CFP: Bloodwork: the politics of the body 1500-1900
CALL FOR PAPERS: Conference: Bloodwork: the politics of the body 1500-1900 May 6 and 7, 2011 at the University of Maryland, College Park Conference Organizers: Kimberly Coles , Ralph Bauer, Zita Nunes, Carla L. Peterson This conference will explore how conceptions of the blood one of the four bodily fluids known as humors in the early modern period permeate discourses of human difference from 1500 to 1900. Bloodwork begins with the assumption that the concept of race is still under construction and that our understanding of the term would profit through an engagement with its long, evolving, history. Specifically, it asks how fluid transactions of the body have been used in different eras and different cultures to justify existing social arrangements. Recent scholarship has opened up the question of the continuities and discontinuities between early modern and modern rationalizations of human difference. In early modern England, race commonly referred to family lineage, o