The Race and Regency Lab Launch

          The JCB and the Lab have a shared goal of bringing new readers to the archive, especially those it has historically excluded, and to reimagine the archive as a community trust with a binding relationship of shared responsibility. In this way, the launch was an opportunity to bring women of color into a more equitable relationship with archival practices that in the past have excluded them even as it has been used to define their pasts. Our hope was that bringing women of color into the archive would result in a kind of radical alchemy, one that celebrated agency and wisdom, creativity and resistance. 

          The September 13th launch of The Race and Regency Lab at the John Carter Brown Library centered on two of the library’s recent acquisitions: Plan of a Section of Belvidere Estate, St. Thomas in the East, Jamaica (1772) and the first American edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1832). With a focus on literature, material culture, art and artists, and new approaches to the archive, the Lab aims to broaden and deepen our understanding of the Regency period by considering it alongside constructions of race. It brings together the public, scholars, artists, and museum professionals to discuss how race operates in the era that—while technically short—has had a lasting impact on how we understand the 19th century. It is an era scholars focus on and popular culture reimagines in novels, films, and television shows. The JCB’s new acquisitions are linked to the period in two ways. John Cope Freeman, cousin to Austen’s father George and godfather to her brother Charles, owned Belvidere Estate from 1763 to 1788. Mansfield Park is her novel most closely tied to debates about slavery and the slave trade. Beyond this explicit connection to Austen, these objects reflect how closely tied the genteel parlor culture of the 18th and 19th centuries are to the violence of the transatlantic slave trade. 
          This collaboration with the JCB was spearheaded by Karin Wulf, Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library and Professor of History at Brown University. In our planning for this launch, she articulated the importance of the archive as a trust and understanding that word as both verb and noun. The JCB and the Lab have a shared goal of bringing new readers to the archive, especially those it has historically excluded, and to reimagine the archive as a community trust with a binding relationship of shared responsibility. In this way, the launch was an opportunity to bring women of color into a more equitable relationship with archival practices that in the past have excluded them even as it has been used to define their pasts. Our hope was that bringing women of color into the archive would result in a kind of radical alchemy, one that celebrated agency and wisdom, creativity and resistance. 
          The day’s events all took place in the John Carter Brown’s grand reading room, a neoclassical space lined with rare and precious books in locked glass shelves: books about European global exploration and the Americas, from the 15th to the 18th centuries. Patricia Akhimie (Director, Folger Institute, Folger Shakespeare Library), Carole V. Bell (Lecturer University of South Florida, Freelance Journalist, Co-Producer and Co-Host of the Black Romance Podcast), Kim F. Hall (Lucyle Hook Chair and Professor of English and Africana Studies, Barnard College), Nikki Payne (Novelist), and Constanza Robles (Doctoral Candidate History of Art & Architecture, Boston University) brought their experiences as scholars, cultural critics, curators, and artists into the reading room, where curators had put the map and the book on display. Alongside Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth (Lecturer in French and British History of Art, Edinburgh University), Bertie Mandelblatt (George S. Parker II '51 Curator of Maps and Prints, John Carter Brown Library), and Simon Newman (Senior Visiting Fellow, John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study) they discussed archival culture and inclusive methodologies and contextualized the map in literary and material culture. 
          In the afternoon’s first session, Patricia Akhimie and Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth discussed the challenges of developing inclusive practices that are more meaningful than simply checking off the “diversity” box. While brick and mortar repositories can sometimes function as mausoleums (indeed, have sometimes been designed to serve this purpose), they also have the capacity to serve as anchor institutions, spaces that support efforts at connection, meaningful exchange, and community building. Akhimie and McCaffrey-Howarth pointed to the urgent need to include communities that live near, and whose ancestors live near, institutions that tend to exclude them. The Plan’s connection to Austen is important and intriguing for what it tells us about her family’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. It is also important for the details it provides about how plantations are organized. The legend on the map shows land apportioned for produce and livestock, and, most interestingly, land assigned to enslaved laborers as provision grounds. There are four names listed in the map’s legend: Jupiter, Jack’s, Peggy, and Pistole. Simon Newman pieced together a possible narrative for Kitty Thomson, an enslaved woman who attempted to escape from  Belvidere Estate. In doing so he showed attendees how he uses archives to build narratives out of what they reveal and their conspicuous silences. 
