SOURCE: “Reading What Isn’t There: ‘Black’ Studies in Early Modern England,” in Stanford Humanities Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter, 1993, pp. 23-33.

[In the following essay, Hall examines the figure of the black woman in order to show the “problematics of the historical study of race and gender.”]

It is particularly difficult to “attend” to racial difference in early modern England.¹ Given the lessening but still widely held assumption, that “race” is not a viable category of analysis not only in the early modern period, but for literature in general, added to the distressing lack of data on people of color in England before the codification of the slave trade, it is not surprising that women of color constitute a largely “invisible” presence in the English Renaissance. In its very title, Elliot Tokson's The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550-1688, a standard work on the subject, announces the absence of black women.² Another influential text, Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black, devotes very little space to the problem of gender in racial discourse, even in his discussion of the English obsession with fairness.³

In this article, I will use the figure of the black woman as an example for the problematics of the historical study of race and gender. My concerns spring from my own investment in a politicized historical study of Europe that dialogues with the work being done by women of color which has been at the forefront of critiquing both assumptions about race and gender and the role of “race” in identity formation. Rather than making a specific argument about the linkages of race and gender, my goals for the essay are twofold: (1) to question the underlying assumptions of two contemporary constructions of the black presence in early modern England and to suggest ways in which both the standard tools of analysis and the materials subject to analysis work to elide black women from discussions of race; (2) to question the somewhat arbitrary boundaries between “history” and “literature” by juxtaposing an historical document with a literary representation of a black woman and to thereby suggest some possible relationships between representation and history in studies of race in the early modern period.⁴

The historical study of black women poses interesting problems for critical practice. As Audre Lorde has argued, “Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have always been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism.”⁵ Certainly discourses of race did not begin in America and the combination of distortion and high visibility that Lorde notes may operate in early modern culture as well. The distortion Lorde notes suggests that black women are in a sense unretrievable in such a past since they are objects “named only in ways that define [their] relationship to those who are subject.”⁶ Yet we disregard their infrequent appearances with peril, since their very visibility and the purposes it serves in a white supremacist culture means that representations of black women have a significance that the actual number of appearances would belie.

In the recent anthology Critical Terms for Literary Study, African-American critic Kwame Anthony Appiah begins his entry on “race” by recognizing a continuing bias against the inclusion of race in literary studies: “the idea that the concept of race should have any place, let alone an important one—in literary studies has been attacked from a good many directions.”⁷ Working against such a notion, Appiah then goes on to outline a history of racial “conceptions,” and contends that earlier conceptions of race, particularly in the Renaissance, are rooted in theological distinctions rather than “racial” ones. He begins what is to be a discussion of Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and The Jew of Malta with the assertion:

In each of these plays a central figure—Othello, Shylock, Barabas—plays out a role we can understand only in terms of a stereotype of a people, Moors or Jews; a stereotype we are likely, if we are hasty, to conceive of as simply racialist. So it is important to go carefully. We should begin by recognizing that in Shakespearean England both Jews and Moors were barely an empirical reality. And even though there were small numbers of Jews and black people in England in Shakespeare's day, attitudes toward ‘the Moor’ and ‘The Jew’ do not seem to have been based on experience of these people. Furthermore, despite the fact that there was an increasing amount of information available about dark-skinned foreigners in this, the first great period of modern Western exploration, actual reports of black or Jewish foreigners did not play an important part in forming these images (Appiah 277 emphasis added).⁸

His notions of Elizabethan England are a clear articulation of a largely unstated bias against the study of “pre-slavery” Europe by scholars centrally concerned with race: that studies of race and blackness should primarily be concerned with the construction of black subjectivity (the corollary being that the early modern period cannot be the subject of black studies because there were no blacks to study). In Women's Studies, this problem can best be summed up by the now famous words of Audre Lorde, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.” Her formulation proposes that a study of the master himself with scholarship defined by the academy can never lead to scholarship with a significant political impact. Too often, it can be used to erase the study of the formation of dominant culture altogether.

