Race and Regency: The Lab and the Pod with Dr. Patricia Matthew and Shruti Jain

Welcome to the Race and Regency pod, a supplement to the Race and Regency lab. This podcast brings the public, scholars and cultural critics together to reimagine our understandings of race in the 19th century. I'm your host, Shruti Jain. In today's episode, we're joined by Dr. Patricia Matthew, the director of the Race and Regency lab. Dr. Matthew is an associate professor of English, Montclair State University. In this episode, we talk about the lab, the podcast and what you can expect from us in the future episodes. Thank you, Dr. Matthew for joining us. Let's just jump into it, maybe with you telling us a little bit about the Race and Regency lab. Okay. First of all, thank you so much for being our producer and being on this experimental journey with us. I'm really grateful for your time and expertise and I really respect that you came to me at the conference and said, the lab needs a podcast and I'm the person to do it. That's exactly what you're supposed to do, right? See something, envision it, put yourself forward and you wrote that great proposal. I'm really glad that we're doing this. I came up with the idea of the Race and Regency lab at a particular political moment in the world and in my own career, I had been fortunate enough to win back to back to back fellowships. I was at the SUNY Buffalo, they had a diversity fellowship that brought mid-career faculty to the university to work on our own projects, but also to develop programming that would focus on questions that we might broadly put under DEI, even though I should say I don't love that phrase. I was there for a year, I was invited for a second year and then I won a fellowship with the National Humanities Center. And so I sort of went from the world of the pandemic to the world of the National Humanities Center, which is this kind of lovely oasis in the woods and the research triangle, and I was writing this book that I'm writing now about sugar, gender and history, and in the middle of all of that, Bridgerton happened. And I realized that what people were hungry for around Bridgerton and the opportunity it opened were the questions that I was always wanting my students to ask in class about history and race and gender, and at the same time that it was kind of forcing a lot of people to reimagine or reconsider what they thought the past looked like. It's not because Bridgerton got things right, but it opened up all of these questions about what is possible, like is this all imagination, what's actually going on at the time? I've done a lot of work after my first book, written, unwritten, diversity in the hidden truths of tenure came out, or I was traveling to different colleges and campuses and then during the pandemic online, talking to groups of people about the principles of equity and inclusion. And those conversations tended to go well, but I found that too often I was speaking to the people who already agreed with me that I really didn't have a way to track what happened after my conversation. I was learning a great deal and I think I reflected back to people of color what they were experiencing in higher education, but I wasn't really sure if that was the best way to have or the most interesting way or sustainable way to have that conversation. And so all of those things were happening at the same time and at the National Humanities Center, I thought I really want something that brings those two things or three or four things together. My real interest in a meaningful conversation about equity and inclusion that has to be rooted in understanding history, which people don't want to talk about in a quote unquote DEI workshop. They want to get to the checklist. There were all of this interest, I can't tell you how many invitations I got to come and talk about race and the regency, race and history, Jane Austen, Wedgewood, sugar bowls, any number of things. Not so much Bridgerton, but it clearly had heightened people's interest and imagination. And I found in those conversations a few things at once. When the topic was about something that people were actually already interested in, and they were curious about it, the fact that there was some pleasure in watching these things actually made it more organic to have conversations that people might normally avoid. That was the foundation for the lab. I didn't automatically think of it as a lab. I wasn't sure. I didn't want a center. I didn't want the race and regency center because I felt that it would be too event focused. If you have a center, I feel like you got to produce a lot of stuff. And I really wanted whatever we did to feel organic and to fit in with what people wanted and what our resources were, I thought an institute was a little bit too policy oriented like we were going to produce white papers. And so the lab as a metaphor worked because I thought, really, I want to know what happens when you put fans, scholars, museum professionals, librarians, all of the different people who interact with history, what happens if you put us all in a room and we talk about the thorny issue of race, what's possible, and how can I cultivate a space where people could come and be curious without worrying too much about being judged harshly, where people of color could just come together and talk about what we love, about whatever it is that we are watching without feeling like we then had to give a little seminar on diversity and inclusion and what are artists doing with the past? So many contemporary black artists that I'm interested in have