Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race

by Noémie Ndiaye, Geraldine Heng (Editor), Ayanna Thompson (Editor)

Overview

Scripts of Blackness shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism.

In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques—black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)—in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could/would ultimately live in their midst.

Those scripts were often gendered and hinged on notions of demonization, exclusion, exploitation, animalization, commodification, sexualization, consensual enslavement, misogynoir, infantilization, and evocative association with other racialized minorities. Scripts of Blackness attempts to grasp the stories that Western Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effects of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781512826074
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	02/27/2024
Series:	RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Noémie Ndiaye is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
Performative Blackness in Early Modern Europe


Scene 1
<Scene>January 4, 2016. Seville, Spain. Following a tradition that originated, we are told, in the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of spectators gather in the streets to attend the annual Parade of the Magi, la cabalgata de reyes. At dusk, some thirty pageant wagons start moving, laden with music equipment, multicolored neon lights, and costumed children who shower spectators with fistfuls of candies. The kings’ wagons arrive last: this year, King Balthazar is performed by the president of the Sevilla FC soccer club, in blackface, as always. He is attended by local volunteers, most on foot, some on white horses, all in dazzling North African white garb, with white cheches on their heads sharply contrasting with the black gloves on their hands, black makeup on their faces, and bright red lipstick applied within the natural contour of their lips. They laugh, dance to the tambourines, strike a pose for the cameras, and throw candies at spectators. The ground is sticky with crushed candies. You look around; you are the only visibly Black person in this crowd.

Scene 2
<Scene>March 2019. Paris, France. An upcoming performance of Aeschylus’s The Suppliants is advertised on the website of your alma mater, Paris-Sorbonne University, with photographs from a rehearsal featuring white actresses playing the Libyan Danaids in blackface. Students and antiracist organizations protest and get the performance canceled. Outrage over the cancellation ensues from academic, cultural, and governmental institutions denouncing censorship, attacks on creative freedom, and the misguided importation of American cultural sensibilities and performance history into French society. You read the press: antiracist protesters are accused of misunderstanding the director’s intentions, Aeschylus’s intentions, and the universalist values of a color-blind republic. The production will be performed two months later, with actresses sporting golden masks this time, in the presence of the minister of culture, the minister of higher education, diplomats, congressmen, and the Parisian academic establishment.

Scene 3
<Scene>Spring 2008. Paris, France. In her office, your formidable acting teacher (a senior white woman) gives you (a young Black woman) feedback on your performance in Salina, an unremarkable African fantasy play by a popular contemporary playwright that she added to your portfolio. She is trying to steer you in the right direction the best way she can—the way her own training, culture, and experience have taught her to. She is trying to help. “This scene is not working, Noémie. It’s not working because you are not being African enough for the part. You need to find it. I don’t know. Maybe we could—” (she gestures toward her own face while looking at you. The gesture is vague but unmistakably evocative). She will not complete her sentence, perhaps because she caught the expression on your face, or because she can hear herself now. You look at the shelves of classic European drama covering the walls around the two of you.

Those three scenes of formation constitute the affective substrate of Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race and offer a unique experiential shortcut to some of the core ideas of this book.

Performative blackness—a type of racial impersonation that brings into being and fashions what it claims to mimic—haunts the memory of the Western theatre industry far beyond the confines of the Anglo-American world to which its study has so often been limited.

Performative blackness is tied to the use of prosthetic techniques of embodiment that include but are not limited to masks and makeup.

Performative blackness rubs up against lived Blackness historically and politically in ways that have informed the lives of Black professional performers to this day.

Many European countries suffer from forms of cultural amnesia that either erase performative blackness from their history altogether (like France), or erase the early modern roots of performative blackness, making it appear more recent than it is (like Spain).

Performative blackness holds bodies politic together: it is a conduit for communities to tell the fictions they need to hear about themselves, in conflict and in celebration alike.

Those three scenes drive my commitment to understand the appeal that participation in the economy of performative blackness has held across space and time since its inception. In this book, I ask: what did performative blackness do for early modern Europeans? I explore the invention of performative blackness in Renaissance Europe with the hope that uncovering the ideological operations of that racial technology in early modernity might yield insights for the present—a hope that the broken, recursive, and lacunar history separating our moment and early modernity but also linking them might generate theoretical traction.
In this book, I consider the material practices of racial impersonation in use in early modern Western Europe. I reconstruct three specific techniques—black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)—in order to map out the poetics of those techniques by tracking metaphorical strains regularly associated with them in performance. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, were not simply ornamental: operating across national borders, they constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could live in their midst, and conceptually brought blackness into being as a racial category organizing power relations. All early modern European nations whose colonial aspirations involved Afro-diasporic populations found in performative blackness a most useful instrument. By putting into conversation expansive early modern English, French, and Spanish archives that are seldom discussed and never discussed in relation to one another, in this book, I attempt to grasp the stories Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effect of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects. This attempt proceeds from first-person knowledge that the history of early modern performative blackness is ongoing (as Sylvie Chalaye puts it, “it is as if racialized actors and actresses today had to become the perennial African ambassador, that comedic figure of French baroque theatre inherited from court masquerades”), and from a hope that historical consciousness might foster a greater awareness of the scripts permeating the multimedia terrain of performative blackness in our own moment.
To provide a synthetic introduction to Scripts of Blackness, in this opening chapter, I first define some the project’s key words: I explain what the word race meant in early modernity, and I provide an account of the early modern racial matrix that is simultaneously historicized and informed by Critical Race Theory. With those indispensable conceptual premises in place, I proceed to set up the geographical bounds of this project and show that the emergence of blackness as a racial category was a glocal phenomenon that took place in an intercolonial space following the development of de facto color-based slavery in the Atlantic world starting in the mid-fifteenth century. I then unfold the central argument of this book: I explain what early modern scripts of blackness were, where they can be located for historiographic purposes, what the phrase “performative blackness” means in the context of early modern performance culture, and how the scene of ideological production where scripts of blackness coalesced functioned. Finally, I disclose and justify the transverse, transnational, and “reparanoid” investments and methodologies that animate this book, and I discuss choices I made regarding periodization, racial terminology, and translation, before providing a map of the book’s chapters.