Appiah's admonitions for care in discussing “race” in early modern England simultaneously authorizes and de-authorizes race as a “critical” term for study in the Renaissance. His sense that race is an unexplored category in literature empowers the critic who wants to examine the category. However, his insistence on empirical evidence is particularly oppressive from a text that purports to enable new reading strategies⁹ as is his curious declaration of the irrelevence of “actual reports” in discussion of early modern formations of difference. This sense that the “experience of” actual blacks or Jews did not inform literary representation excludes one of the more enabling strategies of the “new historicism”—“describing culture in action” (Veeser xiii)—as well as ignores the possibility that both the reports and “actual experience were inflected by the assumptions about the character” of certain peoples.

While Appiah is rightly concerned with our making broad generalizations about a category, “race,” that has an historical specificity, at the same time he falls into the trap of accepting the post-Enlightenment science that created “racialism” on its own terms. Specifically, this entry seems backed by a narrative of modern science and a myth of empiricism that relies on a clear break from the historical past. Rather, I would argue that the “inherited characteristics” (Appiah 26) that are an elemental part of modern scientific discourses on race are in large part the result of lingering notions of “difference” that resided at the intersections of English travel and trade, plantation, empire, and science in the early modern period. Science merely takes up already pre-existing terms of difference, such as skin color and features, that have been combined with physical and mental characteristics. It is no accident that Sir Thomas Browne, one of the forerunners of modern science, devotes three chapters of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1672) to dispelling myths on “the blackness of Negroes.”¹⁰ Despite these laudable intentions, his investigation is heavily weighted with value judgements concerning color, such as “they of Europe in Candy, Sicily, and some parts of Spaine deserve not properly so low a name as Tawny” (512). The bias that appears in Appiah, even as he deconstructs the terms of nineteenth-century science and biological determinism, can be located specifically in his insistence on “empirical evidence” of a black presence. This delimits the permitted reading strategies of Renaissance critics because we are not allowed to read “backwards,” to draw from the insights of current theorists on race and racism to investigate the birth pangs of these modern attitudes in the early modern period.¹¹

Appiah's vision of an England populated with mere images of non-white, non-Christians contrasts sharply with that of white feminist critic Karen Newman who, in her influential essay, “And wash the Ethiop white’: femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,” argues that “In England itself, by 1596, blacks were numerous enough to generate alarm.”¹² With apologies for making too broad generalizations, I would like to suggest that these critics are fairly typical of the assumptions made about race in the Renaissance. Both confront the problem of the evidence of a viable black presence (albeit with differing conclusions) and both base their work on an equation of race with blackness. “White” as a racial category is left unexamined.¹³ While there is no way of establishing how many blacks there were in England, there were numerous Englishmen and women fashioning their cultural identity with discourses of race. Without ignoring the problem of evidence, I do want to suggest that an uncritical (or overly critical) emphasis on proof may impede historical studies before they have even begun.

What is the evidence for the black presence? Most of the data from Europe on Africans in particular emerge from travel narratives and historical/bureaucratic accounts of Transatlantic trade. The English were late, but eager arrivals in the European slave trade. In 1562, John Hawkins crashed the Portuguese market and organized the first transatlantic slave trading venture, thereby demonstrating the potential value of the market to England and thus encouraging England's future encroachments in the slave trade.¹⁴ With Elizabeth I's consent, other traders attempted to make inroads into the Portuguese monopoly, and slaves were bought surreptitiously or kidnapped and sold along with stolen gold and ivory. As merchants made inroads into the African trade, they brought to England slaves who served as personal attendants. In 1618, James I gave the charter of monopoly to 30 London merchants, the Company of Adventurers of London Trading into parts of Africa. It was not until 1663 that the English incorporated a company, The Royal Adventurers into Africa, which had as its primary goal the acquisition of slaves. Even at this point its primary objective was to provide labor for English plantations in America. The demand for sugar made the trade grow at a furious pace; however, until that point, evidence for a black population in England remained fairly small. Until the codification of slavery, we only get elusive hints of the Africans brought to England as the slaves, servants, linguists, and curiosities who constituted England's black population.