taken up the iconography of abolitionist culture, for example, and they keep returning to it. So Shonda Rhimes could have told that story about anything, but she picked Julia Quinn's novels. There are no people of color in those novels, right? There are none at all. Like, wow, you really did that. But she went there, and so have other artists and storytellers. So I just wanted this, I say just. I really wanted a space where all of those people could come together, where we could think about a broad array of topics related to race and the regency. I wanted us to think of the regency as a broad period with a long tail and maybe an early pre-regency era. I know it's just really technically a short amount of time, but we keep returning to it. We keep returning to it and we mimic it, and we all do. I think when we think of England, a lot of people think either of contemporary England or they think of this moment, even if that's not the moment they're thinking of. If you tell someone you specialize in, you know, if I say, "Oh, I specialize in early 19th century literature," they'll say, "Oh, Austin and the Brontes." And while they may overlap, England is different in those two different periods, right? So I just wanted a space where we could talk about all of these things. And I trusted that there would be people who might feel defensive in some ways, but maybe their curiosity would overcome their defensiveness. If I could cultivate a space with other people where you didn't have to have all of the answers and that you could think about and sort of deal with what it means to enjoy a period that is steeped in a history that is violent, not pretty, for the most privileged, for the most wealthy, and that maybe taught us some things about desire and love, that lessons that we have had to unlearn, but that doesn't mean we don't still enjoy the fantasy of them. So that's what we're about. That's how we started. Lovely. How exciting to be a part of this now for me. I guess we could think about the podcast now as a supplement, as an accompaniment to the lab. Yeah. How do you think the podcast fits into this? Well, the reason, so I'm also, I mean, I know that I know what podcasts are. I listen to them, sometimes I'm interviewed for them, but I really, and this is why I'm relying on you. I'm fascinated with how they fit in the culture at large. If there's so many of them, everyone always talks about their favorite podcasts. I don't have one, by the way. I might listen to something if I'm washing dishes or sometimes I'm listening to things. I'm like, is that a podcast? I'm like, I don't know if that's a podcast or it's just a radio show. But the reason I like your idea for producing our podcast is because it lends itself to the energy of the lab. It's very mobile, it's nimble. Right now, we have plans for you to interview Mephalinda and Bugodi, Kim Hall, they have books coming out. And that seems like a really natural thing for a podcast that focuses on the race and agency lab with a professor as its director to do. I could also imagine, however, a podcast where you talk to two or three people about some element of pop culture that they're all obsessed with. And there can be a fun, wide-ranging conversation about costume design, for example. One of the listening sessions that we conducted with funds from the New Jersey Council for the humanities, we had an incubation year. And in that incubation year, I got to listen and hosted listening sessions with different groups of people who were interested in the region seating. And one of those was about costume, costume, dress and design. And I would love a podcast where some of those people came back together and talked about what they love about a costume or a period of customization. And without it feeling like we have to be pedantic about the number of stitches, right? I have strong opinions, it's not a regency, but I have strong opinions about the dresses, the costumes and the Gilbert age, for example, on HBO. And I can imagine, oh, those colors mattered in that moment. I want everything to be muted and understated and garish and there's a reason for that and it would be fun to watch or hear people debate that. So that's one kind of thing I would like the podcast I think would be interesting for people, to bring the thing that they love and get to talk to one another in a space where we don't worry about expertise. We just are interested in what makes us interested. For scholars who are interested in public facing work, the podcast could be a way for them to build the muscle of talking about their research in a public way. It's much more difficult than people realize. It's not just a matter of writing an essay for larb or for public books. It's actually a skill and it has its own methodology. And so I can imagine a podcast where you maybe put a couple of people in conversation, someone who's an expert in this and someone who's just started. I would love to see artists like Mickey Payne who wrote "Tide" and "Protest". I always get the title a little wrong and "Sex Lies and Sensibility". There are all of these romance writers who are visiting the past or revisiting the past. It might be fun to talk about the work that they do. But at the same time, I think that for people like myself or people I know who are writing monographs and in progress, this is what I'm doing with my book, could really be an opportunity for them to think about the book and maybe reignite their passion for it if they're stuck. So I think all of that, I think all of that is possible. Yeah. Very exciting. Yeah, I really like how you see