Race & Affect in Early Modern English Literature

Race & Affect in Early Modern English Literature
Author: Carol Meija LaPerle
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2022
Genre: Affect (Psychology) in literature
ISBN: 9780866986939

"Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature puts the fields of critical race studies and affect theory into dialogue. Doing so opens a new set of questions: What are the emotional experiences of racial formation and racist ideologies? How do feelings--through the physical senses, emotional passions, or sexual encounters--come to signify race? What is the affective register of anti-blackness that pervades canonical literature? How can these visceral forms of racism be resisted in discourse and in practice? By investigating how race feels, this book offers new ways of reading and interpreting literary traditions, religious differences, gendered experiences, class hierarchies, sexuality, and social identities. So far scholars have shaped the discussion of race in the early modern period by focusing on topics such as genealogy, language, economics, religion, skin color, and ethnicity. This book, however, offers something new: it considers racializing processes as visceral, affective experiences"--

Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature

Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature
Author: Carole Mejia Laperle
Publisher: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS)
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2021-11
Genre:
ISBN: 9780866986922

This collection brings together critical race studies and affect theory to examine the emotional dimensions of race in early modern literature. Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature puts the fields of critical race studies and affect theory into dialogue. Doing so opens a new set of questions: What are the emotional experiences of racial formation and racist ideologies? How do feelings--through the physical senses, emotional passions, or sexual encounters--come to signify race? What is the affective register of anti-blackness that pervades canonical literature? How can these visceral forms of racism be resisted in discourse and in practice? By investigating how race feels, this book offers new ways of reading and interpreting literary traditions, religious differences, gendered experiences, class hierarchies, sexuality, and social identities. So far scholars have shaped the discussion of race in the early modern period by focusing on topics such as genealogy, language, economics, religion, skin color, and ethnicity. This book, however, offers something new: it considers racializing processes as visceral, affective experiences.

Things of Darkness

Things of Darkness
Author: Kim F. Hall
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2018-09-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501725459

The "Ethiope," the "tawny Tartar," the "woman blackamoore," and "knotty Africanisms"—allusions to blackness abound in Renaissance texts. Kim F. Hall's eagerly awaited book is the first to view these evocations of blackness in the contexts of sexual politics, imperialism, and slavery in early modern England. Her work reveals the vital link between England's expansion into realms of difference and otherness—through exploration and colonialism-and the highly charged ideas of race and gender which emerged. How, Hall asks, did new connections between race and gender figure in Renaissance ideas about the proper roles of men and women? What effect did real racial and cultural difference have on the literary portrayal of blackness? And how did the interrelationship of tropes of race and gender contribute to a modern conception of individual identity? Hall mines a wealth of sources for answers to these questions: travel literature from Sir John Mandeville's Travels to Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa; lyric poetry and plays, from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest to Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness; works by Emilia Lanyer, Philip Sidney, John Webster, and Lady Mary Wroth; and the visual and decorative arts. Concentrating on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hall shows how race, sexuality, economics, and nationalism contributed to the formation of a modern ( white, male) identity in English culture. The volume includes a useful appendix of not readily accessible Renaissance poems on blackness.

Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama

Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama
Author: Matthieu Chapman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2016-11-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317195523

This is the first book to deploy the methods and ensemble of questions from Afro-pessimism to engage and interrogate the methods of Early Modern English studies. Using contemporary Afro-pessimist theories to provide a foundation for structural analyses of race in the Early Modern Period, it engages the arguments for race as a fluid construction of human identity by addressing how race in Early Modern England functioned not only as a marker of human identity, but also as an a priori constituent of human subjectivity. Chapman argues that Blackness is the marker of social death that allows for constructions of human identity to become transmutable based on the impossibility of recognition and incorporation for Blackness into humanity. Using dramatic texts such as Othello, Titus Andronicus, and other Early Modern English plays both popular and lesser known, the book shifts the binary away from the currently accepted standard of white/non-white that defines "otherness" in the period and examines race in Early Modern England from the prospective of a non-black/black antagonism. The volume corrects the Afro-pessimist assumption that the Triangle Slave Trade caused a rupture between Blackness and humanity. By locating notions of Black inhumanity in England prior to chattel slavery, the book positions the Triangle Trade as a result of, rather than the cause of, Black inhumanity. It also challenges the common scholarly assumption that all varying types of human identity in Early Modern England were equally fluid by arguing that Blackness functioned as an immutable constant. Through the use of structural analysis, this volume works to simplify and demystify notions of race in Renaissance England by arguing that race is not only a marker of human identity, but a structural antagonism between those engaged in human civil society opposed to those who are socially dead. It will be an essential volume for those with interest in Renaissance Literature and Culture, Shakespeare, Contemporary Performance Theory, Black Studies, and Ethnic Studies.

Women, 'Race' and Writing in the Early Modern Period

Women, 'Race' and Writing in the Early Modern Period
Author: Margo Hendricks
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2013-08-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135088047

Women, `Race' and Writing in the Early Modern Period is an extraordinarily comprehensive interdisciplinary examination of one of the most neglected areas in current scholarship. The contributors use literary, historical, anthropological and medical materials to explore an important intersection within the major era of European imperial expansion. The volume looks at: * the conditions of women's writing and the problems of female authorship in the period. * the tensions between recent feminist criticism and the questions of `race', empire and colonialism. *the relationship between the early modern period and post-colonial theory and recent African writing. Women, `Race' and Writing in the Early Modern Period contains ground-breaking work by some of the most exciting scholars in contemporary criticism and theory. It will be vital reading for anyone working or studying in the field.