The Racial Matrix: Rank, Religion, and Phenotype in Early Modernity
Race, I contend, is a concept best modeled as a matrix, in the full etymological sense of the word: as a womb-like space producing and nurturing paradigms that differ from each other yet share the bulk of their genetic material, and whose lives remain inextricably interconnected. Here I use the word paradigm simultaneously in its lay sense, to refer to “a pattern or model, an exemplar” of the concept of race, and in its linguistic sense, to refer to a “set of units which are linguistically substitutable in a given context, especially a syntactic one” (OED). If concepts are, as Timothy Harrison puts it, “shared cultural products . . . visible in the interstices between idea and word,” then the lexical deployment of the word “race” indicates that, in Europe, the primary paradigms in the racial matrix were degree, or rank, and religion until the end of the sixteenth century. In France, as Guillaume Aubert notes, “the idea of race rapidly became an essential feature of the early modern French ethos,” as the old military aristocracy, the noblesse d’épée, had a strong impetus to devise an ideological apparatus to prevent the new aristocracy appointed by the king, the noblesse de robe or nouveau nobles, from encroaching on their inherited privileges. Across the Channel, in late sixteenth-century England, this system corresponded to what Jean E. Feerick describes as the then-dominant “race-as-blood” system. For Ivan Hannaford, within that racial paradigm, “to belong to a race was to belong to a family with a valorous ancestry and a profession of public service and virtue.” In Spain, the religious paradigm was stronger: since the promulgation of the statutes on the purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) starting in 1449, blood had been used as a tool to racialize religious difference (Judaism and Islam), which was imagined as hereditary. I will return shortly to and engage more expansively with the various historical contexts invoked in this paragraph. My point for now is theoretical: the racial matrix is characterized by its fertility, that is, its ability to keep generating new paradigms without terminating older ones.
At the end of the sixteenth century, stimulated by the age of discovery and the material incentives of colonization, the racial matrix produced a new paradigm: the word race came to refer to phenotypical differences for which skin tone quickly became a shorthand. Across Europe, phenotype, which had hitherto functioned as one type of difference among others, became a type of racial difference: the emergent paradigm of race-as-phenotype joined the dominant paradigms of race-as-degree and race-as-religion. Degree, religion, and phenotype are all racial paradigms: exemplars of the concept of race and substitutable sets of units in the grammar of intercultural power relations called race. Indeed, understood in the light of Critical Race Theory, race is not a form of human difference but a system of power falsely packaged as a system of knowledge. Race is what happens when, in a given society, the dominant group defines a population group on the basis of an arbitrary criterion and begins seeing that criterion as an embodied, essential, and hereditary trait that justifies the specific positioning of the target population group in the social order. As Geraldine Heng luminously puts it, in race making, features are “selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups. . . . Race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content.” I add “hereditary” to Heng’s “absolute and fundamental” because heredity delimits a certain domain of power relations. It is, for instance, what keeps gender distinct from race, coconstitutive as gender and race might be. Indeed, only in (usually misogynistic) discursive contexts fantasizing about uninterrupted genealogies of women are women invoked as a race.
The “structural relationship of race” is, as Stuart Hall puts it, always an interested one, as it effects “the distribution of symbolic and material resources between different groups and the establishment of racial hierarchies.” In early modernity, that interested discourse served a nascent economic system, capitalism, which, in Immanuel Wallerstein’s words, “needs all the labour-power it can find,” and embraces the subordinating logic of racism rather than the ejecting logic of xenophobia. “Racism is the magic formula” allowing the system “simultaneously to minimize the costs of production . . . and minimize the costs of political disruption.” Understood as an interested economic mechanism, race can refer to something different at different points in time and space, while its primary sociopolitical function remains stable. Emphasizing the purpose of racialization allows us to break away from what Ian Smith calls “the terminological obsession” that informs attempts at relegating the invention of race to the post-Restoration era, and “obscures race’s strategic, opportunistic, negotiating purpose.” Race is not the same thing in the fifteenth and in the twenty-first centuries, or in Spain and in India, but it does the same thing: it hierarchizes difference in service of power.
There are many ways to map the multitude of meanings covered by that deceptively transparent word, race, both in early modernity and in the present. Scholars devise models that best reflect their investments in the study of race. My choice to use the matrix metaphor and to bring within the fold of that metaphor what others might read as the entirely different notions of class and religion (largely setting aside, to do so, the lexical deployment of the word “race” in early modern contexts) reflects my investment in thinking about race as a dynamic structure of power relations that is systemic, future oriented, and constantly in movement. The modern use of the term matrix in the domains of mathematics, logic, computing, and technological reproduction (printing, sound recording, photography) clearly inscribes matrices into the realm of the synthetic and so should, I hope, prevent the organic side of the metaphor from ever fully naturalizing the racial logic. At the same time, the matrix model, with its ever-threatening fertility, calls for vigilance, as it signals that race-as-phenotype is neither the first nor the last racial paradigm that will emerge: it is interlocked with race-as-religion and race-as-rank, and when a new racial paradigm emerges (as it will), race-as-phenotype will be interlocked with that new paradigm too. The logic of interconnectedness at the core of the racial matrix ultimately resonates with Ann Laura Stoler’s observation that racisms cite one another: that since “racial discourses draw on the past as they harness themselves to new visions and projects,” we can never truly know whether we are “witness to a legacy of the past or the emergence of a new phenomenon all together.”
Racial paradigms are always at work within one another and against one another, perpetually ready for reactivation as needed, simultaneously past, present, and future. That sense of dormant liveness, of fertility, of cyclical repetition, and yet of limited predictability drives my use of the matrix metaphor to explain the inner workings of the concept of race. The expansive conceptual articulation of race in early modernity has proved particularly hard to grasp because the modern understanding of race that we bring to archives is limited to bodily surfaces; acknowledging this, I seek to displace that partial phenotypical understanding of race. Grasping race in its expansiveness should help put to rest critical impulses to set “race” narrowly construed in opposition to religion and class as distinct concepts vying for primacy as the central form of Othering in early modernity. All three belong to and in the field of early modern critical race studies.
Matrices are always already racial, for, whether they be organic, synthetic, or both, matrices all have the same purpose: reproduction, the very instrument of race in its most elementary sense, that of common descent and lineage. This may explain why race features so prominently in the Wachowskis’ acclaimed science-fiction trilogy that will already have come to mind for many readers: The Matrix. Given its versatile symbolism, these movies have been enlisted in service of various ideological projects, yet I mention them here because this trilogy uniquely illuminates the racial matrix’s relation to reality and time. Centering on a multiracial coalition of rebels’ messianic quest to free a vegetative mankind from its enslavement to intelligent machines, The Matrix critiques late capitalism in the West by rereading the Gospel and the Platonic allegory of the Cave through the lens of transatlantic slavery. In this allegory, the importance of Black protagonists such as the Oracle, the Prophet (Morpheus), and the fearless Captain (Niobe), together with the appearance of philosopher, activist, and race scholar Cornel West himself as Counselor in the last human city, Zion, are not coincidental. They signal the centrality of race and of Blackness to the movie’s understanding of human history in the West at the turn of the millennium, as well as the centrality of race to the matricial concept itself—a concept that the movie revamps and recirculates but does not invent.
In response to frustratingly recurrent dismissals of conversations about racism on the grounds of race’s scientific inexistence, Critical Race Theory has had to explain over the years, with various analogies, that just because something does not exist does not mean the notion of it cannot affect our lives in concrete, tangible, and tragic ways. Given its resemblances to the racial matrix, the Wachowskis’ matrix offers another such useful analogy. Like the Wachowskis’ matrix, the racial matrix is a neural-interactive simulation—a web of beliefs that holds no tangible reality—and just like one’s real body can die if their avatar dies in the Wachowskis’ matrix, the beliefs and behaviors we engage in in the racial matrix have very real, often deadly, effects. The racial matrix also instantiates particular relations to time: like any reproductive apparatus, matrices make us live in the past, much like the Wachowskis’ matrix recreates a two-hundred-year-old historical reality. In addition, as in the films, the racial matrix needs to reboot regularly. A constantly rebooting racial matrix voids the idea of racial time as forward motion and deploys itself as a structure for which space and time are not singular. Race, in other words, is a flexible and canny conceptual continuum: it bends, moves, and changes with the times, as best serves its purpose of hierarchizing difference in the service of power in whichever context it operates.
With the concept of the racial matrix in hand, I zoom in, within this immense mobile structure, onto one specific node at the key moment of its formation: racial blackness. In Scripts of Blackness, I argue that early modern theatre and performance culture at large played a decisive role in the formation of blackness as a racial category, as phenotype entered the racial matrix. In early modernity, performance was a privileged cultural site for what Michael Omi and Howard Winant famously called “racial formation,” that is, “the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meaning.”

