A19 Research Seminar Sorbonne Université/Université ParisCité

Forbes, E. (Invited speaker)

Department of English

Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Invited talk

Description

This talk will be drawn from the second chapter of Criminal Genius in African American and U.S. Literature (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024). After briefly outlining the contours of the larger book, the talk will offer a close reading of the print culture surrounding one late eighteenth-century executed convict: Abraham Johnstone, a falsely accused free Black man found guilty of murder in New Jersey. Johnstone used his criminal status to communicate his vision of collective Black thriving, exemplified by his relationship with and final letter to his wife.

Period	30 Apr 2024
Event type	Other
Location	Paris, FranceShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International

Documents & Links

Thinking through the intertwined histories of racialisation and criminalisation, Erin Forbes (University of Bristol) turned her attention to the genre of eighteenth-century gallows literature, focusing specifically on the origins of the concept of criminal genius, which, she demonstrated, took root in the lived experiences of disenfranchised people. Using a methodology that she terms “corpus convicti,” designed to decouple humanity—particularly the humanity of criminalised persons—and its literary representations from excessive individualism characteristic of liberalist societies, Forbes located agency, power and, most pertinently, genius outside of the individual, instead finding it at the juncture between person and text, between the convict and the print culture generated by and around their crime.