Damienne Scott

Welcome to the Race and Regency Pod!

Today, we are joined by Damienne Scott, who is a Professor, scholar, critic, and advocate. She is the founder and moderator of the community Black Girl Loves Jane, a Facebook group devoted to promoting and celebrating diversity within the Austen community. Dami supports an inclusive online environment for readers and lovers of Austen and demonstrates how people with different cultural identities and who come from various backgrounds find meaning and importance in the writings and stories of Austen.

Dami has conducted interviews on her work for various outlets and been spotlighted by the Jane Austen Summer Program on multiple occasions. She has also published “Sanditon and the Pineapple Emoji Craze” in Persuasions Online.

To learn more about the Race and Regency Lab, visit https://www.raceandregency.org/

The Race and Regency Pod works as a dynamic sonic space to lend an ear to all things Race and Regency. Using the intimacy, accessibility, and fluidity of the medium, this podcast brings together the public, artists, curators, librarians, scholars, and cultural critics who share their passion for questions of race in this period. Unlike ideas and engagements that can often stay confined behind academic paywalls, this podcast facilitates space for community members and connoisseurs of the Regency era to think together and build together. 

Listening with and to a range of people who speak in varied accents and tones, The Race and Regency Pod works as a practice in embodied scholarship. We imagine what enthusiasm and engagement sound like when directed towards sharing, community building, resistance, and self-expression. This podcast will house diverse conversations that expand the conception of the Regency era thematically, geographically, and temporally, by considering how we inherit formulations of race from this period and engage with them now.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to the Race in Regency Pod. I'm your host and producer, Shruti Jain. Today we are joined by Damien Scott, who is a professor, scholar, critic, and advocate. She's best known as the founder and moderator of the community Black Girl Loves Jane, a Facebook group devoted to promoting and celebrating diversity within the Austin community. Damie supports an inclusive online environment for readers and lovers of Austin and demonstrates how people with different cultural identities and who come from various backgrounds find meaning and importance in the writings and stories of Austin. Hi Damie, uh thank you for joining us on the Race and Regency pod. Hello, thank you for inviting me. I'm so glad to be here. Um maybe you could get us started by talking about Black Girl Loves Jane, um, the story of how that came about, how you got here, what what the community is and how it has changed and grown in the last few years.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Okay, so Black Girl Loves Jane at first was really like an ego project, I guess, of mine, where I was going to just like use, I was going to use Facebook as a way to blog. So I would tell something that happened that week in my life and use a quote from Jane Austen to kind of bounce off of and then ramble on for however long I was going to ramble. Um, and so I did that a few years, um, not as consistently as I probably should have, should have. And then COVID happened. And so during the time of COVID happened, also George Floyd happened. DEI became a big thing in corporations, um, in schools, but it also um spurred a conversation um with Jasnah, and so Jasna decided to do a special edition of their Persuasions Online um magazine. And also during that time, Sanditon, um, the PBS uh series had just came out or had been out, um, and there was some debate about whether or not they were going to bring it back, and a lot of people were using the pineapple emoji as a symbol of the love affair between Sidney Parker and Charlotte Haywood. And there were discussions online about how appropriate was the pineapple to be used in that way, especially if you had seen the first year and you had seen, or hopefully you had seen or recognized the sim the symbolism of that pineapple, dealt with the colonialism and imperialism and um the enslavement that was going on during that time. And so there was this great debate about whether people be using that as an emoji to symbolize um Sanitant. So first I made a comment on about it on Facebook, and then when I saw that Jasna was going to do a special edition, I decided that I was going to write an article um talking about the emoji craze and why people should be offended and why we should be using it. And so then Black Girl Loves Jane kind of shifted then because then it was um becoming more of my platform to encourage, to discuss, to debate the place of people of color during Regency in real life, and then of course Regency during Jane Austen's novels and other classic um works, and so that's kind of what the transition has been, and so that's really what I focus on now. So anytime I can see or hear where people of color are going to be invited into the Regency world, even though they shouldn't probably have to be invited because they were already there. Um then I try to promote that among my followers who still may not recognize or completely understand why people of color should be a part of the Jane Hood and should be invited to participate.

