Things of Darkness
Subtitle: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England
Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr
Published: January 1996
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 319
ISBN-13: 9780801431173
Subjects: Literary studies: 16th to 18th centuries; Other prose: 16th to 18th centuries; Race in literature; History; English Renaissance Literature (1500-1700); Literature And Society; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; Literary Criticism; History and criticism; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; England; Women and literature; 16th century; Early modern, 1500-1700; English literature
First sentence: Positioned very early to be interchangeable, tropes of disorder, racial otherness, and unruly sexuality become the terms by which European expansion first appropriates the strange newness of the lands "discovered" in the Renaissance.
Description: The "Ethiope," the "tawny Tartar," the "woman blackamoore," and "knotty Africanisms"--Allusions to blackness abound in Renaissance texts. Kim F. Hall's book is the first to view these evocations of blackness in the contexts of sexual politics, imperialism, and slavery in early modern England. Her work reveals the vital link between England's expansion into realms of difference and otherness - through exploration and colonialism - and the highly charged ideas of race and gender which emerged.

Concentrating on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hall shows how race, sexuality, economics, and nationalism contributed to the formation of a modern (white, male) identity in English culture. The volume includes a useful appendix of not readily accessible Renaissance poems on blackness.