The Bounds of Blackness: Intercolonial, Global, and Glocal Spaces
To be sure, Europeans did not discover dark-skinned Africans in the Renaissance. Geraldine Heng has shown that in the Middle Ages “a hierarchical politics of color, centering with precision on the polarity of black and white, existed and is evidenced across the multitude of texts, sacred and secular, that descends to us.” Although the hierarchical politics of color did affect the ways Europeans thought of Africans, the “signifying field had stabilized” to the extent that color could be played with “under specific hermeneutic conditions, to switch between alternate valencies.” Similarly, Cord Whitaker, while striving to “keep in the foreground the material ramifications of medieval race-thinking . . . with their implications for real bodies,” has mostly brought to light the symbolical play of color in medieval English literature, or “the extent to which blackness in the Middle Ages was a metaphorical vehicle whose engagements with imagination and interpretation were exceedingly flexible.” Heng and Whitaker signal that the evolution of European thought about Africans between the Middle Ages and early modernity was less a rupture than a shift: in the early modern age, the material ramifications of race thinking for real bodies started outweighing the possibilities of symbolic play. That is what Whitaker sees as the medieval “black metaphor” losing its “shimmer,” and what I call the production of blackness in the racial matrix.
The development of de facto color-based slavery in the mid-fifteenth century precipitated the irruption of a sizeable population of sub-Saharan descent in European societies and cultures, a watershed for the purposes of periodization within premodern critical race studies. In this book, I might focus on the mindset of white Europeans and the stories they told themselves by performative means, but the realities of Afro-diasporic life form the horizon against which the shape of that mindset and those stories begin to register and become intelligible. Given the glaring whiteness of the archives, I fully recognize the impossibility, with few exceptions, of recovering the early modern Afro-diasporic perspective in any authentic form. But I do not need to recover traces of that perspective in white sources to know it existed. In other words, we may never be able to look at early modern Afro-diasporic subjectivity directly, but—in this book—like the sun, it casts a light that makes everything else visible in early modernity.
The historical, political, and socioeconomic contexts accounting for the production of blackness as a racial category were colonial and slaving contexts. Scripts of Blackness surveys—between England, Spain, and France—a space bound by particularly strong colonial drives. These three countries were major players, allies, and competitors in the development of color-based slavery in the Atlantic world. That is not to say that they were the only players: two European countries colonized by Spain, namely, Portugal (whose influence over Spanish theatre is unmistakable) and the Low Countries, were crucial to this process, and the future development of early modern critical race studies in the direction of Portuguese and Dutch archives should further enrich our understanding of early modern European racial formations. If color-based slavery was a transnational practice involving sustained exchanges between colonial powers, so was the production of blackness as a racial category, I argue. English, French, and Spanish racializing discourses of blackness, while distinct, were intertwined and, as early modern dictionaries suggest, mutually constitutive: the production of blackness as a racial category was a transnational European endeavor. The conceptual frame of this book is thus, to use Robert Stam and Ella Shohat’s term, “an intercolonial frame.”
It is my contention that early modern performance culture did not passively reflect the intercolonial emergence of blackness as a racial category but actively fostered it. This becomes visible when one compares the fate of blackness on stage and in lexicographic culture. The lexicons that early modern Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Englishmen used at the beginning of the seventeenth century signal that, with various degrees of decisiveness, early modern Europeans were starting to think of blackness as the basis for a new identity category distinct from the older paradigms that had so far defined sameness and difference.
In Iberia, the new category emerged clearly and early. In his dictionary Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), Sebastián de Covarrubias defines a negro as “an Aethiop whose color is black.” For Covarrubias, negros differed from Muslim moros phenotypically: he defines the color “tawny” (morena) as a “color that is not completely black—like the color of the moros, whence the name of the color, unless it comes from blackberry (mora).” Covarrubias defines moros on the basis of geographic origin, as “people from the province of Mauritania.” Negros have a different geographic origin, for Covarrubias defines “Guinea” as “the land of the negros, or Ethiops, in Africa, where the Portuguese enslave people.” In Covarrubias’s rendition of early seventeenth-century Spanish racial lexicon, then, there was a group of people called negros who were defined by the darkness of their skin, their sub-Saharan geographic origin, and their frequent subjection to enslavement—and those people were clearly distinct from moros. Of course, there were people who belonged to both categories—enslaved moros whose skin was darker, and negros who were Muslims—but they are not mentioned by Covarrubias. That such exceptions hardly appear on stage in the Siglo de Oro attests to the role of theatre in actively constructing blackness as an independent identity category. In Spain, both sites of knowledge production, lexicography and performance, worked in synchrony to develop blackness as an identity category that could intersect with other categories precisely because it stood on its own.
The clarity and earliness with which blackness emerged as a racial category in Iberian culture are directly connected to the pioneering role of Iberians in the development of color-based slavery. The Portuguese, having first established trading posts (feitorias) all along the western African coast, changed the traditional dynamics of slave trade in Mediterranean Europe, which for so long had been not color based but religion based. They started enslaving sub-Saharan Africans en masse and sold them in the urban port centers of Lisbon and Seville in the middle of the fifteenth century. From those two cities, enslaved Afro-diasporic people spread over the Iberian Peninsula. A 1565 census had Afro-Spaniards as approximately 13.5 percent of the total population in Seville, commonly known as the “blackest” city in Europe, and Fernández Alvarez estimates that there were forty-four thousand enslaved Afro-diasporic people in Spain by the end of the sixteenth century.
Colonization quickly made the dynamics of slave trade more complex. When Iberians started transporting enslaved people to their American colonies in 1501, that new circuit involved only enslaved people of Sub-Saharan descent. Indeed, in a 1543 edict, Charles V expelled from the Spanish colonies “all male and female slaves from Barbary, or Moors recently converted to Catholicism, as well as their children,” in order for them not to “infect” the New World with the powerful threat of Islam. Such provisions were reiterated throughout the second half of the sixteenth century: because enslaved Muslim were de facto prohibited in the colonies, Iberians increasingly resorted to enslaved pagans, usually from sub-Saharan Africa. Seville and its Casa de contratación, being the heart of the Spanish colonial administration and the home of many prominent slave owners in the empire, became a point of connection between the old and the new slavery systems. Some enslaved Afro-Spaniards were sent to the colonies from Seville, although laws were passed to limit the influence that enslaved ladinos, who were familiar with Spanish culture and thus able to navigate it to their own benefit, could have over enslaved Africans from the 1520s onward. Conversely, seventeenth-century plays increasingly reflect the historical reality of enslaved Afro-diasporic characters traveling from the colonies to the metropole. Across the empire, the slave trade intensified in the first decades of the seventeenth century, as the Iberian Union between Spain and Portugal formed and thrived (1580–1640).
Lexicography reveals a slower emergence of blackness as a category in early modern France and England, where involvement in colonialism and de facto color-based slavery was mostly aspirational at the end of the sixteenth century and solidified throughout the seventeenth century. There, performance culture seems to have been one step ahead of lexicographic culture: scripts of blackness effected the ideological work that lexicography would register only later. While there was no such thing as a regulated slave trade in Tudor England, the Afro-British community grew in the sixteenth century as a result of diplomatic and commercial exchanges between England and Iberia. Enslaved people were offered as gifts; English merchants such as John Lok, the Gonsons, the Winters, and the Hawkins family participated in the slave trade and brought some enslaved people home with them; Iberians who settled in London, such as the Portuguese Marrano community, often imported their lifestyle with them, including an enslaved domestic workforce. Gustav Ungerer estimates that the Afro-British population amounted to 0.5 percent of the London population in the 1590s. On the basis of extensive research into early modern English records, Imtiaz Habib argues that precisely because slavery was not legally recognized in England, Afro-diasporic people who had been smuggled into the country found themselves in a legal limbo that, together with linguistic and cultural alienation, made them vulnerable to the whims of their clandestine buyers. This resulted, for most of them, in lives of “unspoken chattel bondage.”
The Afro-diasporic presence was nowhere near as great in numbers in England as it was in Spain, and the archives reflect that imbalance, but it was noticeable enough to cause Queen Elizabeth to issue edicts of deportation against the Afro-diasporic population at the turn of the century. The fact that, in those edicts, Queen Elizabeth used both the terms “Negars” and “Blackamoors”—a word coined in the 1580s to distinguish dark-skinned Moors from white-passing Moors, and which boomed in the 1590s—suggests that those two words were not exactly synonymous: there was enough referential distance between them for them to be productively juxtaposed in that legal document. In that sense, Elizabeth’s terminology aims at a level of preciseness that exceeds what we find in most early seventeenth-century lexicons, which consistently conflate blackness with Moorishness, a religious identity category. To see blackness explicitly differentiated from, if sometimes overlapping with, Moorishness, we have to turn to the English stage. Only theatre, the commercial expansion of which coincided with the development of the racial lexicon in the 1590s, repeatedly disambiguated blackness, race-as-phenotype, from Moorishness, race-as-religion.
The situation was similar in France, where racial lexicons remained highly ambiguous throughout the seventeenth century, most often conflating North and Sub-Saharan Africans under the Muslim More label, while defining Mores as black. While Lucette Velensi and Simone Delesalle mistakenly state that the word Nègre did not feature in early seventeenth-century French dictionaries, I agree with them that those dictionaries were shaped by “an embarrassment at the existence of Nègres as people and as slaves,” and I suspect that the widespread conflation between Nègre and More in French lexicographic culture had the convenient effect of hiding the embarrassing connection between Nègres and slavery. The archival work that Imtiaz Habib, Gustav Ungerer, Rosalyn L. Knutson, and others have conducted to unearth the Afro-diasporic presence in early modern England has, to this day, no equivalent in French studies. Even the work of historians who specialize in the history of Blackness or race—such as Erick Noël or Pierre Boulle—hardly touches on the Afro-French community prior to the middle of the eighteenth century. Yet, there may very well have been such a community in early modern France, for there is no reason to believe that France had fewer cultural, diplomatic, and commercial contacts with the slave-trading Iberian Peninsula than England did. At any rate, we know that there had been regular contacts between Rouen merchants and the west coast of Africa in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, when Norman merchants tried to breach the Portuguese monopoly over the region. The merchants brought back malagueta spice to be sold on the Rouen markets. Is this the only commodity they smuggled from a region that had an infrastructure ready for selling human beings to Europeans?
Even if we construe the absence of evidence as evidence of absence and thus assume that there was no substantial Afro-French population at the beginning of the seventeenth century, there were many representations of sub-Saharan people in early modern France, and we can read those representations in the light of Allison Blakely’s claim that “the existence of color prejudice in a predominantly ‘white’ society does not require the presence of racial conflict or even of a significant colored population.” The mechanisms through which France came to develop an interest in Afro-diasporic subjects would then resemble the mechanisms through which what is now Germany developed colonial fantasies about South America in the early modern period, centuries before it had any colony of its own, as described by Susanne Zantop. Zantop underlines the importance of the Black Legend in the formation of a sensibility that imagined colonization conducted by Germany as an ideal mode of colonization contrasting with the ethically failed Iberian experience. Similarly, I argue that early seventeenth-century France—a country that entered the colonial competition fairly late because of the crippling effect of the wars of religion until the end of the sixteenth century—understood Atlantic expansion through the Iberian experience, which had involved mass color-based slavery for over a century and a half.
One interesting example supporting this reading of the French situation is Jean Nicot’s definition of the word More in his Thrésor de la langue francoyse, which he began in the 1570s:

Properly speaking, a More is man or a woman from the province of Mauritania in Africa. Maurus, Maurusius. Spaniards and Italians also say Moro. A More is tawny, or olive, unlike the Negro whom we call More when we put him on tavern signs. But that is a misuse of the word, because the Negro, whom we may call black, is perfectly black in color, usually with a short flat nose, thick lips, of pagan and gentile creed—he lives in the heartland and on the coast of Africa. By contrast, the More is of a tawny color, with a common face, and a Muslim creed. It is because of Islam that the term More has been used outside of its initial boundaries and extended to all those who share that faith—except the Turks, whom we still call Turks although they are Muslims.