SPEAKER_02 4:26

Fabulous. What an arc it's been for Black Girl Loves Jane. Yes, yeah. Um, well, you said people of color doing regency, and um I would be remiss to not mention the one big piece of pop culture that really has drawn attention to people of color doing regency in the last couple of years. The big show, Netflix show, Bridgetin. Yes, Bridgetin, yes. Maybe maybe we could just begin with your thoughts on the show itself, the last four seasons of it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

So I was not aware of the novels, I've never read the novels to this day. Um, I was just online, really. I don't even know what I was doing, but it it popped up there was gonna be this Jane Austen-esque series on Netflix, and it was gonna have people of coloring it. I was like, oh, this is fabulous, you know. So um doing a little um due diligence and researching and found out that it was a romance that were based on romance novels, and of course, had no people of color in it, um, in the actual novels. Um, but of course, with Sean the Rhymes, we're gonna have some people of colors, so I was really excited. Um, and that was the same year, actually, that roughly around the same year, because we were still in COVID, that December is when Bridgetton came out, and so I was truly excited about it because it really did um allow the impossible, quote unquote, possible to happen to really allow people to see that people of color were a part of Regency, that this was not some fantasy. Now, of course, people, a lot of people, particularly Eurocentric people, really did think like, how can we have this show where we have a black queen and we have you know Asian people over here and South Asian people here? How can we have that? That's not really England, and so then became part of my my job with Black Rology. It's like, yeah, that was England, yeah, there were some black people there, some Asian people there, yep, it surely was, you know, you know, and really like push this idea that maybe you need to rediscover your history in England because clearly you have paintings with people of color in them, you have a whole uh period of clothing that was inspired by the imperialism of India. I mean, like, come on, so yeah, there were people of color. So Bridgenton really excited me because it allowed the dream to become reality for so many people of color who hid or wanted to hide their love for Regency, love for Austin. I mean, I am the only little black girl um in my circle, maybe my friend a little bit, my best friend a little bit, but I'm the one of the group who's very invested in this this period and and and and the reading of these books, and not just Austin, but classical literature in general, and um classic in the sense of um particularly British, to to be really invested in that period, but then not able to see myself in that period, even though at the beginning of my studies I faintly recognized that people of color were there. It just became so wonderful with Bridgerton to see that. And the fact that we were not people, particularly black people, were not people who were enslaved, that we had just as much equity and equality as everybody else in the town, because it is fantasy. I mean, because we do know what the period was, um, if you know history, but to be able to live that fantasy and nobody think about race and nobody think about um enslavement or imperialism or anything like that, but just romance and people trying to live their lives, it was a great, great um discovery for me. And I you know ingested the series really quickly when it came out, and I've been looking, you know, ever since making my judgments on it from there.

SPEAKER_02 8:42

Well, the last uh the most recent season just came out like two months ago. What did you think about this one? Because this one's a bit more complicated.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

I like this season. This is probably now my favorite season. Side note from Queen Charlotte. Queen Charlotte is it, it's everything. Um, but it's not the Bridgetton series, it's a series on its own. Um, so but this season, season four, is probably my favorite. Um, because I just really do enjoy the slow burn, the romance, the Cinderella story of it all. I like the scene, the masking of not only you know Sophie, but also um the masking of Benedict. Um, Benedict's been wearing a mask for a long time, the last four seasons, for those people who have seen the show. Um, he's been wearing a mask for four seasons, and so has Sophie been wearing a mask of being as a servant when really she's not a servant. Um, she's upper crust just like uh Benedict. And so I like the storytelling of the unmasking of these two characters so that they can see each other. Also, I like the story of the up and uh upstairs, downstairs. I like seeing the servants because we really know they were the ones running the ship. I mean, we know that those grand houses and those beautiful clothes would be nothing without the servants who were crafting them, cleaning them, creating them, creating the food. So that we were then all like in awe about, but the the people in the aristocracy had nothing to do with it. It was all the people below stairs. So I really enjoy that up-down stairs thing. Um, and then so I so I just enjoyed that story. I think it was better written um than most of the other seasons. And so I also enjoyed seeing Francesca give a different kind of uh diversity, um, with her, I believe, being on the on the spectrum and and and dealing with things in a different way from the rest of her family, and how she gets to go through that arc of you know being married, being happy, and then now she's a widow, and how she deals with that. And then, of course, you know, the it's coming up, you know, in season five that she might be in a lesbian relationship with the cousin. And then I did before that I liked season two. Season one I liked because I'm sorry, is that okay? Yeah, season one I liked because it was the first, and so I had nothing to compare it to.

