If you were to attend the prestigious British Women Writers Association Conference you might expect to delve into the world of authors like Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, or Virginia Woolf.
But, Assistant Professor in UWinnipeg’s Department of English, Dr. Kerry Sinanan, hopes to bring a new perspective to this year’s conference, taking place in Sioux Falls, South Dakota from May 15 to 17.
Dr. Sinanan teaches Global Literature Pre 1800 as well as Critical Race Studies, and her research looks at transatlantic slavery, race, and Caribbean literatures.
“If you work in 18th or 19th-century literature, if you go through an English degree, you’ll read mostly, if not entirely, white author texts,” she explained.
Knowledge is always empowering, even if it’s painful knowledge.
Dr. kerry Sinanan
Dr. Sinanan’s work focuses on ensuring students and new readers know about the narratives of enslaved people in the transatlantic slave trade.
“Olaudah Equiano was one of the first enslaved people to buy their own freedom and then tell their story to the British public to advocate for abolition,” she explained.
“I’m also working on The History of Mary Prince,” she added. “She was an enslaved woman who worked with the Abolition Society in 1831 to publish her story, to urge Parliament to allow for full emancipation of all enslaved under British colonial law.”
As a keynote speaker at this year’s British Women Writers Association Conference, Dr. Sinanan will explore the ways that including marginalized experiences can help us reshape how we perceive race and gender.
“The conference organizers, and many people in the association, understand that these categories of identity really need to be challenged,” she said. “So, I am giving a talk on Mary Prince and Jane Austen together, to think about what happens when we put these two figures together.”
In her talk, Mary Prince, Jane Austen, and the Chain of Being, Dr. Sinanan will invite listeners to look at extracts from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen through the lens of race as well as gender.
“What we’re thinking of is how the white British women construct race and gender at the same time,” she said. “I want people to think more about the ways in which early feminist writers weren’t always thinking of the rights of Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women.”
At the conference, Dr. Sinanan will also be hosting an anti-racist pedagogy workshop to help attendees better understand how to incorporate these themes in the classroom.
“Knowledge is always empowering, even if it’s painful knowledge,” she said. “I think it’s very important for students to know the history of the discourses, the rules, and the laws that surround them today. It gives them more power to intervene in those narratives and, hopefully, to argue for a better world without racism and without economic inequities.”
Due to current travel advisories, Dr. Sinanan won’t be travelling to the United States, but will give her keynote address and workshop remotely – something that, she believes, highlights the importance of understanding how modern systems are impacted by history.
“More Canadians, I think, are aware that these boundaries of who can talk, who’s allowed to talk, who’s allowed to travel, who’s allowed to move, who’s being policed – they’re now being more universally applied,” she explained. “And in one way that’s terrible, but in another way, it makes these systems much more visible to everybody.”
Dr. Sinanan hopes her talk at the conference can get more people thinking about how race and gender structure our world, our curricula, and how English literature is read and understood.
