Shades of difference: mythologies of skin color in early modern England

Abstract

Sujata Iyengar. Shades of Difference. Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. 310pp. ISBN 0 8122 3832 X.1. Whether romance, lyric, masque, or narrative, Sujata Iyengar, in her book Shades of Difference, suggests that early modern literary affiliations entangle with variable concepts of skin color and emergent racial distinctions to produce specifically early modern ways of figuring difference (1). Historical and material contexts - bodily, gendered, religious, scientific, and social - here collude with literary genres, constructing different languages and traditions for negotiating human variation. Iyengar explores racializing discourse as structure of feeling, term she borrows from Raymond Williams and uses to point out the temporal complexity of ideological formations as well as the overlap of political institutions and private beliefs in discursive construction.2. Iyengar's book is divided into three parts. The first part, 'Ethiopian Histories', examines the Renaissance transmission and interpretation of classical and Biblical texts on blackness. She focuses on ambiguous heroines such as Chariclea of Heliodorus'Aethiopica or the Bride of the Song of Songs, figures whose beauty, rank, and ethnicity depended on, and changed according to, understanding of skin colour. She then concludes her chapter with juxtaposed representations of the Irish and the Ethiopians in Stuart court masques.3. In part two, 'Whiteness Visible', Iyengar reads early modern poetry and drama for white skin in its different variations, including blushing, pallor, and cosmetic colourings. Contextualizing epyllia with moral treatises, and stage plays with anti-cosmetic tracts, Iyengar shows that skin colour worked towards configuring not only ethnic prejudice, but also sexual difference.4. 'Travail Narratives', the third and final part of Shades of Difference, plays with the early modern double meaning of 'travail' as both hard work and travel. Iyengar first examines different constructions of gypsies whose skin colour, whether natural or artificial, linked with mythologies of illicit labor and stage performance. The travel section of the chapter examines English travelers' ethnographic accounts of Africa and African bodies, texts that can be seen as constructing an early version of racialism that hinges on both skin colour and labour, especially slavery. The book concludes by moving forward in time towards the Restoration and the scientific revolution, where the escapism of prose romance may have offered an alternative to the gradually stabilizing fictions of race.5. Iyengar consistently resists imposing a straightforward historical trajectory 'toward' racialism or 'toward' color-prejudice as an explanatory mechanism (1). Rather, she interprets early modern negotiations of skin color as an open-ended discussion, dynamic history unbound by necessary march towards race and racism. She follows the diverse and often contradictory ways in which her texts construct otherness, and demonstrates the complexity of the varying meanings of skin colour while also reading for intertextual references, influences, and paraphrases. For her, following the multiple literary networks in which skin colour emerges can account for change better than can history that views skin colour through the later prism of race. …