This definition shows how much early seventeenth-century Frenchmen were looking to the Iberian lexicon and culture for thinking about identity categories and race. Nicot does not define a Noir or Nègre—those words do not even feature in his dictionary. Rather, he defines a negro: he defines a Spanish word through a French contextual lens. Not surprisingly, Nicot knew Iberian racial cultures and languages firsthand: he had served as French ambassador in Lisbon from 1559 to 1561. Nicot’s turn to the Iberian racial lexicon illustrates one of the fundamental premises of this book: that racial formation in the early modern period was a transnational process characterized by the circulation of racial tropes and ideas across European borders, often—but not always—northward. For a man like Nicot familiar with southern European racial discourses, negros and moros were two distinct conceptual categories that remained lexically conflated in French only because of intellectual blunder and inertia. As I will show, one major site of knowledge production that bypassed lexical inertia early on was performance.
Analyzing early modern performative blackness within an intercolonial framework in Scripts of Blackness, I take up Africanist and performance scholar Catherine Cole’s invitation to rethink our perception of blackface not as “a quintessentially American form” but as “a quintessentially colonial one.” Cole brings to light the meanings that blackface minstrelsy took on as it spread through colonial empires in the nineteenth century, and I propose to extend her insight further: I argue that all early modern European nations with strong colonial aspirations deployed, worked with, and worked through performative blackness. The intercolonial space of this book is a global space: the performances studied here all took place in metropolitan Europe, but they are informed by the core-periphery dynamics of the fantasized, coalescing, thriving, and deliquescent colonial empires that spanned the early modern globe. By choosing that globally inflected metropolitan space in which to explore the racial politics of performative blackness, I seek to bridge the growing divide between race scholars who center Blackness and those who advocate for a global ambit sensitive to different racial articulations, often resenting what they perceive as American imperialism at work in the field. In Scripts of Blackness, I center Blackness in a global framework, and I explore the racialization of Blackness as interconnected with other paradigms and tropes within the racial matrix.
The political impetus at the core of race scholarship mandates that it reflect on its own political moment of production, whether that political moment be the culture wars of the Reagan era in the foundational works of early modern critical race studies such as Kim F. Hall’s Things of Darkness, or the Obama presidency and the illusions of postracialism in the works published over the last decade or so. I am completing this book in late 2021, in the wake of a historical uprising and in the heat of a conservative backlash against Critical Race Theory that made one thing abundantly clear: we will not move beyond white supremacy without collectively centering the Black/white binary and relentlessly deconstructing it with the best tools at our disposal.
Like any pandemic, white supremacy is a global threat; addressing it requires global thinking. The movements of global solidarity—in Amsterdam, Tunis, Tokyo, Seoul, London, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, Pretoria, Rome, Sydney—that followed the murder of George Floyd often brought to light forms of anti-Black racism specific to the countries that produced them. To take but one example, in France, it is a standard rhetorical move, in order to discredit and silence antiracist activists who protest blackface or seek to draw attention to profound societal issues, to accuse them of importing American sensibilities and operating as agents of American cultural imperialism. Relational thinking is thus framed as the problem, while it actually is the solution. Indeed, in June 2020, protests of unprecedented size took to the streets against police brutality and systemic racism in Paris and across the country. Protesters paired the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis with the murder of Adama Traoré, a twenty-four-year-old French man of Malian descent who was killed by police in the Parisian suburb of Beaumont-sur-Oise in 2016. The Traoré family had demanded justice for the last four years, but never had their movement gained such traction until the response to the murder of George Floyd.
The French protesters who demanded “Justice pour Adama” while chanting “Black Lives Matter” were not the pawns of American cultural imperialism. Rather, they brought to light the glocal nature of racism against Afro-descendants and of the struggle for Black Liberation. Those phenomena’s glocality means that they have been historically shaped by global forces and are experienced in the present as highly localized yet bound in futurity by a sense of joint destiny across locales. As Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods put it, “Black geographies,” those lived by Black subjects, necessarily “reconfigure classificatory spatial practices” and “allow us to consider alternative ways of imagining the world.” The dichotomy between global-mindedness and Black-centrism in early modern critical race studies is a false one. This book rejects it and embraces Blackness as a global analytic by unearthing the early modern roots of glocal racism against Afro-descendants with a keen awareness that such nefarious multinational invention calls for a multinational response.

Scripts of Blackness, Racecraft, and the Ways of Ideology
In Scripts of Blackness, I argue that the scripts projected onto the material techniques used by white actors—professional and amateurs—in various loci of early modern European performance culture shaped new habits of mind, new ways for spectators to think of the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could live in their midst. My ambition is not to account for the entire regime of representation of early modern blackness, what Stuart Hall calls “the whole repertoire and imagery of visual effects through which ‘difference’ is represented at any one historical moment.” Rather, I aim to explore some of the scripts that animated three specific performance techniques often but not always used simultaneously: black-up, blackspeak, and black dances. I aim to reconstruct how early modern Afro-diasporic characters looked, sounded, and moved in various performance settings, in order to reassemble the racializing scripts of blackness that such cosmetic, acoustic, and kinetic impersonation yielded. Because scripts of blackness far exceed the techniques of impersonation that they animate, recovering them requires more than a focus on material practices—it requires a capacious approach grounded in literary and performance studies that uses material culture only as a starting point. The technical names I use to refer in English to those three techniques are necessarily anachronistic, because they had no set names in early modern England (archives do not yield such names, at least). While I discuss in detail the multilingual terminologies of impersonation that were available to the early moderns in each chapter of this book, I avoid the term blackface, not for fear of anachronism, but because nineteenth-century minstrelsy, which coined the term blackface, synthesized cosmetic, acoustic, and kinetic blackness: the term thus proves too blunt an instrument for the analysis of performative blackness intended here.
I use the term racecraft as an allusion to stagecraft, to flag in no uncertain terms the role that performative practices played in shaping new racial formations in the early modern world. However, I use that term very differently from historians and race scholars Karen and Barbara Fields, who pun on witchcraft to comment on the hold of racial thinking on our minds, defining racecraft as “one among a complex system of beliefs, also with combined moral and cognitive content that presuppose invisible, spiritual qualities underlying and continually acting upon the material realm of beings and events.” As my account of the racial matrix should make clear, unlike the Fieldses, I do not see racial thinking as shoving class-based thinking “out of the vocabulary available for public debate,” for, in early modernity, conversations about phenotype and rank (as well as religion) used the same vocabulary and were part and parcel of the same racial concept. I am, however, moved by a desire similar to the Fieldses’ to understand how racial thinking can “hijack the mind” to foster a sense of “obviousness.” I see early modern performative scripts of blackness as doing just that. Scripts of blackness shaped a European structure of feeling about Afro-diasporic people: scripts of blackness captured and fostered affective social experiences of an emergent racial formation “in solution,” as Raymond Williams would say, and gave them semantic and material articulations.
Early modern scripts of blackness are varied, for they animate techniques of performance that hold no single or definite meaning per se. The meaning of black-up, blackspeak, and black dances in a given production was determined by what Stuart Hall calls “indexical” signs, that is, literary cues that helped close or “fix” the free-floating meaning of the “iconic” signs of cosmetic, acoustic, or kinetic blackness into ideologically inflated “dominant,” or “preferred,” meanings. In this book, I reconstruct the encoding and decoding, the hermeneutic process through which playwrights, performers, and spectators collaboratively produced performative blackness. In that process, material practices attached to white performing bodies were indexically inflected to produce a conceptual blackness that could then be attached to real Afro-diasporic bodies. That conceptual blackness, born from a dance between the bodily and the abstract registers, was malleable in that it had no clear borders (it did not stipulate who was or was not black) and no stable substantial content (it did not articulate what it meant to be black in any unified or systematic manner). That malleability is precisely what gave that concept its purchase for the purposes of race making, as it enabled strategic redefinitions of the concept’s scope and substance on the basis of glocally articulated needs. This book captures a selection of such redefinitions under the rubric of scripts of blackness.
Racialization has always been a performative process: to cite Xavier Jonathan Inda, the racial body does not exist in nature any more than the gendered body does, and “racial performativity is a matter of reiterating the norms through which a racial body is constituted.” By exposing how early modern techniques of racial impersonation could shape the meaning of blackness by virtue of their repetitiveness, citationality, and expectedness, I suggest that theatre and performance culture at large offered an early space for modeling and thinking about the larger ideological mechanisms that racialize human bodies. In light of this analogical structure, I use the phrase “performative blackness” to refer to the techniques of racial impersonation studied in this book, rather than “performed blackness.” By calling such affected blackness “performative,” I do not mean that early modern cosmetic, acoustic, or kinetic blackness was perceived as efficacious beyond what the limits of spectators’ engagement with a propositional “what if?” temporarily permitted. I mean that those techniques of impersonation and the scripts of blackness that animated them “constituted” the black body “as an effect of discourse” in its absence. I mean that they publicly “constituted the identity they are said to express or reveal.” If the term performative aptly captures the work of early modern scripts of blackness in fashioning and upholding oppressive racial constructions, I do not see early modern scripts of blackness as the site for the potential politics of emancipation that many thinkers of gender and racial performativity are invested in—except in the cases, which I consider briefly at the end of Chapter 2 and at length in Chapter 4—when Afro-European performers themselves got to partake in racial performativity.
Scripts of blackness have a particular ontology, which draws on and reworks Diana Taylor’s classic distinction between the archive and the repertoire. Cosmetic, acoustic, and kinetic performance techniques are part of what Taylor calls “the repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge,” which is not as ephemeral as one might think, transmitted as it is through “spoken languages, dance, sports, and rituals.” However, as previously mentioned, the flexible meaning of those early modern performance techniques was constantly redefined ad hoc by indexical signs: literary cues preserved in the “archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e. texts, documents, buildings, bones).” In other words, meaning emerged from the interaction between material practices belonging to the repertoire and poetic cues belonging to the archive. I chose the metaphor of the script in part to signal the hybrid nature of the racializing hermeneutics of performance as equally material and textual. Yet my debt to the archive goes further, since, in this book, which is informed by but not limited to the methodologies of literary studies, I look for the repertoire-in-the-archive. The early modern archive certainly does not capture the whole repertoire of racial impersonation, but it gives us a good glimpse. Stage directions in playtexts, acting companies’ receipts, and various testimonies help us reconstruct the looks of black-up and black costumes; play texts, broadside ballads, and Christmas carols script black accents; dictionaries, stage directions, dance treatises, and iconography describe and depict black dances. Without a doubt, a large part of the repertoire is forever lost to us, but the archive is more generous than one might think.
Scripts of blackness help account for what Ayanna Thompson powerfully identifies as the contradictory construction of race as simultaneously essential and performative on stage: “I am arguing that early modern performance created race in a contradictory fashion precisely because it was an act. Thus race ends up being constructed in the contradictory terms of ‘discursivity and corporeality’: it is a performance, a discourse, but a performance in which the body is privileged. The audience’s gaze upon the racialized characters’ bodies licenses the materiality of those bodies, but the performance—white actors in costume and make-up—simultaneously deconstructs that materiality.” Scripts of blackness help us understand the illogic or contradictory effect of racial impersonation onstage. The artificiality of cosmetic, acoustic, and kinetic blackness was never lost on spectators, but the scripts of blackness that their flexible hermeneutic configuration produced found their way to spectators and acquired, through reiteration, the solid sense of obviousness that makes for essential constructions of race. Thus, I see scripts of blackness as contributing to the integration of blackness into the racial matrix more than resisting such integration, and, in that sense, I depart from a scholarly tradition that tends to construe the material practices of the stage as a site enabling resistance to the dominant strands of ideology articulated in dramatic playtexts. I argue that early modern scripts of blackness—albeit unstably and self-consciously—overwhelmingly constituted blackness as a racial category, thereby providing, in performance, a steady counterpoint even to the playtexts that we see as most complex and progressive in their portrayal of blackness. Racecraft matters precisely because it enabled plays to enact contradictory impulses, to lend themselves to opposite interpretations, and thereby cater to the largest possible audience.
The ideological efficacy of early modern racecraft relied on distributed agency in the scene of hermeneutic production. Grasping that distributed agency requires that we suspend the scholarly reflex to foreground the unique contours of specific playwrights’ or actors’ engagements with racecraft: that we pay less attention to innovations, ruptures, and canonicity, and rather embrace Foucault’s idea that it is not “necessary or possible to distinguish between what is new and what is not,” for racecraft “is not a field of inert areas broken up by fecund moments; it is a domain that is active throughout.” The historiography of racecraft has little use for the singular, all the less since its domain is not limited to drama, but spans a vast culture of performance whose agents have turned anonymous and whose events have often become fungible in the historical record. In that sense, writing a history of racecraft supposes that, in Judith Butler’s words, we “untether the speech act from the sovereign subject” and think of scripts of blackness as conventional, to the extent that the racecraft practitioner “speaks conventionally, that is, . . . speaks in a voice that is never fully singular. The subject invokes a formula (which is not quite the same as following a rule), and this may be done with little or no reflection on the conventional character of what is being said. The ritual dimension of convention implies that the moment of utterance is informed by the prior and, indeed, future moments that are occluded from the moment itself. Who speaks when convention speaks? In what time does convention speak? In some sense, it is an inherited set of voices, an echo of others who speak as the ‘I.’” Butler’s account of the speaking subject’s agency models how I think in this book about the agency of individual playwrights and performers in the scene of hermeneutic production called racecraft.
The other key participant in this schema of distributed agency, is, of course, the spectator, for, as reception theorist Susan Bennett cogently puts it, “a performance can activate a diversity of responses, but it is the audience which finally ascribes meaning and usefulness to any cultural product.” Audience responses are neither uniform nor entirely predictable. The metaphor of the script, obviously drawn from theatrical culture, is meant to convey a sense of openness to contingency: a script is the basis for improvisation for the commedia dell’arte. To produce a script is to abdicate claims to control over a performance. To think of scripts of blackness is to acknowledge that early modern spectators were “emancipated” in Jacques Rancière’s sense:

The spectator also acts, like the pupil or the scholar. She observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages in other kinds of place. She composes her own poem with the element of the poem before her. She participates in the performance by refashioning it in her own way by drawing back for example, from the vital energy that it is supposed to transmit in order to make it a pure image and associate this image with a story which she has read or dreamt, experienced or invented. They are thus both distant spectators and active interpreters of the spectacle offered to them.

Rancière’s thinking might be rooted in Enlightenment ideals, but his description of spectating mechanics has a transhistorical reach. Rancière compares a fantasy of theatre in which the director would control the message spectators receive to the delusions of the “stultifying pedagogue” who believes they directly control what students learn. Educators know better than this. But we also know that, however agency flows and gets distributed in our classrooms and in the network of spaces that extend the classroom, learning will happen. Rancière’s analogy thus provides a useful model for thinking holistically about the scene of ideological production that is racecraft in early modernity. Agency was distributed in ways we cannot perfectly grasp or systematize, yet ideological production clearly happened. The scene of ideological production had many moving pieces: Scripts of Blackness imagines what could happen in a scenario of maximal cooperation between playwrights, performers, and consumers of performative blackness in the moment of its production. Such maximal cooperation was not systematic (ideology never works perfectly or seamlessly), but that scenario is necessary from a historiographic perspective to render scripts of blackness intelligible and mappable.
To ask how the scene of ideological production functions in terms of agency is, ultimately, to ask whose interests it serves or can serve. Jean E. Howard’s magisterial study of theatre’s participation in ideological production in a time of massive social change, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, demonstrates that the models of Gramscian hegemony and of Althusserian ideological State apparatus do not apply in an early modern theatre that regularly eschewed royal censorship, and whose commercial interests led it to cater to diverse viewpoints and interests in its representation of class and gender. “It does not seem to me true,” Howard writes, “that these texts always served established power, whether one defines established power as the monarchy, the aristocracy, the Anglican Church, or the male sex. . . . The drama enacted ideological contestation as much as it mirrored or reproduced anything that one could call the dominant ideology of a single class, class faction, or sex.” The difficulty Howard identified in pinpointing a stable set of interests that early modern theatre could have served turns into a clear impossibility when we widen the corpus, as I do in this book, and understand public theatre within a larger performance culture. Black-up, blackspeak, and black dances moved among sites of performance that were open to elite audiences (court entertainments such as English masques, French ballets, Spanish teatro palaciego), to spectators with disposable income (commercial theatres in London, Madrid, Rouen, and Paris), or to anyone (free street theatre accompanying religious processions, pageants celebrating aristocratic entries into big cities, civic parades such as the London Lord Mayor’s pageant, religious services including carols in blackspeak, and any setting for social dances, from revels to block parties). The risks to which Howard alerts us of reading the ideological work of an entire performance culture through the lens of a single class, faction, or sex are palpable in as classic a study as Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Indeed, Lott’s commitment to reading minstrelsy as a cultural form that was not “devised simply to reinforce social hierarchy in [a society] whose every act proclaims it” led him to produce a resistance reading and to construe blackface as a medium that primarily enabled working-class white men to figure issues of class through race, occasionally expressing racial sympathy in the process, as they “precariously lived their whiteness.” Love and Theft signals that the impulse to read theatre as something more than the mere instrument of established hegemonic power can prove a double-edged sword in the study of racial impersonation. In Scripts of Blackness, I seek to handle that double-edged impulse with care. Ultimately, I do not see a contradiction between the claim that early modern performance culture constituted blackness as a racial category and the impossibility of pinning down the stable beneficiaries of such ideological production. In Scripts of Blackness, I argue that early modern performance culture produced blackness as a conceptual resource available to all European spectators via techniques of racial impersonation and scripts of blackness that, in their multiplicity, could cater to various classes, factions, and sexes.

