Seminar: Renaissance Race Theory and Early Modern Culture

3 units

This course will explore how literary and popular texts of the early modern period represent and produce racial identities. We will consider the characteristic shapes of racial fictions in early modern England -- occasionally comparing literary examples with period scientific, visual, and material texts. In addition, we will reflect on the methodology of reading race in cultures other than our own, with frequent recourse to critical race theory, using both work focused on the early modern period and work that engages race more generally (e.g., Kim Hall, Stephen Jay Gould, Anthony Appiah). Readings will include poetry by Shakespeare, Sidney, and William Herbert; fiction by Aphra Behn; plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton; we will also compare early modern representations of race to a few later representations, likely including Wilkie Collins' "Poor Miss Finch" and "The Jazz Singer."