Brown Bag Biography: Derrick Higginbotham

Apr 11: Biography of an Early Modern Merchant: John Gresham, Theatre, and the Ethics of Business,Derrick Higginbotham, Dept. of English at UH Manoa

John Heywood's early seventeenth-century comedy, If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part 2, dramatizes a biography of the big-time London merchant and financier, John Gresham, who transformed the economic world of early modern England and the infrastructure of London in ways that reverberates into the present. In this paper, I examine the ways that this play imagines Gresham as both unethical in business and magnetic in personality, with his magnetism overwriting his duplicity. This play, I contend, uncovers that deceptiveness in economic activity is not, as business ethics often would have it, a threat to the success of capitalism but is actually constitutive of it as an institution.

Derrick Higginbotham is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where he specializes in late medieval and early modern literatures, queer theory, and contemporary queer cultures, especially on the African continent. Currently, he is finishing his book, Winners and Wasters: Profit, Pleasure and Plays in Late Medieval and Early Modern England; with Dr. Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, he edited the essay collection, Contested Intimacies: Sexuality, Gender, and the Law in Africa. He also has published articles on queerness in Shakespeare's Richard II; queer affiliation in two South African novels, Gordimer's None To Accompany Me and K. Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams; and on race, sexuality, and enslavement in William Wycherley's late seventeenth-century comedy, The Country Wife, which appears in the new anthology, Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies.

Ticket Information
Free and Open to the Public

Event Sponsor
The Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Janet Graham, (808) 956-3774, gabiog@hawaii.edu, http://blog.hawaii.edu/cbrhawaii/

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