          Bertie Mandelblatt and Constanza Robles’s session brought the Plan into clearer focus with important historical information and cultural contexts. Mandelblatt shared examples of plantation maps in the JCB holdings and its history of atlas and map collecting. Explaining to attendees that cartography is “an imperial practice,” she discussed the provision grounds as spaces that required labor from enslaved women and men at the same time they were plots of land where these same people could challenge the plantation’s mechanisms. With funding from the Boston University Center for the Humanities and the British Association for Romantic Studies, Constanza Robles curated the virtual exhibition Visualizing Property. Robles is a doctoral candidate in Art History, and her exhibit situates the objects within plantation schema, material culture, and regency-era literary and visual culture. 
          The final session brought together women of color to reflect, analyze, and bring creative energy to the day’s discussion. The Race and Regency Lab is inspired by the women and community practices that form the foundation of RaceB4Race—a cross-institutional scholarly community for pre-modern critical race studies. Kim Hall, one of its foundational members, started this session with reflections about what it means to be scholars and artists of color in institutional spaces, regardless of our credentials and expertise. She concluded with two questions: what does true inclusion look like? How can the archives steward transformation instead of stasis? In my own talk for the Launch, I analyzed the map in the context of other representations of plantation landscapes--in literature, pro-slavery sketches, and on abolitionist objects. I also discussed the Lab’s role in making sense of an object like the Plan in the larger debates about Austen’s politics. We are a space where different kinds of readers and publics can come together to discuss what an object like the Plan illuminates about a time period that remains a global fascination.  
          The launch concluded with a focus on how Black women imagine and reimagine the Regency. It featured Nikki Payne in dialogue with Carole Bell about Payne’s two Austen-inspired romance novels, Pride and Protest and Sex, Lies, and Sensibility. Payne, an anthropologist by training who has immersed herself in Austen’s novels and letters, transforms Austen’s characters in contemporary social negotiations. Bell, a prolific book reviewer and expert in Black romantic literature, interviewed her about how she forms her diverse characters and the stories they tell contemporary readers about themselves. 
          In the final hours of the launch, attendees and speakers ate and drank together at a festive reception in the reading room. After a day engaging with interpretations of the 19th century, the reception was a time for attendees and speakers to share how their experiences and ways of knowing overlap. Everyone discussed the day and thought about its implications for everyone’s reading and research pleasures. In her comments, Kim Hall urged people to support The Race and Regency Lab materially and to imagine innovative future collaborations. Ideas for future events bubbled during the event and folks began planning for group readings of new novels, symposia, and new exhibitions.  
          The Race and Regency Lab has generous sponsors and collaborators: the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, the British Association for Romanticism Studies, Montclair State University, the Boston University Center for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Scholarly Communications Institute, and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 
          In addition to being grateful to Karin Wulf for her leadership, the Lab is grateful to everyone at the JCB who made the launch possible: Gianna Chaves, Katherine Goldman, Bertie Mandelblatt, and the Brown University A/V Staff.  The launch would also not have been possible without the support of Montclair State University graduate assistant Evan Dekens, the Lab’s advisory board, and, especially, Jospeh Rezek of Boston University. 
          Our motto comes from bell hooks. We want the Lab to be a space:  “where there is unlimited access to the pleasure and power of knowing.”  We are well and truly launched!

Patricia Matthew

Associate Professor | Department of English  | Montclair State University | patriciamatthew.com 
Series Co-Editor Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Oxford UP)
2024-2025 Long-term Fellow at the Shakespeare Folger Library 2022-2023  Anthony E. Kaye Fellow, National Humanities Center
2020-2021 Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar, SUNY Buffalo

Photo credit: Rythum Vinoben.