This cross-disciplinary comparative panel features innovative theorizations of colonialism during the early modern period. It foregrounds how theorizations of racialization and theories settler colonialism inform contemporary studies, and it interrogates the strengths and limitations of said theories for thinking about the Ottoman empire, French colonialism in Brazil, and the British empire in early modernity. While Settler Colonial Theory (SCT) has become an influential framework of analysis for scholars of colonialism across the globe, some scholars critique the field’s perceived Anglophone focus. This panel, however, questions some of the central premises of this critique, and seek to reconfigure the genealogy of STC through analysis of sources from Franco, Lusophone, and Turkish contexts. The panel further reflects on the legal framework of early modern English imperial sovereignty and, specifically, on how the King’s imperial second body allows us to theorize race in early modernity. It also highlights how intra-European imperial competition influenced notions of imperial power and sovereignty in early modernity. The panel is intended to enhance and deepen the discussions fomented by the guaranteed panel “Theories of Settler Colonialism” sponsored by the Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies (CLCS) Renaissance and Early Modern forum.

Below is a description of the three proposed presentations:

Racialized Agents and the Imperial Second Body in Titus Andronicus and The Tempest. Kyung Cho, PhD candidate in English at Indiana University Bloomington.

In this paper, I read Titus Andronicus and The Tempest to show how racialized agents intensify tensions within what I call the imperial second body. As a form of bodily statecraft increasingly central to early modern England, the imperial second body is a dispersed network of imperial agents who act as extensions of sovereign power. While Titus stages the return of colonial others to the imperial center through Titus’s arrival in Rome with the Goths and Aaron the Moor, Tempest stages outward colonial expansion through Prospero’s rule over Caliban’s island. These plays thus imagine empire in opposite directions, inward and outward. Yet Aaron’s live burial in Roman soil alongside the survival of his black infant, and Prospero’s fraught relation to the colonized, both raise questions about who may function as the sovereign’s agents and whether agency itself confers subjecthood. I argue that these tensions complicate the bodily composition and legal architecture of early modern English imperial sovereignty.

Critiques of Settler Colonial Theory from 16th French Brazil. Timothy Messen, PhD candidate in French at Emory University.

This paper engages a Brazilian strand of de-colonial thinking in the French-language literary and anthropological tradition as one potential source for broadening the scope of Settler Colonial Theory. Casting a transhistorical net across geopolitical and linguistic borders reconfigures Settler Colonialism as indeed a global phenomenon with continuity over time. Affinities and affiliations abound between (post)structural anthropology – Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Clastres, Gilles Deleuze – and the Early Modern proto-ethnographies of Jean de Léry and Michel de Montaigne. These 16th century authors interact with Tupí Indians and already articulate a critique of what would become settler coloniality. Re-tracing this genealogy not only reconfigures STC through franco- and lusophone foci but also actualizes an immanent critique of European settler colonialism found in the Early Modern contact zone archive. This provides new understandings of the Early Modern and injects new potentialities into ongoing developments in decolonial studies.

Darkened Defeats and Sinful Skins, Blackened Bodies and Broken Orders in Post-Vienna Ottoman Court. Fatih Torun, Ph.D. candidate in History at Indiana University-Bloomington.

In this presentation, I discuss how Ottoman imperial power was reinterpreted in the aftermath of the military defeats beginning in 1683 through racialized explanations in political writing. Drawing on contemporary narratives, I explore how Ottoman authors exploited bodily markers—especially color-based epithets—to account for imperial failure while preserving the legitimacy of sultanic power. Critiques of high-ranking viziers and associations of political disorder with darkness paralleled condemnations of black eunuchs as morally corrupt and inherently sinful, displacing responsibility for defeat onto racialized bodies within the imperial household. By foregrounding Ottoman voices as agents in the production of socio-racial categorizations, I contribute to scholarship on the early modern racialization process beyond a Eurocentric or Anglophone focus, highlighting the non-European dimensions of racial formation and demonstrating how sultanic power intersected with, yet remained distinct from, emerging imperial and colonial formations of power in the global early modern world.