This book looks backwards and forwards from the Renaissance , a period that, though too few attend fully to the fact, marked a turning point in race history. The Renaissance oversaw the ushering in of the early modern slave trade in African people, a profoundly important truth. St. Clair Drake demonstrates, for instance, that racism is not the cause but the consequence of that slave trade ; indeed, modern anti-black/white-over-black racism developed as a purposeful justification of âracial slavery ,â according to which, âin the new system the slave owner was expected to differ in physical type from the slaveâ (Drake 1991, 302). Though the Renaissance and pre-modern history broadly have often been treated as race-neutral on the grounds that early definitions of âraceâ differed or have not been properly âhistoricized,â such claims overlook much literary evidence, particularly in comedic contexts, of early prejudiced rationalizations/beliefs about race and national identity demonstrably yielding stereotypes that prefigure and are even identical to those of modern racism . Indeed, the rise of racism occurred considerably earlier than scholars have heretofore allowedâwell before American chattel slaveryâand first gained force in the Renaissance , a period that was, not coincidentally, also the one in which colonialism and truly global trade first emerged alongside an expansion of dynastic, linguistic, and religiously inflected proto-nationalism . As this book will demonstrate, Renaissance Europeans synthesized and developed a logic, hermeneutical modes, and race-beliefs (especially via often overlapping categories of religion and race) promoting proto-racism , that is, the earliest observable pre-modern forms of racism. Significantly, the proto-racism preceding and underlying the derivative, so-called modern scientific racism was not founded upon biologism , but rather upon metaphysical authorities and belief in the supposed rational and moral inferiority of blackness drawn from religious texts and interpretations, moral allegory , metaphysical philosophy, and the comedic blackface fool traditions so often informed by them.
This very summary is at odds with a dominant strain in early modern studies, where a willful or privileged blindness to issues of race persists. Thus, when race enters scholarly conversations about early works, it too often meets the objection that such a concept is an ahistorical, anachronistic imposition, a tactic still appearing, surprisingly, even in discussions of race in Othello. Peter Erickson and Kim Hall point out in a 2016 special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly that a denial of the relevance of race has been around since the 1980s and 90s: âInitial opposition to early modern race studies, associated primarily with New Historicism , was encapsulated in the single word âanachronismâ and informally deployed as a scare tactic and conversation stopperâ (Erickson and Hall 2016, 4). As Arthur L. Little, Jr. explains in the same volume, New Historicism thereby âeffectively prescribed the proper parameters of early modern studiesâ in a way that excluded race (Little 2016, 86).
New Globalist criticism offers a striking example of more recent consequences of proscribing a focus on race. The first two major collections of essays introducing a global focus, Global Traffic (2008) and A Companion to the Global Renaissance (2009), were alike in showing little interest in Africa or black people. That is true even despite the already burgeoning Renaissance trade in African slavesâand English encroachments upon itâin this period. Notably, the Companion only briefly touches upon Africa in a few scattered sentences on just 17 of its 400 pages, while less than 5% of the total pages even mention Africa. Even more telling of disinterest, Africa is the focus of zero essays out of twenty-one. Doing somewhat better, Global Traffic addresses Africa in one sustained discussion in one out of fourteen essaysâ23 of its nearly 300 pages (less than 10%).
The Atlantic slave trade and the assumptions of racial difference to which it gave rise were somehow deemed outside the purview of Global Renaissance studies. One reason is that the brutal economics of human trafficking would sound a dissonant note at odds with some global criticsâ neoliberal view of capitalism as the master narrative of history. The African slave trade , after all, presents us with the reality of a bloody stain challenging such a congratulatory view of early modern history, which overlapped precisely with the related histories of emergent capitalism and colonialism . Recalling former President Bill Clintonâs globalist reassurance back in the 1990s that âA rising tide lifts all boats,â we would do well to remember that similar proverbial rising tides also propelled slaversâ ships. Besides, given that the marked effects of early modern forms of racism and colonialism remain all too persistent today in the systemic institutional racism recently exposed by Ta-Nahesi Coates (Coates, June 2014), the tendency to avoid scrutinizing emergent racism appears all the more unhelpful. After all, when scholars insist upon a wholly pre-racist past before the modern era, they make it easier for others to ignore current, derivative forms of racism ; dismissing the development of forms of racism in the past helps to enable dismissing similar racism now.
In fairness, most dismissals of early forms of racism are well intentioned. For example, Ania Loomba identifies a reluctance to recognize early race prejudice due to misplaced liberatory motives: â[M]any scholars want to find an early modern Europe free of highly calcified notions of race. And for others, the early modern period, or the medieval period, or indeed the classical age before that must be preserved as golden ages where racial issues were simply absentâ (Loomba 2002, 5). Compare this with Michael Bristolâs persuasive case that much of the history of criticism on Othello has been âcharacterized by a search for consoling and anesthetic explanations that would make its depictions of humiliation and suffering more tolerableâ (Bristol 1995, 154). The desire to maintain a seamless race-free prior age is likewise anesthetic; it has anesthetized us to the pain that came before but which, remaining masked, has all the more power to continue to harm now. For all the good intentions behind âgolden ageâ thinking on race, then, such notions are as shortsighted as they are uninformed.
The Early African Slave Trade and Renaissance Race-Consciousness
In Shakespeareâs era, in Kim Hallâs words, ânew social pressures ⊠force[d] fairness /whiteness into visibilityâ (Hall 1998, 79), thereby putting âblackness â into relief. Nothing put racial blackness and whiteness into sharper contrast than the still too little known history of the Renaissance African slave trade. This contrast between âfairâ or white Europeans and âblackâ Africans was becoming self-conscious well before the seventeenth century when many âWhiteness Studies â scholars have observed it.1 The Mediterranean âwhite slave trade,â which had been based in Italian port cities like Venice and Genoa , had collapsed by the end of the fifteenth century , as Black Sea slave marketing in Tartars, Circassians, Armenians, Georgians, Bulgarians, and Slavs was sealed off by the Turks after their capture of Constantinople in 1453 (Davis 1966, 43). By that time, the Portuguese had already developed a slave trade centered in West Africa that was well positioned to fill the void. In fact, importantly, at least by 1444, Portugal had launched the early modern slave trade when Lancorote de Freita led an expedition which took 225â235 African captives from the Guinea coast (Donnan 1930, vol...