Not surprisingly, most documentary evidence concerning blacks in the period before the signing of the Asiento in the 1660's is extremely limited. Consequently the few documents available have assumed monumental importance in discussions of the black presence. I would like to look at one such document in juxtaposition with a representation of a black woman fairly invisible to modern criticism. Despite her support of English piracy in the slave trade, in 1596 Queen Elizabeth sent an open letter to the Lord Mayor of London and to the mayors of other towns, stating, “Her majesties understanding that there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kind of people there are allready here too manie”¹⁵ and demanding the confiscation of Africans brought to England in a recent voyage by Thomas Baskerville. In 1601 Elizabeth again expressed concern over the presence of blacks in the realm and sent this proclamation to the Lord Mayor of London:

whereas the Queen's Majesty, tendering the good and welfare of her own natural subjects greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth, is highly discontented to understand the great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors which (as she is informed) are crept into this realm since the troubles between Her highness and the King of Spain, who are fostered and relieved here to the annoyance of her own liege people that which co[vet?] the relief which these people consume; as also for that the most of them are infidels having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel, hath given a special commandment that the said kind of people should be with all speed avoided and discharged out of this her majesty's realms; and to that end and purpose hath appointed Casper van Denden, merchant of Lucbeck, for their speedy transportation, a man that hath somewhat deserved of this realm in respect that by his own labor and charge he hath relieved and brought from Spain divers of our English nation who otherwise would have perished ther … and … if there be any person or persons which be possessed of any such Blackamoors that refuse to deliver them in sort aforesaid, then we require you to call them before you and to advice and persuade them by all good means to satisfy her Majesty's pleasure therein which if they shall eftsoons willfully and obstinately refuse, we preay you then to certify their names unto us, to the end her majesty may take such futher course therein as it shall seem best in her princely wisdom (emphasis added).¹⁶

This document and the image of Elizabeth, that white and red icon of English racial purity and superiority, casting out her polar opposites, “Moors and Negars” gives startling materiality to Winthrop Jordan's assertion that discourses on blackness occured in tandem with ideals of female beauty as represented by Elizabeth (8). While such critical attention as has been paid to this document concentrates on the attempt to discharge Moors out of the realm and uses the attempt to prove the existence of a viable black presence in England (Newman 148), the terms of the proclamation demand special attention. The image of large numbers of Moors having “crept into this island” suggests that they suddenly “appeared” on their own volition (despite having been “fostered and relieved” here by unnamed residents). The rest of the document is concerned to prevent contact between these invaders and “her own liege” people despite its contradictory contention that her own subjects are the ones “possessed” of “Blackamoors” to the detriment of the state.

Equally important is the reference to the religion (or lack of religion) of the Moors which supposes that they are a logical group to cut off from state resources because they have “no understanding of Christ or his Gospel.” In this time of perceived crisis Christianity becomes the prerequisite for access to limited resources. Certainly, Elizabeth's evocation of the religious difference of the Moor would seem to support Appiah's contention that religious difference is the crucial part of the construction of black “difference.” I would argue, however, that even though religion is given as a compelling reason for excluding Moors, merely emphasizing religious difference only clouds the political reality that the Moors' visibility in the culture made them a viable target for exclusion. In other words, it is their physical difference and the moral/spiritual qualities associated with it that provokes their exclusion, not simply their religion.