Baroque Investments: A Transverse, Transnational, Reparanoid Project
Much scholarship has been devoted to studying the racialization of blackness in early modern English theatre by focusing on individual plots, authorial psychology, and character typologies; Scripts of Blackness attempts something different by foregrounding the hermeneutic animation of performance techniques. Thus I have structured this book around performance techniques, rather than geography, genre, tropes, or authors, as one might expect. I have also resisted the temptation to organize the book by degrees of artificiality, which would have yielded chapters dedicated, respectively, to early modern Black performers playing black characters (rare), to white performers playing black characters (numerous), and to white performers playing the roles of white characters who themselves play black characters (their number increases over time). More often than not—and I flagged exceptions—scripts of blackness move transversally across those three levels of artificiality; instances from the last category, with their heightened metatheatricality, thus help bring to light the scripts that animate instances from the other two categories.
Organizing chapters around specific performance techniques allows me to engage with the repertoire-in-the-archive and to curate collections of exhibits across languages, media, and centuries that rub up against each other, and in that rub, acquire evidentiary density. Those collections draw on a large corpus of plays from England, Spain, and France, some well known and some forgotten: late miracle plays, mystery plays, autos, interludes, plays produced for the commercial theatre, ballets and masques produced at court, and processional dances performed throughout the period. The majority of French and Spanish plays and documents I study have not been translated into English (unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own), and many have not been reprinted since the seventeenth century. I also mobilize iconographic documents (woodcuts in play texts, illuminated manuscripts, engravings, professional paintings, costume sketches), musical documents (broadside ballads, music sheets), treatises (on cosmetics, anatomy, dance, theatre, ethnography), dictionaries, poems, chronicles, travel writings, parish registers, religious edicts, royal decrees, and legal documents (hiring contracts, theatre companies’ receipts, complaints).
This book’s transverse structure also allows me to bring to the fore two regimes of racialization—the acoustic and the kinetic—that have received hardly any scholarly attention in early modern performance culture, because the Western understanding of theatrical performance relies so heavily on the supremacy of the visual, or scopic, regime. Without a doubt, much remains to be said about cosmetic blackness in early modern Europe—especially around the figuration of gender and sexuality in that tradition, and I attend to this historiographic lacuna. Yet blackspeak and black dances did some of the most interesting performative work of racialization in early modernity, and I have structured this book in an effort to make their distinct ideological operations perceptible. Although the sequence of chapters might suggest that the repertoire of performative blackness expanded from the cosmetic to the more actorly domains of vocal and kinetic virtuosity, lacunar early modern archives lend themselves to that claim only tentatively. It might very well be the case that, in England and in France, the development of professional acting and celebrity culture occasioned the expansion of performative blackness in the direction of blackspeak and black dance over time. However, in Spain, the three techniques developed simultaneously, and future findings in French and English archives might surprise us. I overwhelmingly perform in this book what Eve Sedgwick calls a “paranoid” reading, seeking “to expose the ruses of power,” even when—as is the case with scripts of blackness—the agents of power are indistinct, the uses of power varied, and its reception open-ended. Yet I want to emphasize the less immediately visible “to and fro movement” between paranoid and reparative critical stances that informs this book. The reparative approach is clearest in the last chapter, where I assemble available traces of Afro-diasporic agency, as Afro-Europeans engaged with, responded to, and used for their own benefit the culture of kinetic blackness that was coined and wielded against them. Reparative leanings also inform the historiographic principle that I call recording, which I use at various points to reconstruct transnational genealogies of racial performance in the subjunctive mode when lacunar archives curtail the use of the indicative. In early modern English, while the noun record was attached to the legal domain (meaning a witness, a testimony), the verb to record was attached to the domain of memory (meaning to remember, to rehearse, to go over in one’s mind) and to the domain of performance (meaning to sing in counterpoint). Recording thus denotes a way of singing based on dialogue between two melodic lines. The contrapuntal structure does not undermine but enhances both melodic lines with a high degree of sophistication. As a historiographic metaphor, recording happens when theatre historians allow their work to operate on more than one mode, weaving a contrapuntal song that hinges on évidence—that luminous sense of presence—into their evidentiary work.
No field has thought with more depth, complexity, and urgency than Black studies about the ethics of care that must drive historiographic inquiries into racial archives. By proposing the historiographic model of baroque recording, I am suggesting that the conceptual resources of early modernity may have something to contribute to that ongoing critical conversation. I see contrapuntal recording as a practice that resonates with “critical fabulation,” a method driven by Saidiya Hartman’s hope that “by advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities), in fashioning a narrative which is based upon archival research,” she could “tell an impossible story and amplify the impossibility of its telling.” Recording also has affinities with what Audre Lorde calls “biomythography,” which C. Riley Snorton invokes as a practice of invention for recounting Black Trans lives lost in the archives, a prosthetic “practice of symbolic surrogation, not as a supplemental thing, but through supplementarity,” which “is not about completion” and “does not perform or propose reconciliation.”
Recording as I construe it uses the openness to changes, surprises, and hope proper to the reparative stance in order to support the paranoid drive toward exposure that is at the core of my inquiry. Such hybridity is pervasive, compounding what I playfully call this book’s reparanoia: its wide and conflicted range of affective responses to the early modern racial archives. Scripts of Blackness’s self-avowed reparanoia is grounded simultaneously in a reparative desire (shared with many) to account for an early modern Afro-diasporic life that exceeded the painful heinousness of racial formations, and in a paranoid distrust of the comfort and complacency that such accounts of early modern Black life can easily elicit among twenty-first-century readers prepared for any number of reasons to minimize the transhistorical reality of antiblackness.
Scripts of Blackness moves across fields, but also across space. This book heeds Barbara Fuchs’s important warning that “no field is an island” by integrating early modern critical race studies—a field that originated in early modern English studies and, more specifically, in Shakespeare studies—vertically within the expanded temporal reach of Black studies and horizontally within the emerging field of transnational early modern race studies. Pushing beyond the limits of Anglophone archives to study the mechanisms through which early modern culture constituted blackness as a racial category is not a luxury but a necessity, if we are to understand a phenomenon that was in itself transnational. While comparative approaches seek to identify “commonalities, differences, and points of contact,” transnational or “intersectionist” approaches, in Sharon Marcus’s words, “focus on concrete interactions between national literatures, studying influences, circulations, reprints, and translations, to show how literary developments depend on transnational contacts.” In the early modern period, only in rare cases can we trace the direct influence of one cultural unit (performance technique, hermeneutic configuration, lexeme, or play text) on a unit from a different culture. And yet, similar things, different in their sameness, happen in different places across a relatively short time span, evidencing a rhizomatic dissemination of racial concepts, performance techniques, and racialized theatregrams in early modern Europe. Scripts of Blackness takes both approaches, the transnational and the comparative, in an effort to reveal cultural idiosyncrasies that mononational approaches structurally enshroud.
Doing transnational early modern critical race studies does not mean simply collating knowledge currently disseminated in various fields: it means generating knowledge and finding new evidence for all those fields. Blackness has hardly been studied as form of difference in the theatre of the Siglo de Oro, mostly because scholars of Spanish theatre have traditionally focused on religion as the dominant paradigm of difference in Iberia, inherited from the medieval period. Building on the pioneering work done in theatre studies by Baltasar Fra-Molinero and more recently by John Beusterien, Nicholas R. Jones, and Emily Weissbourd, in conversation with the work done by historian Aurelia Martín-Casares and visual culture scholars Erin Rowe, Larissa Brewer-García, and Carmen Fracchia, this book studies the emergence in early modern Spanish theatre of phenotype-as-race, a newly established paradigm distinct from religion-as-race in the racial matrix. Scripts of Blackness, however, departs from most recent scholarship on early modern Afro-Europeans in Iberian and Hispanic studies, in that, guided by a reparanoid ethos, it queries the reparative turn that field has taken in the last decade. Scripts of Blackness puts pressure on the argumentative grammar now in vogue, which too often construes black oppression as a mere qualifying clause to a main clause foregrounding Black resistance and self-emancipation.
While the representation of Afro-diasporic people in French fiction and drama in the eighteenth century has recently been studied, an entire corpus of earlier materials remains overlooked. Studies of race in the ancien régime, focusing on a rich production of récits de voyage, ethnography, and anatomy treatises, have overlooked theatrical productions. This omission has reinforced the prevailing assumption that sub-Saharan Africans and slavery were absent from the stage prior to the eighteenth century. Christian Biet, Sylvie Chalaye, and Toby Wikström recently started expanding the archive by looking at the early modern intersections of race and theatre; my work is indebted to theirs and demonstrates that focusing on performance can significantly advance this urgent line of inquiry. Such silences in early modern French studies are due in part to the fragmentary nature of the French early modern dramatic archive, which, just like Spanish theatre, has only recently started benefitting from systematic recuperation, digitization, and indexing. I would however argue that those silences are also due in large part to what Doris Garraway calls “historical abjection,” the silencing of colonial slavery in French historiography that started during the Enlightenment and influenced the constitution of what we have come to know as the canon of classical French theatre.
Because the early modern period saw the rise of nation-state formation and a literary golden age in several European countries including France, England, and Spain, the canon from the period plays a special role when those countries reflect on their identity and history today. It is a starting point where collective imagination, reflected in syllabi and cultural politics, begins to define ideas of national identity in those parts of Europe. I seek to open up those ideas by locating an Afro-diasporic presence in English, French, and Spanish cultures at that time, and by showing that interracial negotiations and white supremacist leanings and practices, as well as minoritarian resistance to those leanings and practices, have long been part of European identity. Such reckoning is long overdue and much needed in the climate of identitarian xenophobia that has recently settled over many parts of Western Europe.
Moving across time, space, and fields ultimately requires rethinking traditional periodization. In many ways, the temporal reach of Scripts of Blackness, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the very end of the seventeenth century, is unorthodox, because reckoning with the different chronologies of different national and regional literary traditions demands unorthodoxy. I am thus concerned with the period called the baroque. The baroque is a moment of stylistic departure from Renaissance classicism, which follows different timelines and takes different forms in different countries. Probably derived from the Portuguese word barocco—which designates an irregularly shaped pearl that could be fitted to make gorgeous eccentric jewelry in the early modern period—the term denotes an aesthetic based on beautiful irregularity and characterized by complexity, surprise, dizzying folds, metamorphoses and illusions, perpetual movement, self-referentiality, and a lavish profusion of carefully contrived ornaments. While, as a cultural project, the baroque is usually associated in scholarly discourse with Counter-Reformation efforts in Catholic countries (and thus shunned in English studies), baroque aesthetics actually operated across early modern Western Europe. Black dramatic characters are native to that aesthetics, and it is those characters’ development, their continuities, and their transformations that ultimately drive my periodizing choices, delineating a long baroque arc.
A final note on terminology and translation. As mentioned earlier, early modern performance culture strategically produced blackness as a malleable racial category, the substantive content of which could be redefined with each script of blackness to suit specific needs, and the boundaries of which could be renegotiated ad hoc to include or exclude, for instance, mixed-race, North African, and South Asian characters. In other words, blackness was produced in early modern Europe as a prescriptive identity, not a descriptive one. Consequently, a reparanoid recording of racecraft must tread on the grounds of racial terminology with care and purpose. When I use the word Black—for instance, to talk about myself—I am expressing a political commitment, a choice, the same choice that French Africana studies scholar of Ivorian descent Maboula Soumahoro so eloquently describes:

