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Article Excerpt
Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England
By Sujata Iyengar Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005
Sujata Iyengar's Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England arrives at a particularly fruitful moment in the development of early modern race studies, where the field is now large enough, and its place in publishing, conferences, and the classroom secure enough, to withstand complexity and sometimes divergence of approach. One key point of divergence is the status of racialism and racism in the early modern period. The recent work of scholars Kim Hall, Peter Erickson, Jyotsna Singh, Joyce Green MacDonald, Arthur Little, and Dympna Callahan make central an analysis of racism and/or racialism to their understanding of the period and of the field of early modern studies. This branch of early modern race studies has a forward- and backward-looking reach, focusing on the presence and impact of African, Native American, Indian and Irish bodies as they register on the early modern English literary imagination and official writings: ethnographies, laws, scientific treatises and policies, plays, masques, and poems, as well as an explicit analysis of the racialized politics of the field. For example, in Shakespeare Jungle Fever (2000), Arthur Little defines the "jungle" as those notions of racial and sexual difference repressed and chastised out of visibility in early modern culture as well as our current academic conversations: "The institutional and official foundations of culture are essentially chastised ones. In other words, culture (so defined) becomes legible when read with, through, and against those moments it chooses to forget. If culture names itself through anything, it is through the moment it obliterates, the histories it erases, the institutional hands it does not admit or does not know it owns, the bodies it pretends not to see or doesn't" (9).
Other early modern scholars, including Emily Barrels, Mary Floyd-Wilson, and Gary Taylor, decenter England's engagement with colonialism and the slave trade, to focus primarily on the often contradictory notions of white ethnic and/or racial identity as it merges with other forms of identity, including religion, sexuality, and nation. These texts often broach the subject of an English "racialism" with some reserve. Mary Floyd-Wilson, for example, argues that
In focusing on England's eventual commitment to the Atlantic slave trade and on those aspects of early modern discourse that subjugated Africans, denigrated blackness, and helped to naturalize a link between color and slavery, we have overlooked an ethnological history that failed to predict the outcome that we now know. English Ethnicity resists recapitulating the accession of white over black. It attempts instead to retrieve the counterintuitive notions of ethnicity and "race" that the now-dominant narrative of oppression aimed to erase: the representations of northern "whiteness" and English identity as barbaric, marginalized, and mutable, and the long-neglected perceptions of "blackness" as a sign of wisdom, spiritualize, and resolution. Readings that ignore such expressions of ethnic and racial differences risk confirming, rather than historicizing, the normative status of whiteness and Englishness. (11)
Might we acknowledge the unsteady production of white identity in the period while at the same time identify emerging racist or racialist ideas in early modern English culture and the continuing impact of such thought? Iyengar's central point of contention with this question might be with my use of the word "emerging." Iyengar resists a sense of a development "toward" a racist or racialist trajectory, and therefore a sense of a "stable" racial meaning for the period: "Unlike work that tries to find a specific historical or disciplinary point for the emergence of race as a color-coded classification, mine insists that the terms of race and racialism cannot and should not be treated as pure or hermetic categories" (1). She is interested in the ways that literary affiliations entangle and complicate racial mythologies and forms of thinking, calling on Raymond Williams's concept of the "structure of feeling," the distilled residue of past and present lived experience of a community, as bracketed from the institutional and ideological organization of the society. Racialized thinking of the period...
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