Department Colloquium: Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Princeton) "The Affects of Manumission: Racial Melancholy and Roman Freedpersons"

Title: The Affects of Manumission: Racial Melancholy and Roman Rreedpersons

Abstract: This paper brings Anne Cheng's The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford 2000) to bear on the study of Roman manumission, and specifically on the subjectivization of the Roman freedperson. It argues that Roman practices of enslavement and manumission generate a species of trauma that is most profitably analyzed under the rubric of racial melancholy. In illustration of this argument, the chapter pursues a close reading of one scene in Petronius' Satyrica: Hermeros' desperately self-justifying account of how he entered and exited slavery.

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