Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies brings into conversation two fields—Early Modern Studies and Black Studies—that traditionally have had little to say to each other. This disconnect is the product of current scholarly assumptions about a lack of archival evidence that limits what we can say about those of African descent before modernity. This volume posits that the limitations are not in the archives, but in the methods we have constructed for locating and examining those archives. The essays that make up this volume offer new critical approaches to black African agency and the conceptualization of blackness in early modern literary works, historical documents, material and visual cultures, and performance culture. Ultimately, this critical anthology revises current understandings about racial discourse and the cultural contributions of black Africans in early modernity and in the present across the globe.
Table of Content
1. Introduction: The Contours of a Field (Cassander L. Smith, Nicholas R. Jones, Miles P. Grier).- Part I. Space and Field.- 2. Maroons in the Montes: Towards a Political Ecology of Marronage in the Sixteenth Century Caribbean (Gabriel de Avilez Rocha).- 3. Women/Animals/Slaves: Race and Sexuality in Wycherley’s The Country Wife (Derrick Higginbotham).- Part II. Archives and Methods.- 4. Choreographies of Trans-Atlantic Primitivity: Sub-Saharan Isolation in Black Dance Historiography (Esther J. Terry).- 5. Ventriloquizing Blackness: Citing Enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, 1655-1685 by Ashley Williard.- 6. “Candy No Witch in Her Country”: What One Enslaved Woman’s Testimony During the Salem Witch Trials Can Tell Us About the Origins of Early American Literature (Cassander L. Smith).- Part III. Period Tensions.- 7. “Is Black So Base a Hue?”: Black Life Matters in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (David Sterling Brown).- 8. “[L]ooking at me my body across distances”: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Seventeenth-Century European Religious Concepts of Race (Lauren Shook).- 9. “Do you love, master?”: The Erotics and Politics of Servitude in The Tempest (Rebecca Kumar).- Part IV. Early Modern Black Lives Matter: A Critical Roundtable.- 10. Necrocapitalism and the Early Modern Iberian Black Diaspora as Academic Field (John Beusterien).- 11. Debt Collecting, Disappearance, Necromancy: A Response to John Beusterien (Nicholas R. Jones).- 12. Ain’t She a Shakespearean: Truth, Giovanni, and Shakespeare (Dennis Austin Britton).- 13. The Color of Professionalism: A Response to Dennis Britton (Miles P. Grier).
About the author
Cassander L. Smith is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama, USA. Her publications include a monograph, Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (2016), and a co-edited volume, Teaching with Tension: Race, Reality, and Resistance in the Classroom (forthcoming).
Nicholas R. Jones is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Africana Studies at Bucknell University, USA. His publications include the forthcoming monograph Staging Habla de negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain and articles in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, and Hispanic Review, among others.
Miles P. Grier is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, USA. He is finishing a book manuscript on Othello and the racialization of Atlantic literacy. His publications include essays in The William and Mary Quarterly, Politics and Culture, and The Journal of Popular Music Studies, among others.
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