This Distinguished Speaker Lecture offers a revisionist understanding of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter by discerning the disavowal of settler colonial “economies of dispossession” as the precondition for “American Renaissance” interpretations of the romance’s characters, themes, narrative, plot, and scene of writing. By placing the narrative's settler colonial strain of racial capitalism into conversation with Indigenous critical studies theorists, Black studies scholars, and critical ethnic studies scholars, Prof. Pease also intends to show how contemporary modes of predatory accumulation re-animate pre-national governance apparatuses of colonization, settlement, and racialization.
