“What Are You Reading?”: Kerry Sinanan
The Communications Fellows are excited to continue the K-SAA Blog’s “What Are You Reading?” series! Started by the 2019 Comms Team, this series aims to spotlight the research of our community members and encourage conversation around recent publications in the field. Please reach out to us if you have someone you would like to see interviewed (including yourself)!
Kerry Sinanan is Assistant Professor in Global pre-1800 Literature and Culture. She specializes in the Black Atlantic, Caribbean slavery and race, and the global dimensions of Black resistance and abolition up to the present. Her monograph, “Myths of Mastery: Traders, Planters and Colonial Agents, 1750-1834,” examines the writings in various genres by slave traders and slave owners from the mid-eighteenth century up to British emancipation (1834). She is under contract with Broadview Press to produce a new edition of The History of Mary Prince (1831). As an Anti-racist pedagogy practitioner she runs regular teach-ins and workshops on undisciplining 18th and 19thc studies and on decolonial curriculum.
What new studies of Romantic-era literature are you reading right now?
I am catching up on some urgent reading that I have wanted to get to and top of that list is Joey S. Kim’s Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Kim’s focus on the form of the lyric poem, and her historicizing of it within the political and racial geographies of the period known as ‘the Romantic’, offer vital insights into the making of whiteness as a norm for the creation of a lyrical subject—but also for a reading positionality that hides racial violence. One of the phrases in Kim’s book I especially love is “the veil of cosmopolitan intrigue” via which, Kim argues, “worldliness” obscures what is in fact a white supremacist world view fundamental to the period’s literary production. I have just finished reading Dionne Brand’s Salvage: Readings from the Wreck ((Penguin, 2024), a kind of forensic autobiography (although Brand notes this as an “artifice”) of reading to show how a “reader is made. And unmade,” and this is so important for those of us educated in colonial systems, as I was in Trinidad and Ireland. I am also now finally reading Celia Naylor’s important history, Unsilencing Slavery: Telling Truths About Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica (University of Georgia Press, 2022), a transatlantic account that focuses on the lives of 208 enslaved people. Naylor undertook archival research in both Jamaica, and in the National Archives in Kew, to tell us these microhistories of those enslaved at Rose Hall—a site that remains a key tourist destination in Jamaica—between 1817 and 1832. For most of this time the plantation and those enslaved there were “owned” by John Rose Palmer. For me such work must remain fundamental to anyone studying in the period because, despite all the work being done on Caribbean slavery, it remains relegated to a side “topic”, rather than being fully taken account of as the fundamental socio-economic fabric of life in these years. Romanticism is not conceivable without slavery.
Does this writing inform your current research and/or teaching?
Yes, very much: I am currently finishing an essay on Phillis Wheatley Peters as a deliberately elided source for many women Romantic poets, such as Charlotte Smith, and so Kim’s insights into how Romantic lyrical subject is raced and forged via colonial geographies, is vital. Similarly, Naylor’s work is as much a lesson in how to carefully research and write about the lives of enslaved people, as well as about enslavers, which is my ongoing work. Her introduction, which draws on Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), Marisa Fuentes’ Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), and on Saidiya Hartman’s many works, is a model for how one might (and, crucially, who might) ethically enter archives of slavery to “tell impossible stories” (Hartman).
What books are in your 'to read' pile right now? (Any period or genre!)
A book I am putting next on my list is Maroon Nation. A History of Revolutionary Haiti, Johnhenry Gonzalez (Yale University Press, 2019) which follows the story after the 1804 Haitian Revolution. Gonzalez writes against the present-day misrepresentations of Haiti which remain fundamental to the West and, I would argue, to Romanticism’s account of itself, to show how former enslaved people continue to resist the plantation world order that was still imposed upon them, even by Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe. Simon P. Newman’s Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (University of London Press, 2022), is open access and a must-read showing us that Black and Asian enslaved workers in England were constantly resisting their condition and that slavery’s systems were part of domestic white Londoner’s lives—not something remote. Brandon Shimoda’s autobiography, The Afterlife is Letting Go (City Lights Books, 2024), is about the lives of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans who were mass incarcerated and removed forcibly in America during WWII. I will be fascinated by how Shimoda’s writings as us to consider all forms of enslavement, incarceration and genocide. I will hope to read Vahni Capildeo’s poetry collection, Polkadot Wounds (Carcanet Poetry, 2024), which has just won the 2025 Bocas Prize for Poetry. Finally, I want to sit down and properly read Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (Haymarket Books: 2025), by Mohammed el-Kurd. Now, more than ever, we must listen to Palestinian voices: anyone studying the Romantic period, which was also a period of settler colonialism, should read this.
Which book(s) do you most frequently recommend to your students? Why?
I will be very predictable here but these books cannot be read enough: I just finished teaching a cross-listed honours and MA course on The Black Atlantic. I began with reading Sharpe’s In the Wake and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness (Verso, 1995) which, for all its flaws, remains fundamental for refusing the nation and period boundaries that Romanticism remains beholden to (despite all its efforts to go ‘global’!). Students’ responses to these works affirms how vital they are to understanding the role of anti-Blackness in modernity and the Romantic period, and to asking how we therefore read, remember, and think on more “demonic grounds” as Sylvia Wynter would say. Our present moment, as well as the amnesia of a lot of writing in Romantic Studies, insists that we can also not stop reading Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism and Orientalism: refusing the norms of white supremacy remains our core task.
Have there been any articles or publications recently you’d like to draw our attention to?
It is a little earlier than the period’s boundaries, but Bonnie and Rebecca Anne Barr’s volume, Revisiting Richardson (Bucknell University Press, 2025) is just out. My own essay is in there and all the essays are fantastic for new perspectives on Richardson: I cannot urge enough that everyone has to read Rebecca’s own essay on the male virgin figure and I think we can all think more about the currency of Sir Charles Grandison in the Romantic period. Nicole Aljoe’s The Cambridge Companion to Mary Prince will be out any second now and will be so useful to scholars and students alike.
When you are taking a break from research, what genre or authors do you like to check out?
Like myself my reading is split! I will always be reading Caribbean writers like Edwidge Danticat, Ayana Lloyd Banwo, Maryse Condé, and Claire Adam but also, when I am tired, I still tend to turn to classics like Agatha Christie, Trollope, Richardson, Barbara Pym, the Brontës etc. even though I can never take off my “critiquing whiteness” hat!