This is the document Newman uses to support her contention that blacks were “numerous enough to generate alarm.” The tone of the document does imply a state of national emergency, since Elizabeth opens with a reminder of “these hard times of dearth.” If we take the proclamation at face value, the “great numbers of Negars or Blackamoors … of which kind there is allready here too manie” suggests a large number, but the furor caused by the presence of Moroccan ambassadors at Elizabeth's court in 1601 suggests that blacks, particularly royal blacks, were still a novelty. There is no evidence that this had to constitute a large number, particularly if we remember that the threat of the black to the state is continually magnified in a racist culture. Given such contradictory evidence and Basil Davidson's early warning in The African Slave Trade that “A great deal of historical writing is propaganda” (26), a more fruitful and significant question might be not how many black Africans were in early modern England, but “How many Moors does it take to generate alarm in England”?

In his Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, commenting on this passage, Peter Fryer suggests that the first expulsion of these “Negars” was payment for the release of English hostages. The merchant involved asked for the right to confiscate black slaves in exchange for his arrangement for the release of 89 English hostages in Spain and Portugal. Fryer's evidence convincingly demonstrates the real political and economic factors underlying the expulsions and forces us to question the rhetoric of the second expulsion as well. Nevertheless, his explanation only heightens our curiosity about the specificity of the terms of the expulsion. Certainly the political/religious rationale mystifies the wholesale confiscation of “property” from her citizens. However, the reliance on the good of the commonwealth suggests that Queen Elizabeth draws on a series of associations about Moors as a group that seem to persist in contemporary Anglo-American racial discourse: in times of economic stress, visible minorities very often become the scapegoat for a national problem.

Elizabeth's proclamation may open up another text which reveals the economic and racial fears of Elizabethan England, The Merchant of Venice. At the end of Act III of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the audience witnesses a joking interchange between Shylock's servant, Launcelot Gobbo, and Lorenzo and Jessica about their mixed marriage:

jessica:
Nay you need not fear us, Lorenzo, Launcelot
and I are out. He tells me flatly that there’s no mercy for me in heaven
because I am a Jew's daughter; and he says that you are no good member
of the commonwealth, for in converting Jews to Christians, you raise the price
of pork.
lorenzo:
I shall answer that better to the commonwealth
than you can the getting up of the Negro's belly; the Moor is with child
by you Launcelot.
launcelot:
It is much that the Moor should be more than
reason; but if she be less than an honest woman, she is indeed more than I
took her for.

(III.v.31-42).¹⁷

This passage proves to be a very problematic re-presentation (with the double distancing that this implies) for Shakespearean criticism. The female Moor is not a character presented to the audience by an actor, but one only spoken about by other characters; she literally does not exist on stage. So too, she barely exists in the area of textual analysis. The Arden edition of Merchant helpfully notes that “this passage has not been explained” and suggests “Perhaps it was introduced simply for the sake of the elaborate pun on Moor/more” (99, n.35). The annotations in the Variorum Shakespeare suggest that this emphasis on the purely linguistic aspects of the scene is typical, giving several such reading, including, “A change of ‘less’ into ‘more’ makes the jingle fuller.” Even editions that acknowledge the racial charge in this scene still elide the black woman as a part of the play. The notes to the 1926 Cambridge edition attribute this scene to an adapter rather than to Shakespeare and then asks:

Who was the black woman referred to in this passage? Clearly she has nothing to do with the play as it stands. Was she a character in an earlier version, e.g. a member of Morocco's train? Or was she a real figure, a London notoriety familiar to the audience for whom the dialogue was written? Holding the opinion we do on the authorship of this scene, we are inclined to interpret this reference as a topical one (emphasis added).¹⁸

Interestingly, even an edition that confronts the startling reference to a black woman and posits the existence of an actual black woman completely detaches her from the Shakespearean text by asserting that the dialogue is not Shakespeare's and that the figure “has nothing to do with the play.” Both readings, the linguistic and the topical, insist on the obscurity of the scene and of the black woman.¹⁹ For one, she exists only as a text; for the other, she may exist in history, but not in the text.

