Reimagining Racial Equality in Blake’s Visionary World: A Close Reading of ‘The Little Black Boy’

As the first flowering of the Blake and Race Project, we’ve scheduled this online event at a time that’s more amenable for attendees in non-UK time zones, not least our speaker, who will be joining us from Taiwan. As ever, a recording of the talk will be available to watch on this page soon after it has taken place.

In response to Jonathan Jones’s contentious Guardian review of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s  exhibition, William Blake’s Universe, Li Hui Tsai will examine William Blake’s poem, ‘The Little Black Boy’, as a critique of racial inequality.

Drawing upon the Fitzwilliam exhibition’s curatorial ambiguities and responses from the Blake Society, Tsai will argue that Blake subverts the dominant racial narratives of his time by centring the black boy as the poem’s hero and giving him a voice of agency, autonomy, and reconciliation. Through close reading, she will reinterpret the poem’s imagery and symbolism to reveal Blake’s commitment to racial justice and spiritual equality, positioning the poem as an eighteenth-century precursor to the modern Black Lives Matter movement.

Li Hui Tsai, PhD (Queen Mary, University of London), studies Romanticism and eighteenth-century literature. She is an assistant professor at St. John’s University, Taiwan, and has written on Blake and related topics.