Foundational critical race scholarship such as Ania Loomba’s Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (1989), Kim Hall’s Things of Darkness (1995), and Arthur Little’s Shakespeare Jungle Fever (2000) created a methodology for studying the intersections of race, gender, and nation in early modern theatre. However, more recent studies like Sujata Iyengar’s Shades of Difference (2013), Matthieu Chapman’s Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama (2016), and Patricia Akhimie’s Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference (2018) have focused on the ways in which discrete ethnic identities were treated and understood differently on the stage and within English culture. Our session–which ranges in discussions of Black, Roma, and Indigenous peoples–similarly attunes itself to the nuances of racialization in early modern performance culture. We add to this conversation an increased focus on the ways in which sexuality is used to further demarcate characters of color, and we reveal how sex and sexual desire were themselves central to the project of English nation-building.

The session will showcase emerging women scholars of early modern performance studies. In an effort to engage established scholars, the three panelists will speak for no more than fifteen minutes to allow for the maximum period of discussion. As presider, Kirsten Mendoza—an expert on early modern race, sex, and performance—will facilitate a vibrant discussion period. As the panelists, the majority of whom are BIPOC, are explicitly responding to the current call in early modern studies to reassess the impact of race and colonialism on English literature and culture, we anticipate a large audience.

Our first panelist, Hannah Korell, offers a new perspective on the witch-craze in her essay “Elizabeth Sawyer’s ‘Black Lust’: Demonizing Desire in The Witch of Edmonton.” Korell reveals how propaganda about witches drew upon fears of racial miscegenation to amplify the horrors of witchcraft for white English audiences. Exposing the anti-Black racism inherent to The Witch of Edmonton, Korell demonstrates how the play exaggerates the sexual relationship between Elizabeth Sawyer and Black Tom, rendering both Sawyer and her demonic familiar more monstrous and transgressive because of the racialized elements of their desire. In doing so, the play situates Sawyer as the antithesis of the ideal English subject.

Similarly, Anita Raychawdhuri’s “The Gypsies Metamorphosed: Queer Pregnancy, Racial Prosthesis, and Mythologizing of Roma” studies the hypersexualization of racialized bodies and their role in the creation of English national identity. Turning to Ben Jonson’s court masque, The Gypsies Metamorphosed, Raychawdhuri shows how the masque represents the Roma characters’ sexuality as uncontrollable and contaminating, arguing that this dehumanization of Romani people relies on both racial othering and the queering of the fantastical “gypsy” figure. Yet through these queered depictions, Raychawdhuri suggests, the masque also opens a space for a different sort of futurity that complicates white English nation-building.

Bringing together Raychawdhuri’s exploration of the subversive potential of performance and Korell’s study of the hypersexualization of the racialized body, Willow White’s essay, “Pocahontas’ Racialized Performance in Seventeenth-Century London,” draws on archival records and artistic renderings of Pocahontas’s time in London in 1616 to re-frame Pocahontas as more than a mere object of sexualized spectatorship. Instead, White argues that Pocahontas created the role of a Native woman “gone English.” This unsettling racialized performance, White reveals, contributed to a major shift in English colonial policy away from interracial kinship building and toward erasure and replacement.