Early Modern Women, Race, and Writing Revisited

Abstract

Abstract This chapter refutes the sidelining of premodern critical race studies within early modern women’s studies and urges premodern critical race studies scholars to integrate into their analyses (and not simply mention) historical women’s cultural productions. The chapter begins with Margo Hendricks’ ‘state of the field’ essays, where she adjudicates ‘the epistemology of race in the period’ and engages with ‘feminist historiography’. It cites Kim Hall’s articulation of ‘a semiotics of race’ for assessing Renaissance culture and Joyce Green MacDonald’s diachronic-dialogic approach to ‘the intersection of race, gender, and performance’ from the early modern era to now. It proceeds to Hendricks’, Hall’s, and MacDonald’s explications of early modern English women’s writing and their excavations of subaltern women’s agency as English colonialism intensified over the course of the seventeenth century. The chapter concludes with Elysabeth Grace’s Daughters of Saria romance series, where she builds on these investigations to imagine reparations on a cosmic scale.