Poetic Form and Racialized Environments in The Faerie Queene

This talk turns to Edmund Spenser’s epic-romance, The Faerie Queene, to inquire how literary forms transform the concept of nature into an engine of race-making. Dr. Debapriya Sarkar attends to the poetic apparatus that dehumanizes marginalized figures, turning them into symbol and allegory by linking them to wasted and unsalvageable environments. These episodes reveal how literary plot and narrative drive the development of a fundamental aspect of European colonial projects: a system that calibrates humanity through the use-value of racialized people and understands those who cannot be utilized as disposable.