:Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewRace and Affect in Early Modern English Literature. Edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) Press, 2022. Pp. xxviii+221.Michal ZechariahMichal ZechariahMax Planck Institute for Human Development1 Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreRace and Affect in Early Modern English Literature is a collection of essays reflecting, as indicated by its title, on the interconnection of race and affect in early modern texts (one essay focuses on print culture). The anthology, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, is an exciting addition to the field of premodern critical race studies (PCRS), as well as to the growing body of work on Renaissance emotions. In relation to the materials its essays examine, this anthology brings out nuanced emotional dimensions of early modern racial formation through questions such as what race feels like; what remains unfelt in order to enable racializing logics; how affects are harnessed to perpetuate and disseminate racist ideologies; and what roles desire and disgust play in early modern thinking about race. In addition to these textual concerns, the book also has the ambitious aim of influencing the state of early modern studies at large. LaPerle’s project resists what she describes as “the field’s compulsion to undermine race scholarship” (xi), and as Margo Hendricks writes in her foreword, it “emerges as next gen PCRS” (vii). Proudly continuing the works of scholars such as Kim F. Hall, Ayanna Thompson, Imtiaz Habib, Ian Smith, and others who have argued persistently for the vitality of studying race in premodern cultures, the authors in this volume offer galvanizing ways for thinking about early modern notions of race through the lens of affect. Finally, Race and Affect is not only a book about the premodern past but also of and about the present. In LaPerle’s introduction and in many of the essays, there is a burning activist care about how contemporary racial formation is illuminated by its early modern predecessors, how teachers should address texts containing racist content with their students, what linguistic choices are appropriate for cultivating a just discourse, and other concerns of the present day. The result is a book that is not only invested in early modern discourses about, for example, complexion or miscegenation, but also attentive to contemporary discourses about “white feelings” (151) and “toxic positivity” (202). The collection’s commitment to social justice in the present is complemented by its welcome inclusion in the ACMRS and Arizona State University Library open access program, which allows readers to access the book in its entirety online.The book falls into three sections. The first, “Racial Formations of Affective Communities,” focuses on the affective aspects of forming and designating collectives. The first essay, “Imagining Islamic Worlds: Race and Affect in the Contact Zone” by Ambereen Dadabhoy, analyzes the racialization of religious difference in Philip Massinger’s play The Renegado and coins the term “staged Mediterranean” to describe dramatic representations that aimed to domesticate the foreign for white English audiences (5). Next, Mira Assaf Kafantaris’s “Desire, Disgust, and the Perils of Strange Queenship in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene” discusses how Spenser’s epic poem uses affect to shape the racial knowledge of its readers. To exert its “affective control” (25), Kafantaris argues, the poem channels readers’ emotions in response to desire between racialized bodies into disgust, and contrasts the fair, sentimental Una with the racialized, “foule” Duessa (30), who is characterized as either unfeeling or feeling the wrong things. The third essay in this section is Meghan E. Hall’s “New World Encounters and the Racial Limits of Friendship in Early Quaker Life Writing.” Looking at the journal of English Quaker and itinerant missionary Alice Curwen, this essay shows how the usually intrepid Curwen nevertheless documents feelings of fear from the Black and Indigenous people she was to encounter. Hall explains lucidly how Curwen’s fear serves to unify white individuals against a designated fearsome object, therefore excluding Black and Indigenous people from the institution of Quaker friendship despite Quaker belief in their spiritual equality, and overlooking the legitimate fears of dispossessed or enslaved people. Finally, Drew Daniel’s “Early Modern Affect Theory, Racialized Aversion, and the Strange Case of Foetor Judaicus,” beginning with an engaging anecdote (in Drew Daniel fashion) that illustrates the difficulty of capturing the meaning of affect, goes on to show how the very elasticity of affects fueled the premodern fantasy that Jewish bodies issued forth a distinctive bad smell.The second section, “Racialized Affects of Sex and Gender,” opens with an essay by Sara Coodin. In “Conversion Interrupted: Shame and the Demarcation of Jewish Women’s Difference in The Merchant of Venice,” Coodin offers a nuanced analysis of shame’s role in racial formation as it emerges in Jessica’s ambivalent conversion to Christianity. She concludes that shame was a technology for limiting the mobility of Jewish bodies that, like Jessica’s, were “imagined to be amenable to whitening” (94). Kirsten N. Mendoza’s “Navigating a Kiss in the Racialized Geopolitical Landscape of Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West” reveals the affective constructions of “white, Christian, and English superiority” subtending the play’s evaluation of its heroine (118). Bess Bridges’s sexual behavior, Mendoza shows, while held suspect at home, becomes acceptable when she uses her white femininity to enthrall the King of Fez and advance English interests abroad. Closing this section is Mario DiGangi’s “Branded with Baseness: Bastardy and Race in King Lear,” an essay that traces the racial rhetoric of Edmond’s act 2 soliloquy, whereby Edmond attributes to the “race of bastards” an inherent fierceness rather than the baseness he wishes to reject (120).The third section is dedicated to essays on “Feelings and Forms of Anti-Blackness.” In “Black Ink, White Feelings: Early Modern Print Technology and Anti-Black Racism,” Averyl Dietering brings together early modern print culture and Afro-pessimism to show how print practices furthered an association of Blackness with negative emotions, lack of dimensionality, and the position of a readability that is nevertheless poor in signification. It is followed by Matthieu Chapman’s “‘Away, You Ethiop!’: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Denial of Black Affect—A Song to Underscore the Burning of Police Stations.” The only essay in the volume to contain content warnings, this is a moving meditation on how Blackness is continually positioned outside the scope of affective resonance and empathy, occasioned by Chapman’s perception of his own failure to address anti-Blackness in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when directing a student performance of the play. Cora Fox’s essay “Othello’s Unfortunate Happiness” positions Othello in what Sara Ahmed has called an “unhappiness archive” (189). In Fox’s powerful reading the play offers a “struggle against happiness” (189), as its tragic hero realizes the promise of happiness through Christian marriage to Desdemona will not be available to him. The volume concludes with an essay by LaPerle: “The Racialized Affects of Ill-Will in the Dark Lady Sonnets,” which argues that the lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets 127 to 154 is racialized through her attributed disobedience and ill will, affective traits that threaten white kinship and white futurity in the sonnets.If I have any criticism at all of this rich and, yes, affecting collection, it is about the few instances in which the role of affect in an author’s argument seems either secondary or insufficiently elaborated. But those instances are few. I think the book offers both keen insights for scholars of early modern race and affect and useful thoughts on their application in teaching. Its diversity of arguments bears out the pragmatic intuition concluding Drew Daniel’s essay, that “we can best know ‘what affect means’ by tracing the particular histories of what particular affects have made possible, and at whose expense” (75).Notes1. My work is supported by a Minerva Fellowship of the Minerva Stiftung Gesellschaft für die Forschung mbH. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724655 Views: 36Total views on this site HistoryPublished online March 16, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.