British and Dutch Women’s Writing: Race, Class, and Colonialism

Sanchez, Melissa E.; Sanchez, Melissa E.

Since the 1970s, scholars of early modern women writers in Britain and the Netherlands have discovered significant but previously neglected bodies of women's writing. Only recently, however, have comparative and multilingual studies of Dutch and British writers begun to emerge. This work across national and linguistic borders presents an important opportunity for comparative studies of race, class, and colonialism, which have thus far received little attention in studies of early modern European women’s cultural production. This Master Class seeks to address this neglect, one that tends to perpetuate an ideal of European women’s exemplarity while marginalizing the work of non-European women. Led by scholars with expertise in British and/or Dutch women’s writing, this Master Class will encourage scholars to ask how early modern British (English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh) and Dutch (in the Dutch Republic or the Southern Netherlands) women imagine their own authority and position as writers in relation to other axes of identification—race, class, religion, generation, sexuality, colonization.

Seventeenth-Century Britain and the Dutch Republic both offer salient archives of writing by women who locate themselves and their works in emergent milieux—in a larger Atlantic and Asian world, in which racialized slavery arises as a constitutive factor in English and Dutch prosperity; in a world where settler colonialism exploits and displaces indigenous communities across the New World; and in a scene of formal subsumption where extant class relations are unsettled and rearranged, where “labor” and “aristocracy” take on new meaning, and where new bourgeois values shape assumptions about life and art alike. Where does the category “woman” fit into this changing world, and what meanings does it hold for critics?

We hope that by presenting this topic in pedagogical not polemical terms, we will engage those who haven’t yet thought about the racial-colonial context in which early modern women shaped their writing. As a more interactive alternative to traditional paper sessions, a Master Class will, we hope, accommodate both established and new voices.

The four short Master Classes of this session will feature scholars leading the audience in discussion of a particular theoretical topic, literary or critical excerpt, historical or aesthetic crux. Each speaker will offer a 15-minute class consisting of brief provocations or presentations of their research (3-5 minutes) followed by 10 minutes of unstructured group discussion interpreting a particular text or brainstorming paths for future research and syllabi. These mini-lessons will be followed by 15 minutes of unstructured general discussion of the new methods, research questions, and teaching possibilities that have emerged from the Master Class. Our hope is that audience members will leave the Master Class with renewed interest and concrete tools to pursue research and teaching of early modern English and Dutch women’s cultural production.

Our speakers bring expertise in women’s writing across national cultures and languages. The first lesson, presented by Su Fang Ng, discusses Margaret Cavendish’s connections to the scientific community in the Netherlands while in exile in Antwerp as well as her knowledge of the establishment of the Royal African Company. Ng will lead participants in a collaborative close reading of passages from Cavendish’s Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy to consider how natural history from the East and trade explorations to the East permeated her writings, as well as how the slave trade shaped the work’s racializations.

The second lesson, by Inger Leemans, will begin with a brief summary of her own research on pornography and eroticism in debates on female author and readership as well as an overview of recent Dutch scholarship on women and race. Leemans will then have the participants work in small groups to study excerpts from Anna Maria van Shurman and Isabella de Moerloose, with particular emphasis on translation, race, and sexuality.

The third lesson, by Dennis Britton, will use Kim F. Hall’s claim that Petrarchism is a site productive of early modern whiteness as a point of departure for a collaborative exploration of Mary Wroth’s representation of whiteness and female undesirability in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Participants will close read sonnets by Wroth alongside those of her uncle Sir Philip Sidney to think through the relationships between women’s writing, manuscript culture, coterie readers, race and desire.

Finally, Sujata Iyengar--a pioneer in this area of study--will briefly introduce her recent work on Amelia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn’s exploration of colonial and white supremacist tropes. Following this 5-minute overview, Iyengar will have participants work in small groups to read passages from these authors, focusing on their representations of the relationship between language, nation, and embodiment.

521V British and Dutch Women’s Writing: Race, Class, and Colonialism: Calls for Papers