Race and the Body in Early Modern Drama and Culture

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Working collaboratively with King's College London and Shakespeare's Globe, this project seeks an urgent revision of the critical study of the body and its relationship to race in early modern England. Building on the project outlined by Gordon McMullan (King's College London) and Farah Karim-Cooper (Shakespeare's Globe), it will also attempt to assess the value of a recuperation of early modern notions of the racial body for the analysis of contemporary performance of Shakespearean and early modern drama. Essential to this understanding of the relationship between race and the body will be the analysis of the further role of social categories such as religion and gender, especially as these categories are not distinct but 'porous and mobile'. Indeed, critics such as Kim F. Hall and Joyce Green MacDonald have drawn attention to the manner in which concerns about race, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality were layered in early modern England. Through an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach, this project will advance the field by layering methodologies such as critical race theory and historical phenomenology in order to reconsider our current critical understanding of early modern theories of the racial body. The first aim of this project is to question to what extent early modern English somatic theory had a concept of the 'normative' body, and in what ways this was used to establish racial and cultural difference. Following on from this, I will question to what extent current criticism on the early modern body has continued to assume that whiteness is a universal condition of 'the body'. Although somatic alterity has long been recognised in the early modern period as a way of confirming difference from and typically inferiority to the white, European body, criticism has only recently begun to interrogate the construction of this whiteness as inherently racialised. Utilising Critical Race Theory, Whiteness studies and early modern studies to revisit existing criticism on the early modern body, this project aims to place the body's relationship to race at the centre of its questions in ways that resist talking about the body as intrinsically white - advancing the current scope of our questions about early modern race, its relationship to the body and the representation of this relationship in the period's literature.