"You Can't Sit With Us": Austen's Lady Karens and the British Slave Trade

Economic historians would describe ‘absentee enslavers’ as people who managed enslaved people and the land they toiled on while geographically and psychologically removed from the terror of the plantation. Based on Tre’s chapter in the upcoming Jane Austen and the Makings of Regency Whiteness (Sinanan and Osborne, 2026?), this event uses Jane Austen adaptations to reframe Austen’s women as absentee enslavers or in close association with that brutal system thousands of miles away.   

Focused on the erasure of absentee enslavement from regency romance, it provokes a richer discussion largely absent from spaces like English Literature and Austen Studies. With 40% of compensation claims being women (Hall et al, 2014: 36) characters like Emma Woodhouse may also allegorise the lives of women from landed families in the records – especially as twenty-nine National Trust (2020: 5) properties are tied to successful claims.   

This event will illustrate those links between empire and Austen’s characters on screen. Characters such as Lady Catherine de Bourgh were the original Karens. It is time producers and broadcasters do right when adapting the regency, showing the anti-Blackness of the economy that helped forge Victorian Britain.   

Tré Ventour-Griffiths is a multiply-disabled historian, creative writer, and sociologist with interests in Black histories, race and disability, pop culture and insurgent politics. His PhD research uses creative storytelling methods to consider a multigenerational story of Caribbean Northants Post-1942. Tré’s works in popular culture looks at representation, identity, and political commentaries in the history, writing, and development of popular entertainment namely comics, film, and TV. At the moment, one of his projects uses Marvel media to develop new theories around microaggressions and other forms of social harm. Tré has written and presented on work including regency romance, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Peaky Blinders, superhero films, and the Disney Princess Phenomenon.