SPEAKER_02 11:17

Yeah, I feel the same way. I mean, Queen Charlotte is the undisputed it's it's just so good.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

I'm just like it's perfect, yeah. This is perfect, and and it always kills me when I see um on online, people are like, Queen Charlotte 2 is coming out. I'm like, why do you need a Queen Charlotte 2? You don't need a Queen Charlotte 2 to mess it up. Queen Charlotte is perfect in itself, and you know how it's going to end. You already know how it's going to end because you're looking at Bridget, you know what's gonna happen, but Queen Charlotte's just perfect by itself, and I can look at it anytime, any day, and I'm just like, this is so good, so good.

SPEAKER_02 11:57

It's a it's a great show, it's a great show, and it's also such a great prequel.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

Yes, I that's another thing. Um, because with season one, you know, I did a a power, I did a presentation on because there was so much hullabaloo about Queen Charlotte being black and this idea of can she possibly be black and you know, all this thing. Then of course that was roughly around the same time when Meghan Markle was gonna marry uh Prince Harry. So it was like, you know, they were like, oh, the first black princess, and then people were like, no, there was another one, and I'm like, who is this person? And then, of course, did you know my little research um about Queen Charlotte? And so I did some presentations on it because people were really having a hard time, not only with Queen Charlotte, but just this idea of black people being it or people of color, not just black people, people of color being the aristocracy. Truly, of course, then Bridget didn't have to be a fantasy because there's no way we could have actually had a Queen Charlotte who was of a person of African descent. There was no way we could have these people of color that had money um during that time frame. And so when I did my presentation, I really wanted people to understand that, first of all, the possibility was there for Queen Charlotte to be in existence as a person of color, and that there were people of color during that time. And so one person that I read when I was doing research said that Queen Charlotte and Bridgeting itself was trying to pander to the masses, right? That they were trying doing this DEI moment, pander to the masses, and this is of course not reality. And I said, Well, if this is pandering to the masses, so be it, you know, because the masses are there are people of color living in this world and living, particularly because Bridgetin takes place in England, living in England. So if Queen Charlotte is pandering to the masses, it's about time. Yeah, it's about time we see people of color on the screen during those times and other times because they really were there. And this idea that we have to continue to whitewash or rewrite history to pander to the Eurocentric belief system that people of color were not there, that's where history is really being disordered. That is where really this is not historically accurate. It wasn't all Eurocentric. There were people who were people of color who had businesses and jobs and who were not enslaved, and those stories now need to be told. And so if those stories are are being told, even if it's through the fantasy of Bridgetton, if it allows for other stories to be told, because I think once Bridgestone got started, then we had Christmas Carol that had people of color in it, and then we had we've had you know Miss Austin's sisters. Um Miss Austin had people of color in it, and all these uh and pride and uh persuasion on Netflix, even though people are not crazy about that version. That is what Bridgison did was release this idea that people of color did exist during that time, and Austin probably did see a couple of them, maybe not in Hampshire, but she's if she saw them in Bath, then um I was all for it. So I'm very thankful for Bridgetton and what it what it's done, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:30

Um and what Queen Charlotte's done too. Totally. I mean, if this is pandering, calling me pandered, right? Yeah, calling me panded. Well, you you alluded to the next season of Bridgeton that's coming out, and I really wanted to ask you some things about how you feel about the reception to the season. Of course, you said you're um looking forward to how delicately they're going to play out Francesca's character and then her romance plot with her cousin-in-law. You said that, but also maybe I I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the reception of the announcement of Francesca and Michaela's season, which has uh, I mean, the announcement has been received with celebration and suspicion and frustration and uh homophobia.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

