Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England

Abstract / Excerpt

The "Ethiope," the "tawny Tartar," the "woman blackamoore," and "knotty Africanisms"―allusions to blackness abound in Renaissance texts. Kim F. Hall's eagerly awaited book is the first to view these evocations of blackness in the contexts of sexual politics, imperialism, and slavery in early modern England. Her work reveals the vital link between England's expansion into realms of difference and otherness―through exploration and colonialism-and the highly charged ideas of race and gender which emerged.

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About the Author

Kim F. Hall

Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England

Kim F. Hall

Cornell University Press

Race in Literature, Early Modern Literature, Feminism

Book

319 pages

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Citation "Kim F. Hall’s Things of Darkness was a game-changing book when it appeared in 1995, both historicizing and deconstructing the figures and ideas of Blackness in early modern English literature. In a series of elegant, closely analyzed chapters, Hall de-familiarized canonical texts, such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, his niece Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania, Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest (among others). And though, of course, she was not the first to discuss Renaissance texts in terms of race and colonialism, by focusing on the naturalized use of tropes of Blackness, she made sure we could never read these texts the same way again. Even early in her career, Hall was, unsurprisingly, committed to the classroom, and this book was and remains an essential text for anyone wanting to teach these fictions in the context of gender, race, and colonial expansion. Even more specifically, the book contains in its Appendix a little anthology of early modern “Poems of Blackness” that gives students and teachers instant access to texts that otherwise would be much more difficult to find. Hall continues to produce outstanding scholarship—editing a superb edition of Othello, writing seminal articles on race in the Renaissance, maintaining the #ShakeRace hashtag on Twitter—but this book announced her transformative presence in the field and retains its power twenty-five years on." - Peter G. Platt, English Department Chair