The Future of Early Modern Race Studies: On Three Ambitious (Enough?) Books

Abstract

The Future of Early Modern Race Studies: On Three Ambitious (Enough?) BooksThe publication of three important books devoted to early modern race studies marks a watershed moment in the field. Taken together, Sujata Iyengar's Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Pennsylvania, 2005), Virginia Mason Vaughan's Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 2005), and Celia Daileader's Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee (Cambridge, 2005) provide a bold and complex portrait of the current state of, and future outlook for, early modern race studies. Collectively, the books attempt to untangle the meaning of race vis-a-vis color, gender, nationality, and sexuality in the early modern period. Respectively, the books address the taxonomies of and race, the mimetic fissures in performances of blackness, and the disturbing ideological work Shakespeare's Othello has enabled in its various afterlives. All three books make substantial contributions to the field: Iyengar's for the range of its analysis and commitment to sustained close readings; Vaughan's for its focus on actual early modern performance techniques; and Daileader's for its scope and argumentation. As a snapshot of the discipline, the near simultaneous publication of these books allows us to see a challenge facing the future of early modern race studies: how will we address the underlying anxiety about the compatibility of historicist approaches and the desire for social relevance? In this essay, I will assess each book individually before analyzing what their collective presence signals about the future of early modern race studies.Iyengar's Shades of Difference truly broadens the scope of early modern race studies. By analyzing texts that traditionally have not been in the purview of the field, Iyengar asks all early modern scholars to think about what counts as a race text and why. This contribution is invaluable and pushes the boundaries of early modern race scholarship in exciting new directions.Shades of Difference begins by explaining that Iyengar's model for understanding the development of from mythologies of color stems from Raymond Williams's account of social change in terms of and emergent structures of (3).1 This aptly describes her approach because she is reluctant to construct an overarching narrative, a just-so story, about why and how race and racialism came to exist and figure so largely in our lives (15). Instead, she is interested in teasing out the moments when residual, dominant, and structures of feeling intersect. Organizing her book both temporally and generically, Iyengar argues that literary affiliations (the compulsion of narrative, the longing of lyric, the agendas of masque, and the escape of romance) entangle with variable concepts of skin and racial distinctions (1). In order to untangle this knot, Iyengar usually focuses on providing detailed close readings of a stunning variety of literature. Her book ranges from analyses of early modern translations of classical texts, lesser known early modern plays, poems, travelogues, and masques, to Restoration romances and scientifica. The breadth of Iyengar's study is remarkable in the way it opens the field textually and eschews the well-hewn road of most early modern race scholarship (Othello, for example, is only briefly mentioned).Shades of Difference is divided into three parts, and in the first part, Ethiopian Histories, Iyengar addresses the Renaissance employment of two key classical texts: Heliodorus's ancient Greek romance, Aithiopika or Ethiopian Story, and the biblical Song of Solomon or Song of Songs. In her analysis of the early-modern appropriation of these texts, Iyengar convincingly argues that blackness becomes increasingly problemized and written out as the presence of Africans in Britain increases and as the new, scientific - called by Samuel Johnson 'metaphysical' - poetry emerges (12). …