This joking conversation no doubt parodically reflects the investment of the commonwealth in marriage practices. Nevertheless, the audience is left to question the difference between Lorenzo's liaison with a Jew and Launcelot's with a Moor. The Renaissance stage abounds with jokes about bastards. Certainly, if Launcelot's fault was merely the getting of another bastard, there would be no reason to emphasize that this invisible woman is a Moor. Anthony Barthelemy, in his Black Face, Maligned Race, notes that this exchange reflects ideas of the licentiousness of the black woman typical of the time. However, the pregnant, unheard (and by critics unseen) black woman becomes in some ways the silent symbol for the economic and racial politics of The Merchant of Venice. Like the pregnant Indian maid in A Midsummer Night's Dream, she works within the desire for the riches that come from cultural interaction; however, she also exemplifies the necessity for controlling such interactions. She is, perhaps, an example of what Peter Stallybrass has called “the female grotesque” which “interrogate[s] class and gender hierarchies alike, subverting the enclosed body in the name of a body that is ‘unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits’.”²⁰

The pressures of race, religion, and economics in Elizabeth's proclamation help contextualize the threat posed by a Launcelot Gobbo and his Moor. A similar sense of a critical scarcity of resources pervades The Merchant of Venice. This sense of privation felt by the citizens of Venice produces an economic imperative in the play which insists on the exclusion of racial, religious, and cultural difference. In Gobbo's jesting evocation of the scarcity of food we see the same unease over limited resources and possibly, famine. Famine, one of the particular rationales for colonial plantation and expansion, becomes here associated with the black woman. With the finite resources of a Venetian (or Elizabethan) society reserved for the wealthy elite, the offspring of Gobbo and the Moor present a triple threat that in this world is perceived as a crime against the state. This miscegenation is perhaps more suspect than the possibility of that between a Portia and a Morocco; it raises the possibility of a half Black, half Christian child from the lower classes threatens to upset the desired balance of consumption.

Ultimately both sources draw on/create the same racial stereotype. Just as the image of the black female as consumer of state resources in twentieth-century United States is statistically inaccurate but politically powerful, so may the black presence have been a threat to white European labor, a threat magnified by its very visibility. I borrow here from Patricia Hill Collins' discussion of the image of the welfare mother in the United States:

Controlling Black women's fertility in such a political economy becomes important. The image of the welfare mother fulfills this function by labeling as unnecessary and even dangerous to the values of the country the fertility of women who are not white and middle class … The image of the welfare mother thus provides ideological justification for the dominant group's interest in limiting the fertility of black mothers who are seen as producing too many unproductive children.²¹

Similarly, the alignment of class, race, and religious difference in the jesting over the female Moor in Merchant serves to label her fertility as dangerous and ultimately disruptive of the desired homology between Christianity and economic vitality.

The unnoticed black woman in The Merchant of Venice suggests a great deal about the racial and sexual politics of reading and consequently “writing” the Renaissance. Much attention is paid to Portia's gender-bending and the Prince of Morocco's role in the sex/gender system of Venice. However, modern critical attention to the play in some ways replicates a dynamic typical of modern Europe. The current historical work on the black presence in England, not surprisingly, ignores gender difference as well. Then, as now, black women fall into the margins of difference. As Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith propose in their provocatively titled anthology, All of the Men are Black, All the Women are White, But Some of Us are Brave, the elision of the female from the category of race only contributes to the invisibility of black women.²²

This tendency in modern works is only exacerbated by early discourses of race. A travel narrative printed in Richard Hakluyt's influential Principal Voyages, “The Prosperous Voyage of Master James Lancaster to the towne of Fernambruck in Brasil,” graphically illustrates this point. The English, in the midst of a battle with the Portuguese and the Native Americans in Brazil, block off a harbor and commandeer all enemy ships:

And this farther good chance or blessing of God we had to helpe us, that assoone as we had taken our cartes, the next morning came in a ship with some 60 Negros, 10 Portugall woman, and 40 Portugals: the women and the Negros we turned out of the towne, but the Portugals our Admirall kept us to draw the carts when they were laden, which to us was a very great ease. For the country is very hote and ill for our nation to take any great travell in.²³

At this point in Lancaster's narrative, issues of numbering and cataloguing seem to take precedence over narrative detail. While we are given the illusion of numerical specificity in the numbering of the Portuguese by nationality and gender, the “Negroes” are made genderless (or all male): “the women and the Negroes we turned out of the towne.”

