#  Aphra Behn’s White Female Pen 

 



    ![eighteenth century landscape](/sites/g/files/omnuum4936/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/mahindra/files/eighteenthcentury.jpg?itok=4dajVrDE) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **October 23, 2025** 

 06:00PM - 07:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Barker Center, Room 133**  



 

 



 

## [EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES](/eighteenth-century-studies)

## SPEAKER: Joseph Rezek, Boston University

This talk examines the nominal emergence of the racial category “white” at the end of the seventeenth century through an analysis of Aphra Behn’s *Oroonoko* (1688). I argue that Behn fashioned a white authorial persona by presenting that book’s titular character as an illiterate, tragic African hero who needs a “female pen” like hers to preserve his story in the format of the printed codex. *Oroonoko* depicts racialized, New-World violence during the complex and uneven discursive shift that installed “white” as an identity category in the modern imagination. Behn claims the white author’s power over print, and the codex format specifically, I argue, when she dramatizes the brutal mutilation of Oroonoko’s body at the end of the novel – in a sequence that recalls a long history of colonial ideologies that fuse together ideas about print, violence, and discourses of racial difference.

### About the speaker

Joseph Rezek is Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Boston University. He is the author of *London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800-1850* (2015). This talk is drawn from his forthcoming book, *The Racialization of Print*, to be published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Seminar ](/event-type/seminar)
- [ Dialectical Thinking in the Humanities ](/seminars/dialectical-thinking-humanities)
- [ Eighteenth-Century Studies ](/seminars/eighteenth-century-studies)
 
 

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