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

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

WINNER of the David Bevington Award for best new book in early drama studies (Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society)

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.

376 pages, Hardcover

First published September 20, 2022

Reviews

[Matthew Molinaro]

one of the best reads of the sem!

[Josh Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Did not finish because I have not read enough of sources she’s analyzing to be able to appreciate them but I will say that the intro and opening pages about Othello felt like an absolute revelation.

[Elizabeth Amisu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scripts of Blackness is a huge contribution to the field of Early Modern English Literature, to playtexts and to ethnicity studies in general. It posits a range of findings, based on analysis that are fascinating and focus on blackness in the Early Modern period, one in which not too long-ago critics were still fighting to claim black presence in the period.

[Madelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Dance was and still is a privileged site of contestation and self-assertion”

[helio · Rating 4 out of 5]

read it for class. did not love it just because it felt repetitive