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage
Author: Ayanna Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135908559

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage provides the first sustained reading of Restoration plays through a performance theory lens. This approach shows that an analysis of the conjoined performances of torture and race not only reveals the early modern interest in the nature of racial identity, but also how race was initially coded in a paradoxical fashion as both essentially fixed and socially constructed. An examination of scenes of torture provides the most effective way to unearth these seemingly contradictory representations of race because depictions of torture often interrogate the incongruous desire to substitute the visible and manipulable materiality of the body for the more illusive performative nature of identity. In turn, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage challenges the long-standing assumption that early modern conceptions of race were radically different in their fluidity from post-Enlightenment ones by demonstrating how many of the debates we continue to have about the nature of racial identity were engendered by these seventeenth-century performances.

Shakespeare and Race

Shakespeare and Race
Author: Imtiaz H. Habib
Publisher:
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2000
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

Shakespeare and Race is a provocative new study that reveals a connection between the subject of race in Shakespeare and the advent of early English colonialism. Citing generally neglected archival evidence, Imtiaz Habib argues that a small population of captured Indians and Africans brought to England during the 16th century provided the impetus for Elizabethan constructions of race rather than existing European traditions in which blackness was represented metaphorically. He explores Tudor and Stuart dramatic representations of black characters, focusing specifically on how race affected Shakespeare personally and historically over the course of his career. Using postcolonial paradigms combined with neo-Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic insights, Habib discusses the possible existence of a black woman that Shakespeare knew and wrote about in his Sonnets and examines the design of his black male characters, including Aaron, Othello, and Caliban. Shakespeare and Race represents a significant contribution that will fascinate scholars of literature as well as those interested in the cultural impact of colonialism.

Racial Fictions in Early Modern England

Racial Fictions in Early Modern England
Author: Stephen Kern Kim
Publisher:
Total Pages: 116
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN:

My dissertation, Racial Fictions in Early Modern England, asks how race, co-constituted with gender and sexuality, animates early modern English texts. It is only in the past decade that scholarship on race in early modern literary studies has become an urgent topic of conversation, and much of the work has been limited to so called "race texts," in which characters of color appear. I argue that race is a more capacious analytic for early modern literary studies. I theorize race in early modern England as the developing process of categorizing, including, excluding, and hierarchizing people based upon historically contingent features that become essentialized through these acts of categorizing and hierarchizing. Examining race more as a process rather than a stable category or relationship opens three important avenues of inquiry. First, it brings to light the ways in which race undergirds concepts that are central to early modern texts, such as chastity for Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene or universality for John Milton's Paradise Lost. The hyper-visibility of these concepts often occludes if not erases the processes and preconditions of their own formations, race being one of them. Making them visible requires finding where they hide: within the language and rhetorical figures in literary texts. Second, examining race as process allows more flexibility to accommodate and explore the ways in which race forms and is formed by other facets of identity, such as gender and sexuality. Third, this conception of race as process allows scholars to track race in contexts in which it is not as easily apparent, such as the early modern period when systems of white supremacy are not as coalesced into a set of identifiable oppressive strategies and institutions. I make these arguments by reading four canonical early modern texts, three of which are not as strongly associated with race in current scholarship (William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Christopher Marlowe's "Hero and Leander," and John Milton's Paradise Lost). Ultimately, Racial Fictions asserts that race is a crucial analytic lens for reading all early modern English literary texts.

Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama

Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama
Author: Matthieu Chapman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2016-11-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317195515

This is the first book to deploy the methods and ensemble of questions from Afro-pessimism to engage and interrogate the methods of Early Modern English studies. Using contemporary Afro-pessimist theories to provide a foundation for structural analyses of race in the Early Modern Period, it engages the arguments for race as a fluid construction of human identity by addressing how race in Early Modern England functioned not only as a marker of human identity, but also as an a priori constituent of human subjectivity. Chapman argues that Blackness is the marker of social death that allows for constructions of human identity to become transmutable based on the impossibility of recognition and incorporation for Blackness into humanity. Using dramatic texts such as Othello, Titus Andronicus, and other Early Modern English plays both popular and lesser known, the book shifts the binary away from the currently accepted standard of white/non-white that defines "otherness" in the period and examines race in Early Modern England from the prospective of a non-black/black antagonism. The volume corrects the Afro-pessimist assumption that the Triangle Slave Trade caused a rupture between Blackness and humanity. By locating notions of Black inhumanity in England prior to chattel slavery, the book positions the Triangle Trade as a result of, rather than the cause of, Black inhumanity. It also challenges the common scholarly assumption that all varying types of human identity in Early Modern England were equally fluid by arguing that Blackness functioned as an immutable constant. Through the use of structural analysis, this volume works to simplify and demystify notions of race in Renaissance England by arguing that race is not only a marker of human identity, but a structural antagonism between those engaged in human civil society opposed to those who are socially dead. It will be an essential volume for those with interest in Renaissance Literature and Culture, Shakespeare, Contemporary Performance Theory, Black Studies, and Ethnic Studies.