#  Terence and the "black figura": A Manuscript Talk by Professor Jesse McCarthy 

 



    ![Terence Ethiopian Image](/sites/g/files/omnuum1611/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2026-03/Terence%20Ethiopissa%20English%20Talk%20Illustration.png?itok=5-8ehlv1) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **April 21, 2026** 

 06:00PM - 07:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Thompson Room, Barker Center**  



 

 



 

Terence’s play *Eunuchus* bears a special relationship to the representation of blackness in Roman New Comedy and a significant place in Erich Auerbach’s 1938 essay “Figura.” Drawing out the implications of this coincidence, Professor Jesse McCarthy offers an introduction to his next book project, *Dark Figures: The Representation of Blackness in Western Literature*, a study of the representation of blackness in selected works from antiquity to the 20th century. Taking inspiration from Auerbach’s *Mimesis*: *The Representation of Reality in Western Literature*, his book traces what Auerbach called a “*figura*,” and his book calls the “black *figura*,” as the effect of repeatedly reconstructed figural representations that transmit and refashion the Western encounter with racial blackness across succeeding periods of literary history.



 

 



 

 

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