I decide to be Black. Not because history has defined and fashioned me as such on the basis of my body. I am Black because the bodies that look like mine have for a very long time reacted, fought, contested, resisted, and escaped from recurring organized attempts at making them inferior. By resisting and affirming their humanity, the bodies and minds that were construed as black have gifted the world a multitude of treasures. I define myself as Black as I decide it, because I know history. It is a choice. By deliberately entering a transnational community bound by arts, letters, and by the spirituality so deeply ingrained in the intellectual traditions I have evoked throughout this book, I am performing an act of political solidarity.

In this book, when my use of the term Black or Blackness is informed by such empowering dynamics of politicocultural self-identification, I capitalize the word to signal it. However, as Kim F. Hall remarks, we can no longer grasp the self-determined cultural identity of the Afro-diasporic people who were racialized by early modern processes of racecraft: their subjectivity escapes us. It is impossible for us to know whether they would have wanted to appropriate and politically reclaim the prescriptive racializing identity imposed on them by white supremacy. To avoid making that choice for them (by calling them Black), or reenacting the violent act of racialization they suffered (by calling them black), I follow a set of guidelines. When I cite early modern texts, I abstain from translating racial lexemes (i.e., terms that denote explicitly racial identities). Thus, whenever I translate French and Spanish texts into English, I depart from the conventions of the Chicago Manual of Style—which otherwise preside over this book—by leaving the original racial lexemes untranslated in italics, for “the same words, due to different histories, carry very different connotations and intonations” in different cultures. When I speak from my own perspective—that of the modern historiographer and critic—of the people, real and fictional, who were racialized by scripts of blackness, then I use the terms Afro-diasporic, African, Afro-European, Afro-descendant, and Sub-Saharan, depending on context. I reserve the term black (lowercase) for the instances when I ventriloquize the perspective of early modern white supremacy. I trust readers, when they encounter those terms in my prose, to remember that blackness (lowercase) refers to an artificial prescriptive category created for strategic purposes, and to know the difference between blackness and Blackness. With these guidelines, I hope to produce a historiographic account of racecraft that deconstructs the prescriptive racial episteme of early modernity without reifying it.
Similar ethical considerations inform my use of glyphs as I translate passages of Spanish blackspeak into English. Indeed, I had to make decisions regarding the best way of rendering into English racially motivated phonetic deviations within a foreign language, and I came to the conclusion that this is a task to refuse. There is an ontological difference between racializing idioms artificially crafted for performative purposes and Afro-diasporic dialects organically developed and historically shared by real communities of speakers. Using the latter in order to translate the former into English would be a mistake, because it would give to blackspeak a touch of authenticity while giving authentic Afro-diasporic dialects a touch of comedy—neither of which is warranted. Most importantly, that approach to translation would turn me into a modern producer of blackspeak, and I have no wish to participate in the reproduction, recirculation, and revitalization of a racializing technique that always catches on all too easily amid readers and listeners, as early modern archives show us. Thus, in this book, the grammatical distortions of blackspeak are signaled to the anglophone reader with a star symbol immediately preceding the grammatically marked word or word group, and the phonetic distortions of blackspeak are signaled with a hash symbol immediately preceding the phonetically accented word or word group. With this protocol, I seek to point out deviations and to make the ideological inflections of early modern blackspeak intelligible without facilitating twenty-first-century blackspeak performances in classrooms, private studies, or public theatres.