podcasts as a super fluid form that make all of these things possible. We can do an embodied version of a traditional book review, which just changes everything, right? Scholarship, if it is embodied, especially when it's people of color, women of color, and they speak as scholars on a podcast, it changes the notion of academia and all of that. So there's that. And then we can do something in the next few episodes where we listen together to say a two-minute section of Bridgerton, right? Three of us listen together and then we talk about that. I'm also drawn to podcasts for the same reason and to the regency for the same reason, because it's really fluid in those ways also. Yeah, I really love this idea, the fluidity of it. In multiple directions, as I mentioned to you when we were talking beforehand, I think that the notion of expertise can get into the way of open and engaging conversations where we tend to genuflect to the person who sounds the most expert. And I think what I hope with the podcast is that, as I said before, that what we should be expert in is the thing that we like. And then, hopefully, people will bring that and curiosity to everything we do in the lab. So one of the things you ask, and I'd like to say it here, are there inflammatory topics that we might want to avoid? And this is the experimental part of the lab, and maybe that's why the metaphor works, because I think it's the question. I just finished editing two Austin editions for Penguin, "Pride and Prejudice in Northern Air Abbey." I'm also editing Mansfield Park. And everyone would expect somebody who writes about abolition, slavery, race, and material culture to edit Mansfield Park. That's the book that fits. "Pride and Prejudice" doesn't fit under that. "Northern Air Abbey" doesn't necessarily fit under that. It's the same novelist. It's the same Jane Austen, and England is vibrant with all of these different debates at the time. And we've been very happy to understand that the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, we don't say so much the Haitian Revolution or the abolition of the slave trade. They happened, and she knew. And I think the question then is, how do we balance that, knowing that, with an affection for work that is actually expertly written, at the same time that we're thinking about the cost of those stories? I'm reading Dionne Brand's book, and she talks about the relationship between the reader, it's called "Salvage," readings from the rec, and she revisits the literary canon. And she talks about how, to pick up a 19th century novel as a reader, regardless of your identity, is to engage with its politics, its ideals, the narrative it offers, and the way that it represents individuals, even if on one level, that might also repel you or exclude you. And I think that that question is a really interesting one. I told someone, I said, I don't want people to think that they don't get to like any of the novels or the regency period. I do think it's important to think about the difference between fantasy and history, and who gets to tell history, and what we do with it. And so how do we have both of those things at once? So I hope the podcast gives people space to think about that out loud together. Yeah. I mean, in a world that hardly allows us to think about two things together. Doing this is especially a public humanities project of such great importance in that it's creating the possibility of this new kind of a public space where we can come together and hold our pleasures and things that strip us together. I love that language there, right? Because both of those things happen in everything. We're making complicated choices all the time. And so one of the things that happened, and I don't, I mean, I'm talking about Bridgerton and Austin a lot, because that's where my head is, but I think this happens in myriad ways. I was struck by how many people, so Bridgerton came out on Christmas Day, and my piece came out the same day, sent me in advance, and I wrote it. I was surprised, and that's when Twitter was still kind of not such a toxic place. And I gained a lot from the community there. I was surprised at how many black women wrote to me privately to tell me that they enjoyed Bridgerton, and they were so excited about it, and they actually liked 19th century literature, but they either felt like they had to abandon it to be politically current or could not admit it for fear that they would be judged for worshipping empire and worshipping whiteness. I remember watching Meghan Markle get married and all of these black women suddenly wearing fascinators, and we all tuned in to watch this. And there were criticisms, you know, we were watching this woman, you know, participate in, she's embracing empire and so on and so forth, but we were also wanting to see what she had on. We wanted to see who was there, we, you know, and I think that we can do both of those things at once. So what, what drew you to podcasting, you've mentioned the fluidity of it and think of it as a new public space, but like what made you say this is how I'm going to spend my time? Well, I think it's the form itself, I think it's the form, the medium, and the fluidity that I mentioned earlier is a big part of that. I think there's something really uniquely intimate about the medium, you put the headphone in your ears, and it's so close to you, right? It's so uniquely intimate. I think it enables bonds amongst listeners and producers that really constantly push back against these ways of relating to one another that we have in the world, earlier when you were