Similarly, we find in Peter Fryer's account of the use of blacks as symbols of status in seventeenth-century England, the revelation of a 100 year tradition of the Sackville family who kept a page who was always to be known as John Morocco. A look at the diary of Lady Anne Clifford shows that, in addition to John Morocco, the Sackvilles acquired a black laundrymaid, named Grace Robinson around 1613.²⁴ Even with this seemingly innocent piece of evidence, we need to question (without valorizing) why it is that the black male's name and identity is subsumed under his racial status. The Sackville family literally name him “Morocco” and make him the focus of necessary racial distinctions that shaped family status. Grace Robinson and her labor (like most women's work) disappears from the narrative of the Sackville family only to appear in a list of family retainers at the end of the text. If nothing else, her appearance suggests that although most slaves were men, black women were not absent. Such narrative fragments hint at the possibilities for the study of race in early modern England; however, they should also represent a cautionary tale about the ways in which the terms of representation dictate the terms of critical analysis. The master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house: the insistence on traditional standards of evidence, on “ocular proof” of a black female presence before any discussion of the gendering of race, merely maintains the traditional silence that surrounded black women from their earliest experiences in England and America.

Newman ends her essay on Othello urging that Shakespeare be read from a position of opposition:

We need to read Shakespeare in ways which produce resistant readings, ways which contest the hegemonic forces the plays at the same time affirm. Our critical task is not merely to describe the formal parameters of a play, not is it to make claims about Shakespeare's politics, conservative or subversive, but to reveal the discursive and dramatic evidence for such representations, and their counterparts in criticism and representations (158).

I want to suggest here that Newman's contention needs expansion: Not only do we need to read Shakespeare in ways that produce resistant readings, we need to read “other” documents with the same care. The documents that would seem to provide empirical evidence are as deeply imbricated by the same cultural assumptions as Shakespeare's plays. Thus, we need to interpret Elizabeth's “creation” as carefully and with as the same critical consciousness as we read Shakespeare's. The reticence Appiah states in speaking of Renaissance notions of race may be rooted in the apprehension that one might take a European representation of difference as an “accurate” sense of difference. This does not mean that representations of blackness are not in the proper purview of critical theories of race. It does, however, mean that we need to read with the constant recognition that the evidence of that presence is still the product of a European—and Eurocentric—mind.

Notes

1. I adopt the term “Black” as a more inclusive term that takes into account the study early descriptions of blackness as well as the presence of Africans in Europe and the Americas.

2. Although his title might seem to acknowledge the difficulty of analyzing a black female presence, the text itself suggests that the work is based on the assumption that the category “black” means “black male.” His text is full of sentences such as the following which equate African difference with masculinity: “Put briefly, English dramatists were trying to respond imaginatively to a black African who was a stranger to their land and their consciousness at exactly the same time that English commercial interests were beginning to exploit that same Black man as the most suitable material for slave labor.” Elliot Tokson, The Image of the Black Man in English Drama (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), ix (emphasis added). A more recent work that substantially revises Tokson, Anthony Barthelemy's Black Face/Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), while not feminist in its approach, pays much more attention to representations of black women.

3. Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro: 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP Press, 1968), 8.