Black-Up, Blackspeak, and Black Dances: A Map of This Book
Structured around performance techniques, this book explores sequentially the deployment of scripts of blackness through cosmetic, acoustic, and kinetic impersonation in the performance culture of early modern Europe. In the first two chapters, I reconstruct some of the major scripts attached to cosmetic blackness in Western Europe from the early sixteenth century to the late seventeenth century. Those two chapters form a diptych on the scopic regime of racialization and should be read as such, together. While the first panel of that diptych, stretching from the 1530s to the 1620s, focuses on the public theatre’s negotiations of the legacy of medieval black-up, the second panel, stretching from 1604 to the end of the seventeenth century, explores the hermeneutic reconfigurations of black-up triggered by a new and sustained engagement with gender and sexuality in high baroque culture.
Chapter 1 sets up for the book the glocal dimension of the ideological needs to which scripts of blackness flexibly respond. In it, I argue that cosmetic blackness inherited a residual diabolism from its long-standing association with the devil in medieval performance culture, yielding exclusionary scripts of blackness that cast Afro-diasporic people as figures of the Enemy-Within threatening to tear apart the fabric of Christian societies. That exclusionary script—which the Shakespearean canon, with plays such as Titus Andronicus (1594) and Othello (1604), mobilizes and intensely scrutinizes—fed into the strong xenophobia and racial aversion that seized England in the late Tudor and early Stuart eras, as the Afro-British population started becoming visible. The same exclusionary script of blackness functioned as a cautionary tale against the assimilation of Africans into the transoceanic French body colonial that certain parts of early baroque France such as Rouen, Normandy, fantasized about on stage. That script is apparent in plays such as Les Portugaiz infortunez (1608), La tragédie françoize d’un More cruel (1613), and La comédie admirable intitulée la merveille (ca. 1620). In Spain, however, the exclusionary script of blackness hardly met the needs of a society that had practiced de facto color-based slavery since the mid-fifteenth century. In Renaissance Spanish theatre then, cosmetic blackness quickly shed its diabolical associations and shifted from producing scripts of black exclusion to scripts of black commodification in a wide theatrical corpus that ranges from Sánchez de Badajoz’s farsas (1520–50) to Jímenez de Enciso’s Comedia famosa de Juan Latino (1620–25), via Andrés de Claramonte y Corroy’s El valiente negro en Flandes (1620–25), and Lope de Vega’s black saint comedias (1599–1608). By associating blackness with various types of commodities, those scripts could, for instance, exclude Afro-Spaniards from mankind and deny them fundamental rights, construe them as goods whose consumption was pleasurable and necessary to the health of a hungry body politic, and construe select Afro-Spaniards as exceptional, thereby helping pass a system of racial oppression as a system of racial meritocracy.
Chapter 2 argues that high baroque theatrical culture’s elaboration of female black-up was driven by the need to cast doubt on the desirability of Afro-diasporic women. Scripts of female blackness were thus framed in erotic terms that obfuscated the fact that, in the brave new world shaped by early modern colonization and color-based slavery, white men very often perpetrated sexual violence against Afro-diasporic women that had little to do with eros. What I call the oblique aesthetics of Afro-diasporic women’s desirability found its way into various scripts of female blackness, of which this chapter analyzes three. In France, the oblique aesthetics of Afro-diasporic women’s desirability manifested itself through an absence—a silence. Indeed, starting in the mid-1620s, numerous baroque court ballets excluded Afro-diasporic women from their highly eroticized sphere of representation by unfurling scenarios of interracial desire that exclusively cast Afro-diasporic men and white women. Such scenarios were doubly effective for ideological purposes. On the one hand, by framing Afro-diasporic men as Petrarchan “slaves to love” who willingly surrendered their freedom to aristocratic French women, the wish-fulfilling script of black enslavement to love celebrated a noncoercive idea of color-based slavery that gracefully sidestepped thorny ethical issues. On the other hand, that script excluded from the dance of interracial desire on stage the enslaved people most often involved in coercive interracial sex offstage: Afro-diasporic women.
In England, the oblique aesthetics of Afro-diasporic women’s desirability produced a succuban script, which is particularly visible in plays such as John Webster’s The White Devil (1612) and William Davenant and John Dryden’s The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island (1667). That script framed black women as succubae: dark gender-bending demons who carry the seeds of another race as they coerce Christian men into extramarital sex in their sleep, in an exculpatory state of powerlessness, in the intimacy of their own houses, at the expense of their own physical and spiritual health. Succuban scripts of blackness hinged on fetishistic mechanisms of inversion and disavowal in relation to the rape of Afro-diasporic women. Finally, in Spain, the oblique aesthetics of Afro-diasporic women’s desirability produced a colorist script in which the stock character of the pretty and witty brown-faced mulata dialectically articulated the desirability of all Afro-diasporic women. In the vast repertoire of Lope de Vega’s Sevillian comedias (1609–35), desirable mulatas are contrasted with undesirable negras. Yet they retain a strong hermeneutic kinship with blackness, in part because the anxiogenic prospect of mulatas’ unmoored, spreading, and ever-less-readable brownness threatened the socioracial taxonomies and hierarchies of Hispanic societies. Whether they are poetically moored in blackness or they deliberately embrace their Blackness—as Elvira fiercely does in Servir a señor discreto (ca. 1618)—desirable mulatas function simultaneously as foils to and substitutes for their mothers.
Chapter 3 turns away from the scopic regime of racialization and toward the acoustic one, focusing on mock-African accents, or, blackspeak. In Spain and in the Iberian world at large, blackspeak was extremely popular. From the 1530s onward, it circulated multidirectionally in a nexus of urban performance spaces that included public churches, private houses, processions, public theatres, and court theatres. There, it disseminated scripts of black infantilization that lent ideological support to the slavery-based social status quo. This mechanism is captured particularly well in interludes by Tirso de Molina (1617–35) and Quiñones de Benavente (1660s), among others. Blackspeak yielded other popular scripts of blackness that promoted ideas of black animalization and degeneration. I call what is perhaps the most interesting acoustic script of blackness the script of ethnic conjuration. This script hinged on blackspeaking white performers’ ability, simply by virtue of their own whiteness, to conjure up older traditions of ethnic stage accents and thereby strategically connect Afro-Europeans to other racialized groups with a history of theatrical impersonation. For instance, the script of ethnic conjuration serves, in Richard Brome’s The English Moor, or The Mock-Marriage (1637), to connect Afro-Britons with the Irish, and thereby inscribe them on the same brutal colonial horizon whence the racialized Irish stage accent had risen at the turn of the sixteenth century. The same script served, in Nicolas Du Perche’s comedy L’ambassadeur d’Affrique (1666), to connect sub-Saharan Africans with stage Turks, and thereby Orientalize them in ways that conveniently displaced issues of color-based slavery onto a fantasized Ottoman East far from the French realm and ethos at the very time when slavery boomed in the French Caribbean. The script of ethnic conjuration is relational: it reveals the ever-interconnected lives of blackness and of other nodes in the early modern racial matrix. The chapter concludes with Sir Francis Fane’s comedy Love in the Dark, or The Man of Bus’ness (1675), not only to point out the conjunction and endurance of the various acoustic scripts of blackness previously identified, but to think through the complementary dance of blackspeak and black-up.
Chapter 4 turns to the kinetic as a racializing regime per se, situated at the intersection of the scopic and the acoustic. In this chapter, I argue that kinetic culture in early modern Europe was a vast interactive terrain where dances construed as Afro-diasporic by white producers and consumers—often with the collaboration of Afro-Europeans—functioned simultaneously as instruments of racialization and self-emancipation. In Spain, Creole Andalusian danzas de negros produced scripts of black sexualization associating Afro-Spaniards with the lower bodily stratum; they featured in social dance settings, street processions, and commercial theatres alike from the sixteenth century onward. The wild popularity of this choreographic style and its titillating scripts of sexualization encouraged Afro-Spaniards to claim those dances, transform them, and use them to renegotiate the terms of their own enslavement, either symbolically, as a way to reclaim their own mobility and bodily self-determination, or materially, as a way to earn enough money to buy their freedom or make a career. In France, whether in popular dances such as the moresque or in elaborate baroque court ballets, black dances produced scripts of black animalization that downgraded Afro-diasporic people in the Great Chain of Being and expropriated them from ownership and self-ownership. Nevertheless, white male aristocrats used that choreographic style and danced animalistically to protest what they saw as their own expropriation from ownership and self-ownership at the hands of the French king, which they experienced hyperbolically as a form of bondage. In England, similar dynamics of appropriations by rebellious aristocrats informed Queen Anne’s kinetic performance in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1605), as the queen consort hyperbolically experienced the racially informed inclusion of patriarchal ideology promoted by James I as a form of bondage.
The scripts of blackness that operated under the kinetic regime (sexualization and animalization) stand out not for their originality, but for their affordances—for the acts of resistance or rebellion that their popularity enabled dancers to perform through them. The chapter tracks the spread of black dances and the scripts of blackness that animated them in Jacobean and Caroline commercial theatre where, in plays such as Philip Massinger’s The Bondman (1623), English “antics” started functioning as a conduit expressing unstable power relations between enslaved black characters and white enslavers. Ultimately, plays such as Molière’s Le malade imaginaire (1673), William Davenant’s The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659), and William Wycherley’s The Gentleman Dancing-Master (1673) reveal that, as France and England’s participation in the slave trade intensified, their kinetic culture of racial impersonation followed in the footsteps of danzas de negros, adopting the political configuration of Spanish footwork.
***
“This scene is not working, Noémie.” If my formidable acting teacher had known some thirteen years ago about the long history of performative blackness in Western Europe—if the historical abjection that rules over academic curricula in France and elsewhere had not deprived her of a crucial knowledge of those traditions of racial impersonation—would she have thought for a second of black-up as an aid for me to “find” my character’s Africanness? I doubt it. If she had known that scripts of blackness, the performative mechanisms that brought blackness into the world as a racial category, originated in the corpus of early modern drama that is the basis of any classical actor’s training—if she had known that the transnational dramatic canon of the golden age is such stuff as race is made on—what might have happened to the bust of Molière under whose gaze and authority I rehearsed so often for three years? Scripts of Blackness is the book I wish she could have read at the time.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction. Performative Blackness in Early Modern Europe
Chapter 1. A Brief History of Baroque Black-Up: Cosmetic Blackness and Religion
Chapter 2. A Brief Herstory of Baroque Black-Up: Cosmetic Blackness, Gender, and Sexuality
Chapter 3. Blackspeak: Acoustic Blackness and the Accents of Race
Chapter 4. Black Moves: Race, Dance, and Power
Post/Script. Ecologies of Racial Performance

Appendix. Selection of Early Modern Plays Featuring Black Characters
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"[A] groundbreaking investigation into three modes of racialization—cosmetic, acoustic, and kinetic—that were produced in the theaters of Spain, France, and England across two centuries. The book enriches existing studies of race and performance by departing from the conventional focus on a single nation and limited period and instead highlighting the correspondences between the racial paradigms produced in these countries...[E]ssential reading for students and scholars of early modern studies."

Shakespeare Bulletin

"[A] powerful and compelling study...The strengths of this monograph are manifold. Ndiaye successfully negotiates three different performance traditions, histories and languages to portray wide-reaching patterns rippling across Europe. In doing so, Ndiaye unsettles longstanding assumptions about the history of racial impersonation on stage and refutes claims of the irrelevance or Anglo-centrism of early modern critical race theory. This monograph is equally successful in how it disrupts early modern theatrical canons, placing key playwrights like William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Lope de Vega and Molière with non-canonical, even anonymous, sources and demonstrating how these enduring works cannot be read and taught without a conscious negotiation of their place in the foundation of racial power structures. This book is a must read for early modernists, critical race theorists and scholars and practitioners of the stage."

Forum for Modern Language Studies

"It’s not every day that you read a text that reshapes its field in extraordinary ways while opening exciting perspectives to adjacent fields of study; not every day that you read a document that you know, page after page, will be central for generations to come. Scripts of Blackness is a rigorous, interactive, beautifully-written and generous text that takes from pasts (largely understudied or unknown) to speak of and dialogue with our presents, in order to open windows to multiple futures...Scripts of Blackness is an extraordinary gift for scholars of race in contemporary France. It shines a light on the national and trans-European forges that produced the iron masks currently constraining Afro-French. The book is an exceptional tool for us and for generations to come, in our effort to indigenize and define blackness in French."

H-France

"Studies of blackface performance in the early modern world have focused mostly on English plays, masques, and pageants. As Noémie Ndiaye convincingly demonstrates, those performances did not exist in isolation, and the early modern formation of blackness as a racial category was a transnational European endeavor. Scripts of Blackness is original in that it goes beyond the cosmetics and prosthetics of blackface to consider the ways black characters were made to speak and to move."

Clark University Virginia Mason Vaughan

"[R]ich [and] thought-provoking...This important book issues a compelling call to reassess early modern European performances of blackness in the harsh light of their effects on Afro-descendant subjects."

Journal 18

"This is the first study to my knowledge that puts English, French, and Spanish early modern literatures in conversation with each other through a comparatist method that discusses the history of the African diaspora in each country’s colonial development. Noémie Ndiaye’s scholarship is the soundest I have seen on the topic of early modern race theory."

Bates College Baltasar Fra-Molinero

"Noémie Ndiaye challenges national and disciplinary boundaries by demonstrating that, in order to appreciate the complexity and force with which race cohered as a category in early modern Europe, we must look beyond discursive formations to embodied techniques of what she calls ‘performative blackness.' Performative blackness, Ndiaye argues brilliantly, is ‘a type of racial impersonation that brings into being and fashions what it claims to mimic.' She analyses performance cultures in Spain, France, and England to show how plays, dances, and festivals from these national traditions worked together to render Blackness as a racial category."

French Studies