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Slideshow

Crusoe’s Absence: Sugar Economies and the Ingenuity of Realism

Event Flier
Barbara Fuchs
Spanish & Portuguese Department
University of California - Los Angeles
Founders Memorial Garden, Main Ballroom
Special Information:
5:00pm-7:00pm

This inaugural lecture and reception kicks off the new year of activities of the Early Modern Research Group, which brings together scholars from across Franklin College, with support from the Mellon-funded Global Georgia Program and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute. Refreshments will be served.

Abstract: If, as postcolonial criticism has shown, Crusoe's experience is part of the longue durée of race and empire in the West, it must be considered in relation to earlier Iberian as well as subsequent Dutch, French, and English imperial projects. In this light, Crusoe’s absence from his Brazilian plantation is as significant as his presence on the island, and reinserts his narrative into broader contexts of inter-imperial rivalry, Atlantic sugar, and a more nuanced history of the novel. Reading Robinson Crusoe in relation to the layered and entangled history of colonialism in the Atlantic World reveals the partiality of viewing the protagonist on his island as an English exemplar.

We hope you can join us. The address can be found below.

425 South Lumpkin Street, Athens, GA 30605

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