Race, ethnicity, and power in the Renaissance

This book is a collection of essays addressing the subjects of race and racial difference in English Renaissance culture. Working from historicist, materialist, and feminist perspectives, reading texts as well as cultural practices, the authors present a detailed and sophisticated understanding of early modern views of what race meant.

Beyond the question of how race was useful to English self-fashioning, the essays in this book are also concerned with how the practices of English culture helped endow notions of race with meaning. The authors here have assembled suggestive evidence of how race emerged from economics, technology, dramatic performance and popular culture, as well as how it was presented in more traditional kinds of literary evidence.

That evidence is broad; although most of the essays here are centrally concerned with a single Shakespearean play, those plays are textualized within rich webs of racial discourse from the classical as well as the Renaissance world. The essays juxtapose noncanonical drama with these Shakespearean plays and, in one case, devote major attention to a work outside a traditionally conceived canon of Renaissance literature.

The effect is to emphasize the breadth and pervasiveness of racial discourse, the rich resourcefulness enabling its production.