talking about us being careful in how we engage in things. I was thinking how the cruelty of the world also strips us of the capacity to love something, to enjoy something. So we have to teach each other how to enjoy something in this cruel world, right? And I think podcasts have a plasticity where we can immerse ourselves in these economies of pleasure, of sound that allow us to do this. That draws me to podcasts as a form, as a medium, as the relations that it makes possible. Yeah, and it seems to me, like in its best forms, like I've been talking about individual podcasts, but also group conversations. I don't know this. Maybe tell me what you think. It feels to me that people turn to podcasts in a different way that they turn to other forms and spaces and maybe because it's dialogue-based, but they turn to podcasts to be provoked and affirmed and to have new information, to understand mysteries. I'm using the term mystery really loosely. Yeah, I like the plasticity of it. I was just thinking, I watched this Netflix documentary, it doesn't matter what it was about. I was just thinking, oh, yeah, I bet there's a whole podcast somewhere, a woman disappeared from a boat, a cruise ship. And I thought, oh, if I were a podcast person, I would love to hear from the different kinds of people who could weigh in on what happened and what was most likely to have happened. The documentary, it came to us pre-packaged, the interview, the family, the interview, some of the workers on the boat, the interviewed witnesses at the FBI interview, and it was very compelling. More compelling would be the kinds of people who are really interested in all of the things that happen on a ship. You'd have a, someone had a sentence, like a ship is its own country, you're out. I'm like, wow, I can imagine a series of podcasts where people could learn about everything around in order to better understand the thing that happened, which sounds like a tragedy, it's probably not the best metaphor for the lab, but that's what I watched most recently. I think of, like, every time I watch a series, there's a podcast afterwards that offers to give me some insight from the people that I wouldn't have necessarily paid attention to while I was watching it, almost always the director and the writer. And they were like, when this happened, we were thinking X. So it also deepens our understanding of things that we're consuming in a way that's different than reading a review in the New York Times or reading an essay about it in The New Yorker or arguing about it on some, you know, online message board. I guess, I guess then that is what leads us into public humanities, right? Because when we do all of this, get together after watching a show after reading a book and do all of this, this fits into the public humanities discourse in that way. Well, like, yeah, I mean, I think that and you can speak to this too. It's one of the questions I have for you. Maybe we can start with you. Like, how do you think it fits into public? Because a lot of people talk about public humanities as a thing like academics talking in public, and I don't think it's that. Well, I mean, I'm not going to say assortatively about what public humanities is or something. I mean, it is many things. I've been reading recently, the Journal, New Journal, Public Humanities, where Rupakarism has like tried to draw a different genealogy of public humanities that goes away from like the popular understanding of the next scenario of public humanities to thinking about how people of color, women of color have been doing humanities in the public sphere because they have had to. But anyway, I think in some ways, the coinage of the term public humanities as a discipline or subdiscipline method is a response to an attack on the humanities, a particular attack on the humanities or the crisis of the humanities as we like to panic about. In North America and the world at large today, we do face a renewed sense of precarity. As we've been talking, I look to the affordances of the podcast form to respond to these precarities to see how the humanities, specifically literary studies, and more specifically the Regency have historically responded to or interacted with disciplinary, discursive precarities. And of course, not to mention these precarities are reflective of, representative of the very real violence that people have endured in those periods and continue to endure now. So I think through the race and Regency lab and through the race and Regency pod, what we're trying to envision new ways in which people can be organized. We can be organized. We can think about the past, innovative ways in which we can look at the past. This is not a surprise to anyone that there's a certain obsession with going back to the past that we're engaged in right now. And the race and Regency lab and the race and Regency pod, I think we'll make it so clear that there isn't a pure, white past to go back to, never existed. And that's such an important intervention in the soundscape of America. I'm imagining us being live and having our podcast published, released in the world on Spotify, on Apple Podcast and whatnot, and your type Regency or your type race. And there we are, you know, we're there saying that we've always been there. We've always loved and we've always hated and we've always been persecuted and resisted and been in collectives. We've done all of this and we're here now. Yeah. Yes. Yes. I really like the way that you sort of brought us forward, right, to where we are now, this idea that in some ways, women of color have always been public