Teaching Early Modern Race – A Conversation at the Folger Institute

Committed to embracing inclusive approaches and anti-racist pedagogy, the Society for Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies is currently supporting collective workshops on early modern race inaugurated in the 2020 SE17 Conference, as one of the many ongoing initiatives to confront these questions. For some of us who may be less familiar with the flourishing field of research on critical race theory, this ambition may have raised preliminary questions. Isn’t the concept of race anachronistic to the study of the French early modern period? How might we as literary scholars approach these issues in our classroom, given our own professional formation? How does "antiracist pedagogy" challenge us to rethink our assumptions about "who belongs” -- at the front of the class or on our syllabus?  In an online conversation recorded in July 2020 and available on Folger’s YouTube channel, Ambereen Dadabhoy (Harvey Mudd College) and Nedda Mehdizadeh (UCLA) openly discussed...