Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology

Description

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new critical approaches to black African agency and the conceptualization of blackness in early modern literary works, historical documents, material and visual cultures, and performance culture.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. Front Matter ....Pages i-xvii Introduction: The Contours of a Field (Cassander L. Smith, Nicholas R. Jones, Miles P. Grier)....Pages 1-12 Front Matter ....Pages 13-13 Maroons in the Montes: Toward a Political Ecology of Marronage in the Sixteenth-Century Caribbean (Gabriel de Avilez Rocha)....Pages 15-35 Women/Animals/Slaves: Race and Sexuality in Wycherley’s The Country Wife (Derrick Higginbotham)....Pages 37-61 Front Matter ....Pages 63-63 Choreographies of Trans-Atlantic Primitivity: Sub-Saharan Isolation in Black Dance Historiography (Esther J. Terry)....Pages 65-82 Ventriloquizing Blackness: Citing Enslaved Africans in the French Caribbean, c.1650–1685 (Ashley Williard)....Pages 83-105 “Candy No Witch in Her Country”: What One Enslaved Woman’s Testimony During the Salem Witch Trials Can Tell Us About Early American Literature (Cassander L. Smith)....Pages 107-134 Front Matter ....Pages 135-135 “Is Black so Base a Hue?”: Black Life Matters in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (David Sterling Brown)....Pages 137-155 “[L]ooking at Me My Body Across Distances”: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Seventeenth-Century European Religious Concepts of Race (Lauren Shook)....Pages 157-173 “Do You Love Me, Master?”: The Erotic Politics of Servitude in The Tempest and Its Postcolonial Afterlife (Rebecca Kumar)....Pages 175-196 Front Matter ....Pages 197-197 Necrocapitalism and the Early Modern Iberian Black Diaspora as Academic Field (John Beusterien)....Pages 199-209 Debt Collecting, Disappearance, Necromancy: A Response to John Beusterien (Nicholas R. Jones)....Pages 211-221 Ain’t She a Shakespearean: Truth, Giovanni, and Shakespeare (Dennis Austin Britton)....Pages 223-228 The Color of Professionalism: A Response to Dennis Britton (Miles P. Grier)....Pages 229-238 Back Matter ....Pages 239-244