Things of Darkness

by Hall, Kim F.

• ISBN13: 9780801482496
• ISBN10: 0801482496
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-01-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

The 'Ethiope, ' the 'tawny Tartar, ' the 'woman blackamoore, ' and 'knotty Africanisms'--allusions to blackness abound in Renaissance texts. Kim F. Hall's eagerly awaited 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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(10)
Who Is English? The Black Presence in England	11	(5)
Pirates, Poets, and Traders: England and African Trades	16	(9)
A World of Difference: Travel Narratives and the Inscription of Culture	25	(37)
Writing Africa: Native Informants and Narrative Anxiety	28	(16)
Enterprise and Conversion: Ordering the World in Hakluyt and Purchas	44	(18)
Fair Texts/Dark Ladies: Renaissance Lyric and the Poetics of Color	62	(61)
Astrophel and Stella: ``New Found Tropes with Problems Old''	73	(12)
The Traffic in Fairness: Cosmetics and Blackness	85	(7)
Sunburn: Anxieties of Influence/Anxieties of Race	92	(15)
Washing the Ethiope White: The Song of Songs	107	(9)
Aethiopissa and Her Sisters	116	(7)
``Commerce and Intercourse'': Dramas of Alliance and Trade	123	(54)
The Masque of Blakness and Jacobean Nationalism	128	(13)
Marriages of State: The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra	141	(19)
Colonialism and the Economics of Marriage	160	(17)
The Daughters of Eve and the Children of Ham: Race and the English Woman Writer	177	(34)
The ``Other'' Woman: Beauty, Women Writers, and Cleopatra	178	(9)
Blackness and Status in the Urania	187	(24)
``An Object in the Midst of Other Objects'': Race, Gender, Material Culture	211	(43)
Male Portraits, Property, and Colonial Might	226	(14)
Beauty, Colonialism, and the Female Subject	240	(14)
Epilogue: On ``Race,'' Black Feminism, and White Supremacy	254	(15)
Appendix: Poems of Blackness	269	(22)
Works Cited	291	(18)
Index	309