In the last quarter century, scholars of the early modern have expanded their conversations to encompass literatures from languages outside of the European tradition, marking them as part of a global formation of early modernity. This session proposes to contribute to global early modern studies by asking about the nature, place and literary figuration of labor in works from the period. Building on the scholarship of scholars including Faith Beasley (Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal, U Toronto P 2018), Ayesha Ramachandran (The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe, U Chicago P 2015), Fahad Bashara and Hollian Wint (Into the Bazaar: Indian Ocean Vernaculars in the Age of Global Capitalism, 2021), Tom Conley, Ananya Chakravarti (Empire of Apostles, Oxford UP 2018) Sanjay Subrahmanyam and others, this panel situates labor as a crucial site for expanding academic understanding of the period as a global temporality.

The questions that guide this panel’s discussions include—How is labor defined, fabricated, mobilized or deployed? How do characters showcase agency or the lack of it in terms of their labor and work? What geographies or temporal instantiations enable particular forms of labor to emerge as both historically and literarily contingent? How does the existence of labor at the margins shape global early modern literary and performance genres?.

Daniel Vitkus’ presentation on the early modern English theatrical tradition, opens this panel’s interventions. He argues that plays such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Fletcher and Messinger’s The Sea Voyage, indicate and obscure the dependence of mercantile interests upon maritime labor during the English Renaissance, often through the concealment of the “travails” of travel and the fetishizing of movement across the seas. His examination of the shifting depths of such concealed labor, reveals the economic structures that make the globe a navigable object. The sailing masses— dock workers, sailors, navigators— invisibilized in the performative “magic” of the theater, instead become the means through which the world becomes apparent.

In her paper on Margaret Cavendish’s moral philosophy, Lisa Walters contends that the English science fiction pioneer has rarely been studied for her ethical philosophy of labor and poverty. She proposes that Cavendish’s world-making is not far removed from moral debates as applicable to her own time; that her utopian formulations of gender hierarchy, and social commentary on impoverishment were contestations of prevailing ideas of individual morality as the cause of social inequality. This essay argues that Epicurean philosophy provided the philosophical foundation for Cavendish to imagine new worlds with different political and social structures, and provides an important critique of early modern attitudes about wealth, poverty, precarious employment and social justice.

The fabrication of labor is however not just a class-conversation, but often also one of gender, race, and language. How does one contend with precarity as an assemblage of sometimes conflicting or imbricated identities and ideological positions? In her paper, Sameera Abbas argues that the early Urdu Novel represents female subjectivity in an emerging colonial landscape, as one defined by their labor. Through a study in contrasts, Abbas juxtaposes the figures of Asghari and Akbari, the two women in Nazir Ahmad’s Mirat-ul-Uroos (1869) — often regarded as the first Urdu novel. Despite the work more formally fitting standard conventions of periodizing the early modern in the 14th to 18th centuries, Abbas contends that the placement of the text at the inception of a nascent Urdu expression of modernity, challenges normative assumptions of temporal marking. She builds momentum for a radical reimagination of how such a shift also contributes to examining the place of the woman as an ideal for an emergent early colonial Muslim femininity, fabricated almost entirely upon the provision of their labor both domestically and in public life.

These three presentations articulate complex engagements with the figuration of labor, both as an abstract concept, as a social reality, and in individual action. Across their 16 minute papers, the three speakers highlight the salience of labor as a site for contentions and claims to early modernity, through their vivid relocations of scholarship into interrogating the structures of the everyday— be they ideological, economic or gendered— that circumscribe the making of a more robust understanding of the early modern not just as a European phenomenon, but as a global one that does not map easily onto the categories and demarcations that we elect to use as commonplace. The panel will also include a short seven minute introduction to the topic of discussion, and will end with an open Q&A with the panelists for the remaining 20 minutes.