4. This latter question may in fact seem wellworn to those who have been in immersed in the arguments over the “New Historicism.” I bring up this specific question again, because this issue of “evidence” is of pressing concern to historical studies of race, as one faces from students and from peers the need to “prove” a significant black presence in the Renaissance. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's essay “Literary Criticism and The New Historicism” charges that the reading strategies of the more prominent “new historicists” ignore the unique qualities of history: “In most cases they have implicitly preferred to absorb history into the text or discourse without (re)considering the specific characteristics of history herself. Such a blanket charge may appear churlish, especially since so much of the work in new historicism has attempted to restore women, working people, and other marginal groups (although rarely, so far, black people) to the discussion of literary texts.” in The New Historicism, H.Aram Veeser ed., (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 217. Interestingly, even as she foregrounds the absence of blacks from analysis, she proposes a reading of history which may perpetuate that absence, “Both in the past and in the interpretation of the past history follows a pattern or structure, according to which some systems of relations and some events possess greater significance than others” (218). Such an emphasis on patterns and degrees of significance, this essay should demonstrate, still works to preclude the restoration of marginalized figures to literature and history.

5. Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” in SisterOutsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press, 1984), 42.

6. bell hooks, “feminist scholarship: some ethical issues” in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist *Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 43.

7. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Race” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin eds., (Chicago and London: U of Chicago Press, 1990), 276.

8. I use Appiah here because, as the author of an entry presumably designed to enable further discussions on this category, he shows some recalcitrance in his thinking on the Renaissance which is, in effect, not unlike the objections made by more conservative scholars against race as a focus of inquiry in earlier periods.

9. In the introduction to the volume, editor Thomas McLaughlin outlines the project of the individual entries: “Each theorist considered a different term prevelant in literary discourse, examining its history, the controversies it generates, the questions it raises, the reading strategies it permits” (emphasis added).

10. Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica; or, Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths, ed. Bruce Robbins (New York: Oxford UP, 1981).

11. I am thinking here specifically of such writers on feminism and identity politics such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis and bell hooks and post-colonial critics such as Gayatri Spivak. One tantalizing moment that suggests what such an intersection might look like occurs in a conversation between bell hooks and Barbara Bowen on sixteenth century misogynist literature and Shaharazad Ali's Black Man's Guide to Understanding the Black Woman, recounted by bell hooks in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, eds. bell hooks and Cornel West (Boston: South Bend Press, 1991), 88.

12. in Jean E. Howard et al., eds., Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York: Methuen, 1987), 148.

13. I make these claims with some qualifications. Newman's study is very much concerned with the way black and white work against each other in miscegenative pairings. However, the effect is to locate “race” in Othello and “gender” in Desdemona.

14. See Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade (Boston: Little Brown Company, 1980), 70-71 (originally entitled, The Black Mother).

15. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of the Black People in Britain (London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1984), 10.

16. James Walvin, The Black Presence: A Documentary History of the Negro in England: 1550-1860 (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 65.

17. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Horace Howard Furness (New York: Dover Publications, 1964); originally published 1888.

18. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, eds. Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1926), 158.

19. I do not rule out a topical allusion. One could consider it a reference to the infamous case of the black woman, Maria, impregnated and abandoned by Drake and his crew on his third circumnavigation: “Drake left behind him upon this island two negroes … and likewise the negro wench Maria. She being gotten with child in the ship and now being very great was left here on the island, which Drake named the isle Francisco after one of the negroes” (196). There is no way of knowing how long such an incident would remain in the public memory. William Camden's 1625 Annales records castigations of Drake for this and other actions on that voyage. See John Hampden, ed. Francis Drake: Privateer: Contemporary Narratives and Documents. (Alabama: The U of Alabama P, 1972).

20. Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexuality in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1986), 142.

21. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwyn Hyman, 1990), 76-77. See also Angela Davis, “Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights” in Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage, 1981).

22. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, All the Women are White, All the Men are Black, But Some of us are Brave (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1982).

23. Richard Hakluyt, The Principle Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 12 Vols (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1903-05), 57.

24. Vita Sackville-West, ed., The Diary of Lady Anne Clifford (London: William Heinemann, 1923), n. p.