Whitewashing white permanence: The (dis)/(re)membering of white corporeality in early modern England

Abstract

AbstractIn early modern English drama, black flesh is remarkable. In the Shakespeare canon, the visibly black flesh of the eponymous Moor of Venice in Othello and the villainous Aaron in Titus Andronicus has been the subject of scholarly analysis for centuries. Yet, in a field that has placed so much emphasis on flesh marked by color, unmarked flesh is imbued with assumptions of whiteness that make unremarkable, a privilege that renders it unthought and uncritiqued, processes that contribute to the normativity of whiteness as inextricable from subjectivity. This rhetoric of whiteness as largely unremarkable continues to influence our modern conceptualizations of what Shakespeare looks like both in our minds and on the stage. Too often, modern productions of Shakespeare engage in casting practices that elide important early modern identity distinctions in service of contemporary white supremacy. For instance, national identity—the difference between being English, Irish, Scottish, French, etc—mattered both for character and actor on the Early Modern English stage. Yet, these distinctions fade into the fringes of memory when casting today's productions, allowing directors to include and exclude bodies based on modern conceptions of racial difference and mis‐remembering of whiteness as a coherent and stable early modern identity. But whiteness was neither so stable nor so stoic in Shakespeare's day or in the works of Shakespeare as our modern theatrical culture continually mis‐remembers and re‐performs. This essay engages with the ways in which the modern theatre mis‐remembers Shakespeare in relation to whiteness to reinforce white supremacy. This essay uses contemporary theories of Afro‐Pessimism and Black Critical Theory to destabilize the mythology of white permanence that undergirds Renaissance history. I argue that the notions of the stable white corporeal whole that scholars and artists assume of the majority of Shakespeare's characters requires an anachronistic reading of whiteness that is the product of chattel slavery and a paradigm that relies on the destruction of black flesh for the unified white body to gain corporeal coherence. The essay concludes with a critique of epistemology arguing that this forgetting of the historical dismemberment of white flesh makes us mis‐remember the role of whiteness in our present.