Yes, yeah. So, of course, okay, we just finished season four, but the hinting started coming at the end of, of course, season three, because Francesca gets married to Mr. Sterling, and then she meets Michaela. Um, and so that's when the the celebration, but also the suspicion and the homophobia and all of that started happening before even season four was even filmed. Season three, they were like, oh my god, you know. I had it's it's twofold. I mean, first of all, I have never read the books. So for many people from things that I've read online, um, many people were very invested in Francesca and very invested in the infertility story in the books. So, in the books, according to what I've read, because again I haven't read the books, she is she has an infertility problem. Many people related to her and that story. And then, of course, well, in the books, then she does meet Michael, who is John's cousin, who becomes the heir since John um John dies, and they fall in love, of course, and get married and have babies. So um, many people related to the the pain of infertility, the pain of, of course, from losing her husband, and then of course the happily arrived. So I can understand to some degree where people are like, Well, how can I now relate to Francesca? Because if she is going to be in a lesbian relationship, how are we gonna have kids? Because this is 1816, and as much fantasy as it is, in reality, there are no gay marriages that are happening. Um, so how they're gonna maneuver and get away on that, that's gonna be an interesting point. What lying or things they might have to do to get accepted is gonna be interesting. Because even with um side note, even with season four, with Sophie, they have to lie about her heritage. How they're gonna lie to the town with Francesca and Michaela, I have no idea. Even in England, Bridgerton, where some lines can't be crossed. There's just just some free love that's not supposed to be happening, even in Bridgerton, where we have black people and Asian people, South Asian people, and and this people with disabilities got everybody's got money, but that is one thing that has not allowed to be crossed um yet um in the town. So, how they're gonna work that is fine. So, I do understand people who have read the book being upset about it, they want to see themselves in Francesca, they want to see her infertility issues be resolved and their infertility issues being resolved through her, and so they don't see how they're gonna do that with her now um maybe being revealed as bisexual or lesbian or whatever the case may be. Um, but on the other hand, my idea is just let it go. The book is not the show. The show is not the book. The book and the show have not been the same since season one because Queen Charlotte's not even from my research, Queen Charlotte's not even in the book at all as a character. They might mention her name, but she's not there to have the hullabaloo of Julia Quinn should should be you know shot, killed, or how dare she let them ruin her book and all this stuff, this hella balloo does it happen. I'm like, where are we going season one? Because season one is not the same as the book. So if if we're going to accept some of the changes, just accept them all. Let the book be the book.

SPEAKER_02 20:06

Well, what I'm hearing from um your take on the discourse around the new announcement is also that there's a sudden centering of fidelity to the book, yes, which the suddenness of it says more about us as viewers than anything else, right? When when we choose to invoke fidelity, because we're seeing across different seasons now that that the romance, um transgressive romance that is happening between different pairs is um a legitimization device almost. We saw this um uh in the third season, we see this in the fourth season with class. The only place where we haven't seen that sort of question of transgression or tension is when it is racial and ethnic, the transgression. Because that is built into the Bridgeton universe. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 20:57

Um, which which is a whole interesting um thing of what we choose to uh build into well and what we don't what we what we choose the trigger transgression to be because again, but that's what I think I like about Queen Charlotte so much is she did explain it because one of my things was how are you explaining this to not the the the people in the actual show, but the people who are viewing it, right? How are you how are you explaining this world where race is not an issue? How are you how how did this come to be? Because Lady Dan Bay says in season one is what's love is what brought us together. So she hints at it. She hints at the fact that there's a possibility that there was some kind of race issue, and that love the love of Queen Charlotte had for George is what kind of brought them together. So why are you fighting it? And she was talking to Simon.

SPEAKER_02 21:57

Totally, totally. Well, well, Jimmy, we've spoken. About Bridgetin, but I'm really also excited to ask you what projects you're working on right now.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

