Introduction

The essays in this special issue first made their public scholarly debuts as conference papers during the Black Studies & Romanticism virtual conference, which took place on June 24–25, 2021. This conference came about from two interlocking situations. One was the resurgence, or the resurgent attention to, Black Lives Matter in 2020. Conversations that I was a part of in various organizations were both productive and completely unproductive: more space was clearly needed for a continuous conversation that was informed by various threads of colonial and contemporary histories. At the same time, Romanticism still lacked substantial encounters with the long lineage of Black Studies thinkers. There has certainly been historical work in our period on the institution of slavery, abolition, and enslaved peoples, but Romanticism as a field, and as an abstract concept—defined in myriad ways—had yet to grapple fully with questions of the fungible enslaved body, the subject of the unthought, social death, and the implications of Afropessimism for the field’s concerns. There was important work, new or incipient then, to move from—including Patricia Matthew’s Spring 2022 Studies in Romanticism special issue on “Race, Blackness, and Romanticism,” essays and forthcoming books from our plenarists and those in the Bigger Six Collective, to name a few—but the pandemic threatened to cloister and clique us further, closing off larger, field-questioning conversations. As a white person, I was not in a position to lead that conversation, but one thing I could do was to use my resources to create a space for the right people to lead and for all to participate. Here is how the Call for Papers put it: Because some of these ideas question the very nature or definitions of Romanticism, it seemed important not to house these conversations within spaces already constructed by “Romanticism.” For me this conversation in large part began in the classroom with amazing and brilliant students who were not burdened by Romanticism per se, but who were interested in thinking about ecology without nature, about the ungendering of enslaved bodies, about the pleasures and violent perversions of sympathy, about the nature of white subjectivity as constructed by a necro-colonial system, about the arts in response to the promises and failures of emancipation and revolution. All this to say, even though Mount Holyoke is itself a white institution that suffers from the burden of its history, including its location on stolen Nipmuc lands, I hoped the conference would become a space where we could let our work on the Romantic period, in its various shapes and forms, encounter Black Studies earnestly with the goal of becoming different scholars amid different scholarly landscapes that we continued to change. What resulted was a two-day conference with two collaborative plenaries, a keynote by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, over 50 conference papers, 6 panels of undergraduate asynchronous veritable conference presentations, and more than 200 people in and out of Zoom sessions over the two days, which were punctuated by awkward but friendly “happy hours.” The “collaborative plenaries” are here published in their original recorded form—including Q&A—so you can experience them in their first virtual instantiation. The idea behind these “collaborations” was to give a space for the plenary to take shape in whatever way its authors saw fit—whether a conversation, a scripted exchange, or sometime more creative. The hope was that adjusting the format would better suit the virtual medium and likewise give a break from the individualist, professing, “Romantic genius” shape of usual plenaries. The first group of scholars was assembled from several scholars with exciting, recent work in (or very closely adjacent to) the Romantic period—Kerry Sinanan, …