facing and they've always engaged in public facing work because we've always had to. And some of that has to be as a way and it's also caused some tension, I think, because the gatekeeping models of the world that we live in had very prescribed ideas about how we could talk about what we knew, the questions we could ask and how we ask those questions. And the thing I hear you saying is this idea of a podcast with a very fluid idea of community where the podcast is a springboard for conversations in various registers, bringing together different people who might not otherwise be together in a dialogue. I've been thinking this a lot because I'm getting ready to submit my book to my editor and a wise man told me that a book is a proposal. It's finished, it's done, but it's a proposal into how to think about something. It's not necessarily the definitive statement about how to think about it. And maybe that's a useful way to think about the podcast, right, it's an invitation and a proposal for how we think about a history and we're generationally different. And so I'm also very curious to know how many people are still shocked at the idea that the past was multiracial. Okay, I'm sure there are pockets maybe where people are like, wait, there are people of color in the past, but it's kind of shocking to think that that could still be new to people, you know. But I think the thing that you did say and I think is really that I'm really interested in is how agency operated, right, when I taught my first abolitionist lit class, I had a hard time with my students understanding because they kept calling the enslaved people African American and they think of slavery as a uniquely American institution. And so we're talking about British abolition because the British enslaved people, for them I think it was this like it was a kind of jarring way to understand a world that they had considered holy white, and that was 10 years ago. So I think one of the questions I'm curious, and maybe this is something our listeners will give us in feedback, like how much of that understanding of history is brand new. And what about that history needs more texture to it. Yeah, yeah, I guess, I guess, yes, in the last five years, especially so much so much husband said about the past and the very real existence of people of color in the past. But I think what's still shocking at least what I've seen in classrooms and people of color have full stories and full lives that are not just bad, I think that part is still something to digest. Yeah, yeah, I understand that I was just writing the Folger is having exhibit next year. It focuses on Black women Shakespeare and it goes to the 1600s, but it also goes into the 19th century. And so I was writing the catalog exhibit language for sugar bowl that will be in the exhibit. And one thing I said is that the archive is largely silent about the experiences of Black women in the early 19th century. And then I in the catalog copy I pivot and what we know we know because of these scholars of color and then I list Black women historians who have brought the archives forward. And in many ways in bringing the archives forward. They are also bringing forward and I think that you said this before and maybe one of the challenges is the idea that there is agency and resiliency without sentimentalizing at what cost. Yeah, I'll stop there. I have more thoughts on that. I'm just thinking I'll say this I was thinking about in I have a book chapter about Amma Asante's film Belle about Elizabeth Dido Belle and her cousin Mansfield's niece thinking about historical accuracy which I hardly ever do when I look at a movie. I'm like it's a movie it's trying to tell a story, but what the inaccuracies are telling us about how this artist of color sees agency love and romance and courtship and how much Amma Asante needs to see that that happened in the world to the point where some of what they do with history is just really I'll just say complicated to be politic. But it's like oh yeah you it's not just that it didn't happen it's that you are saying that it happened in this way because you need to believe the thing that we all want to believe is that everything wasn't pain and suffering and abject horror that there was there were moments of joy and grace and people of color moved through spaces that were not all about the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. So I would be interested so you talked about what Drida podcasting you talked about how it fits in public humanities discourse. I think I think listeners should know about your research and professional work. In my professional work I'm really driven by entanglements I think I've been thinking about how podcasts fit into a professional work I guess which is a dissertation now I'm a PhD candidate at SUNY Binghamton I'm really driven by entanglements entanglements of knowledge systems people relations and so on when my dissertation I focus on the entanglements of race and caste in enlightenment literature and culture. I'm drawn to podcasting as a medium where we can explore these entanglements in so many different ways. In 2020 when I'd started the PhD program I took a seminar with Dr. Lisa Yen on community engagement where we explored a lot of different archives of immigrant history in the United States particularly spent a lot of time with the tenement museums digital archives your story our story tenement museum and Lori Seidman-Happen and one thing led to another and we started thinking about this archive a lot more. This is 2020 so in the face of rising anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence of 2020 we asked ourselves what kind of participatory public humanities project we could do which would be an intervention in the way in which immigrant people specifically immigrant women's histories are consumed and produced. So we collaborated with the tenement museum in Manhattan and the American Civic Association in Broom County New York and with the support of two different grants from Humanities New York we have two seasons now of the podcast called Immigrants Wake America. On that there have been other writings that have come to flourish I guess or we've thought about other things based on that I'm now writing something on sonic capacity and how podcasts make sonic capacity as a practice possible to be imagined in the world which is coming out with the in the Handbook of Humanities podcasting. At Binghamton I created and hosted a podcast called Confluence Humanities in the Public Sphere for the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities IASH where we just explored a lot of different public humanities projects through this podcast which was a public humanities project that kind of highlighted the different projects in Binghamton and helped grad students and professors engage in each other's work and see what public humanities is really doing in this area specifically. So in these ways and I think you mentioned archives earlier I think podcasting is this unique kind of it changes how we archive it's so dynamic as a medium that it produces new possibilities for archiving and really drawn to that in the 18th century in the Regency and beyond. The range of your interest in research are fascinating it just sort of spans time right and enlightenment the Regency to contemporary I say contemporary because everything feels contemporary if it's not you know 1790 to 1830. That's very interesting and exciting I'm really glad we have you. The thing I've loved about the lab thus far. So we had our launch at the John Carter Brown Library that focused on a number of objects most particularly the plantation the plant the plan for the Belvedere estate and I spent time in the library looking at the estate map and then studying maps and thinking about imperial cartography. The thing I loved about the launch was that it brought so many different kinds of people together it was to me like really talk about embodied. So we had scholars get literary scholars art historians historian historians novelists journalists and we all just spent the day thinking about what it means to think about this object from different perspectives. And this year our collaboration with Amherst College has brought together a global seminar of 12 readers are now down to 10 who've been reading Cheryl Harris's whiteness as properties sort of key text for critical race theory. It's a mix of activists professional team and museum professionals scholars writers and we met in overall we met online in this winter time and then in June and Cheryl Harris joined us. We talked to her the thing I've loved about it is and I think it's the thing something like the lab makes possible is that all of the different registers that we think in looking at a set of questions that emerge from people's reading as opposed to being foisted on them by someone our director we read and we met and we talked about what we were reading the ethics of the lab is that anyone who participates or collaborates with us I want them to leave feeling replenished and not depleted. And so I wanted to keep the pressure low I wanted to bring in people who were not academics who were thinking about these things in real time and real spaces and to create a space where academics could both know and also be curious. I think more than what we'll do next it's how we'll do it and it is about that it's not even that we'll necessarily do something completely different and completely new but we'll do it in such a way that people have an opportunity to pause and really reflect instead of performing a politics that might not even be particularly politically efficacious in this moment supporting a bright doctoral student who is producing a podcast who has your credentials and creating a space for you to do this work is not just about something that you do for the lab using air quotes but hopefully that it will offer you an opportunity to grow and expand in ways that feel natural to your interest and your expertise and so you don't have to perform you can just be in this genre and in this space that matters a great deal to you it's important to me that this is a space for people of color not just people of color but a space for people of color to just be we don't have to train white people all the time about how to think the way we think or be the scold or the political conscience in the room I just want us to get to do our work together and support one another and doing our work in as many ways as possible I have lots of ideas other people have ideas I'm always looking for collaboration but more than anything it's how we do the work and and how we are how we come together it's very it's very very important I'm going to say that this is a not not the end of the episode not the end of the podcast but like an opening for everything that's to come in the podcast in the lab and this was just lovely thank you for allowing me to do this and thank you for talking with me also awesome awesome thank you so much excited this is so exciting I thank you for listening to the race and regency part for details about the lab and Trisha's work please see our show notes attached here see you next time