Personal things have kind of been going on that kind of made me kind of step back a little bit from um Black Girl Loves Jane. But I am trying to really restart what I've what I've been doing, which was critiquing books that or or that are Jane Austen inspired or Jane Austen um reimagined with people of color in them. So that I can then give my review of them, give my review of them, and then let people who are following me and their friends, whatever, Jasmine World or the Jane Hood know that there are books out there that are inspired by Austin, inspired by Austin's stories that have people of color in them. For the simple fact to really reiterate the idea that people of color can be a part and should be a part of the Jane Hood, of the discussion of Jane Austen, her novels, her her her high, her ideas, that they that they can participate and should be participating and should be welcome in doing the participation. Um and so that's one of the things that I really I kind of slapped off a little bit of that I need to get back on, um, is reviewing um books like that. I've already and then my other thing that I would really like to start focusing more on is I really want to get these books that are Jane Austen inspired, but do have the diversity twist to them, is get them in the hands of these young, um young women, young men too, but definitely young women of color who don't think Austin is for them. So my open goal is is that books like Pride with this uh Pride from this Evie uh Zoboy or Unmarriageable from Sandai Kamal, that those types of books can then be given to young young students, young females particularly, to read and see themselves in, and then I can say to them, hey, this was based off of this. Let's read that too. And you can see that even those ideas that were 250 years ago, the the ideas are still modern, that they still reach and and and and and talk to you today, that even though the language may be different, the ideology is the same, yeah, and that the clothing might be different, but they're just clothed. And in 100 years from now, they're gonna look at our clothing and be like, yeah, I used to wear that, yeah, I used to speak like that. They're gonna do the same thing us. But the ideas and the themes that Austin is talking about, about sisterhood, about classism, about um parental uh love, maybe even parental abuse, um the the themes of being the outsider, all those are themes that can still be talked about today. And so if I can start some kind of like charity or whatever where I can combine those books together for young people to to see and and be talked about in a relaxed setting, not necessarily an academic setting where they have to get a grade or something, but just so that they can talk and feel free to talk about that. Is really the goal that I'm kind of trying to reach.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

That sounds lovely. That really does sound lovely. I I hope you do that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:57

So those are my two projects now. Just try to continue Black O Loves Jane and um we'll see where it goes. I've been trying to write a book and finish a book too, but that that's been on hold, but we'll see.

SPEAKER_02 26:10

That's that's the long-term project.

SPEAKER_00 26:12

That's a long-term project, actually.

SPEAKER_02 26:13

Yeah, totally, totally. Well, I have to ask you something I ask everybody. If you could have tea with one person from the regency, who would it be and why? Fictional or not fictional. You pick.

SPEAKER_00 26:26

Okay. Um, so fiction-wise, I would want to meet Mary Bennett of the Other Bennett book. Because which I can't wait for it to come on PBS. Um, because Mary does get, she does get ostracized by her own family members. And so I really would like to have talked to her and see what she really was like. Hopefully, she is like the Mary and the Other Bennett girl. Um, but I just really think that she's more common to most girls today as well as back then, than the idolized version of Elizabeth, of Lizzie Bennett. Um, Lizzie does get this almost kind of pedestal-like, God figure-like idea of who she is. And um, so much so that everybody wants to be Lizzie, and everybody wants to to you know have the wit and charm of Lizzie. And I'm not sure necessarily if Lizzie was a nice person all the time. Um, nice to her sisters all the time because she does, she's a little sassy, you know. She she she claps back, and so I would like to meet Mary or Mary or Kitty. I mean, because Kitty, you know, she has to follow Lydia around. So I think Kitty outside of Lydia would probably be an interesting person as well. Real life, I'd like to talk to Dido, Dido Elizabeth Bell Lindsey, because I'd like to know what it was truly like to live during Regency, um, where she was a biracial child, a product of enslavement that was going on during that time, and yet she had the benefit of being free because of her father, um, because of the laws that her uncle, um, the chief justice made. Um, of you know, once you you land on English soil, you're free. And and um I would like to talk to her, like really what was her experience. I would like to also talk to, I'm sorry, one more because it just popped in my head. I also like to talk to uh Miss Lamb. I would like to know where Miss Lamb was going to take Austin in Sanditon because we only have the first 11 chapters and she says nothing, she's just sick.

SPEAKER_02 29:03

Yeah, if you talk to Miss Lamb, we would actually get to hear what Miss Lamb has to say.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Yes, because right now she doesn't have a voice, and again, it she shows that Austin is aware that these people existed. That these people, these people of color existed. Austin is telling you, I know they exist. Here's Miss Lamb, that she didn't get to finish Miss Lamb. We don't know how she would have treated Miss Lamb. Maybe Miss Lamb would have been silent the whole time, but we do know that she was aware that people of color existed, that there were these things going on in the world that she was living in that she didn't want to address. And so I would have liked to talk to Miss Lamb.

SPEAKER_02 29:49

Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, Jamie, thank you so much for being on the pod.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

Thank you for inviting me.

SPEAKER_02 29:56

We hope to see you again very soon.

SPEAKER_00 29:58

Hopefully, you will. Thank you for the invitation.