after, Nathaniel purchased the Piercefield House estate and later married Harriet Este, the daughter of a chaplain to King George II, in 1801.

Nathaniel Wells contributed much to Welsh society, but what of the men, women, children and infants who were owned by him and whose names appear in his records solely as part of a property transaction? His father, William Wells, had children with several of his female slaves so it is likely that Nathanial was related to some of the slaves that he owned.

D412.53 Nathaniel Wells Marriage Settlement Signatures

The Marriage Settlement of Nathaniel Wells and Harriet Este refers to the Vanbells plantation at St Kitts and lists the names of 146 slaves. Little is known of the lives and experiences of enslaved adults known as George Crabhole, Landaff, Tom Pigeon, Pompey, Little Mimba, Little Kitty, Nannet, and Doll; nor the lives of the children known as Candice, Juba, Angelick, Sappho and Quamina. Some of them may have lived as family units as suggested by the names of Tom and Bess Theroude, and Tom and Mary Bishop.

D412.53 Marriage Settlement Female Slave Names

Although the trade in slaves in the British Empire was abolished in 1807, slavery itself was not outlawed until 1833. This came into effect in 1834, but former slaves had to become apprentices or little more than indentured workers until this law was abolished in 1838.

In 1850, Nathaniel Wells sold the Piercefield Estate and in 1852, he died at Bath, aged 72.

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View all posts by Archifau Cymru Archives Wales

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Gwent Archives holds a marriage settlement between Nathaniel Wells and Harriet Este, which details the names of the 146 enslaved men, women and children on one of his plantations. Nathaniel Wells was born in 1779 on a plantation on St Christopher Island (St Kitts). He was born a slave, but went on to become the...

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Nathaniel Wells, a former slave, plantation owner, and businessman who lived during the 18th and 19th centuries, was also the first person of African ancestry to become a High Sheriff in England. Wells was born on September 10, 1779 on the island of St. Kitts … Read MoreNathaniel Wells (1779 – 1852)

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Nathaniel Wells Bio || Legacies of British Slavery (2013)

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Nathaniel Wells Bio || Legacies of British Slavery (2013)

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Biography

Nathaniel Wells (1779-1852), son of William Wells, a sugar planter and merchant in St Kitts, and his enslaved house worker Juggy.

1. Born 10/09/1779 in St Kitts. His father was William Wells (1730-1794), who moved to St Kitts about 1749 and eventually became owner of three sugar plantations, the largest of which was Vambells. His mother was Juggy, an enslaved house servant who took the name Joardine Wells on manumission. His father had at least six illegitimate children, as well as legitimate daughters, but Nathaniel was the only son and inherited the bulk of his estate on the death of his father in 1794 - three sugar plantations and money estimated at £120,000. Nathaniel was educated in England and bought Piercefield estate near Chepstow, Monmouthshire, for £90,000 in 1802. He was an integral part of Monmouthshire high society, becoming Justice of the Peace in 1806 and Sheriff of Monmouthshire in 1818. He served as church warden at St Arvan's, 1804-1843 and with the Duke of Beaufort paid for improvements to the building.

2. Nathaniel Wells married Harriet Este 09/06/1801 at St George's, Hanover Square, London, and after her death, married Esther Owen 30/01/1823, also at St George's. He is recorded at Piercefield House with Esther Owen in the censuses of 1841 and 1851. He died at 9 Park Street, Landsdown, Bath, 13/05/1852. His memorial incription reads: "Sacred to the memory of Nathaniel Wells of Piercefield, Esq, a Magistrate and Deputy Lieutenant of the county of Monmouth, who died at Bath May 13th, 1852, aged 72 years. Also of Esther, widow of the above, who died on the 1st day of June, 1871, aged 67 years. R.I.P."

3. Vambells estate is not identified in the Register of Claims for St Kitts, but appears to be the estate shown there as 'Middle Island.' .

4. The will of Nathaniel Wells of Piercefield, Monmouthshire, was proved 28/07/1852. Under the will he reaffirmed his two marriage settlements, under each of which £10,000 was settled on the children of the respective marriage, and instructed his trustees to realise his real estate and divide his estate as to 3/5ths to the children of his first marriage and 2/5th to the children of his second marriage.

Sources

T71/879 St Kitts claim no. 685 (Fahies and Ortons).

1. J. A. H. Evans, 'Wells, Nathaniel (1779-1852)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [ http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/74450 accessed 23/05/2012]; http://www.starvanschurch.org.uk/history.html [accessed 23/05/2012]; J.A.H. Evans, 'Nathaniel Wells of Piercefield and St Kitts: From Slave to Sheriff', Monmouthshire Antiquary, XVIII (2002), 91-106.

2. Ancestry.com, London, England, Marriages and Banns, 1754-1921 [database online]; 1841 census online; 1851 census online; memorial inscription transcribed at http://www.data-wales.co.uk/n_wells.htm [accessed 23/05/2012].

3. PROB 11/2157/51.

We are grateful to Rita Lamb for her assistance with compiling this entry.

Further Information

Associated Claims (1)

Associated Estates (3)

Legacies Summary

Piercefield House [Purchased]

The image is of Piercefield House circa 1840 from a painting by George Eyre Brooks. There is an account of the house's history in [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercefield_House); and see...

Relationships (1)

Addresses (2)

9 Park Street, Lansdown, Bath, Somerset, South-west England, England

Piercefield House, Chepstow, Monmouthshire, South Wales, Wales

Other Information

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Summary of Individual | Legacies of British Slavery

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Nathaniel Wells (1779-1852), son of William Wells, a sugar planter and merchant in St Kitts, and his enslaved house worker Juggy. Born 10/09/1779 in St Kitts. His father was William Wells (1730-1794), who moved to St Kitts about 1749 and eventually became owner of three sugar plantations, the largest of which was Vambells.

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Nathaniel Wells' Rise from Slavery to Slave Owner || BBC (2015)

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Nathaniel Wells' Rise from Slavery to Slave Owner || BBC (2015)

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Nathaniel Wells’ rise from slavery to slave owner

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Chepstow man Nathaniel Wells grew up to own the St Kitts plantation he was born on as a slave.

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Whiteness as Property || Cheryl Harris (1993)

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Whiteness as Property || Cheryl Harris (1993)

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Venus in Two Acts || Saidiya Hartman (2008)

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Venus in Two Acts || Saidiya Hartman (2008)

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This essay examines the ubiquitous presence of Venus in the archive of Atlantic slavery and wrestles with the impossibility of discovering anything about her that hasn't already been stated. As an emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world, Venus makes plain the convergence of terror and pleasure in the libidinal economy of slavery and, as well, the intimacy of history with the scandal and excess of literature.