Moors, Mulattos, and Post-Racial Problems: Rethinking Racialization in Early Modern England

Abstract

This dissertation, "Moors, Mulattos, and Post-Racial Problems: Rethinking Racialization in Early Modern England," examines early modern English dramatic representations of interethnic relations between black and white figures. It focuses on representations that both garner and elude classification as racist, and it argues that the most appropriate means of recovering the subtle modes of racialization that engender these conflicting classifications is through consideration of African American writers and thinkers.

Broadly speaking, early modern ethnicity studies have moved from exploring the period’s denigratory approaches to African blackness toward identifying its counterintuitive modes of engaging such difference. This shift in criticism has brought to the fore potential sites of tolerance but fails to account for the period’s contemporaneous racism. This dissertation argues that this shift has led to a critical dissonance that resembles the popular discord about the persistence or dissipation of today’s racial systems. For example, early modern scholars have begun to mistakenly characterize seemingly progressive early modern phenomena like black ascendency, interracialism, and interethnic cooperation as multicultural. Comprehensive early modern racism is obscured by such concepts of racial transcendence.

As this dissertation argues, even the problematic perspective that the early modern period might be described as multicultural offers insight. It emphasizes early modernity’s difference from histories embedded in high colonialism, transatlantic slavery, and scientific racism, while rendering the period’s affinities with more recent historical moments. Indeed, the early modern period exhibits a type of discursive interest in the cultural potential of practices like racial mixing that wanes until American abolition. Such similarities comprise a bridge between the racial conceptions of the early modern period and those of post-abolition America. However, when these tolerant-seeming concepts are approached through dominant modes of analysis, they appear to contravene contemporaneous racism. African American analyses offer a more comprehensive approach. Black writers helped shift norms regarding topics like interracialism, but they concurrently explored the multivalent modes of intolerance that accompanied softened cultural prescriptions. This dissertation uses these investigations to recover the multifarious racialism that works through depictions of tolerant phenomena on the early modern stage.

This dissertation’s first chapter emphasizes the silences engendered by the competing depictions of black ascendency and overt racism in Shakespeare’s Othello. It reads early modern English denials of slave trading along with Toni Morrison’s Desdemona to demonstrates where Othello navigates and thus obscures its more insidious anti-blackness. The second chapter examines how interethnic cooperation in George Peele’s Alcazar concurrently gives rise to a dramatic paradigm for anti-black assimilation. It turns to Zora Neale Hurston’s exploration of precarious methods for broaching transracial fellowship to elucidate this paradigm. The following chapter contends that Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness employs a mode of appropriation that relies on early modern England’s increasing familiarity with and distaste for aspects of phenotypic African difference. It explores this mode by reading Kendrick Lamar’s “The Blacker the Berry” – a song that considers how appropriative acts require an understanding of both desired and undesired aspects of black culture. The final chapter reads the sensational take on interracialism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus alongside exceptionalizing American views of racial mixing, arguing that each approach obscures histories of the topic that conflict with dominant cultural interests. It emphasizes Titus’s myopia concerning interracialism by bringing the play into conversation with underacknowledged Elizabethan records of children born to white men and enslaved black women.