Latin Poetry in the Caribbean, with John Gilmore

Abstract

The role of Latin in Britain’s eighteenth-century Caribbean colonies was multifaceted. The ability to speak the language was a status symbol for the colonial elite, and Latin texts often served as attempted validations of the colonial project; for example, John Maynard wrote a lengthy Latin poem aiming to justify the slave trade in Barbados. But there was also the Jamaican poet Francis Williams, who achieved international fame as a writer of Latin verse and used his work to defend his right to be taken seriously as a Black poet. In this week’s episode, Dr John Gilmore of the University of Warwick speaks to Shivaike Shah about the light Francis Williams’s one surviving poem sheds on the lesser-known functions of Latin in the British colonies. He shares how Latin poetry became a conduit for arguments about the intellectual capacity of people of African descent and, by extension, about the illegitimacy of the slave trade.

Bibliography

open-source

John Gilmore, ‘Parrots, Poets and Philosophers: Language and Empire in the Eighteenth Century’, EnterText 2.2 (2003), 84-102

PAYWALLED

John Gilmore, ‘The British Empire and the Neo-Latin Tradition: The Case of Francis Williams’, in Barbara Goff (ed.), Classics and Colonialism (London: Duckworth, 2005), 92-106

John Gilmore, ‘“Sub herili venditur hasta”: An Early Eighteenth-Century Justification of the Slave Trade by a Colonial Poet’, in Yasmin Haskell & Juanita Feros Ruys (eds.), Latinity and Alterity in the Early Modern Period, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Vol. 360 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010), 221-239

John Gilmore, ‘Justaque Cupidine Lucri Ardentes [Burning with a Just Desire for Gain]: A Barbadian Poet Celebrates the Peace of Utrecht’, in Matthew Duques, Adam Goldwyn & Maya Feile Tomes (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 146-180

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.