This essay argues that the influence of medical pseudo-science in a number of passages in The Merchant of Venice is much stronger than Shakespeare scholars generally acknowledge. Early modern notions of genetics in the play have a bearing on its conceptualization of "race," which, as the play shows, was a concept in the process of formation.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Indiana State University and St. Louis University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African American Review. Ed dward Said claims that "students of post-colonial politics have not ... looked enough at the ideas that minimize orthodoxy and authoritarian or patriarchal thought, that take a severe view of the coercive nature of identity politics" (219). Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones does exactly that: It explores the potential of coercion behind the notion of ethnic solidarity. What Carole Boyce Davis has said about autobiographical writings by black women holds true for the semi-autobiographical Brown Girl, Brownstones as well: "The mystified notions of home and family are removed from their romantic, idealized moorings, to speak of pain, movement, difficulty, learning and love in complex ways. Thus, the complicated notion of home mirrors the problematizing of community/nation" (21).As Davies's remark implies, the struggle the protagonist has to go through is expressive of the narrative's struggle with cultural nationalism. Paule Marshall, in "From the Poets in the Kitchen," explains the influence which the conversations of her mother and her friends had on her writing career. In these conversations, Marcus Garvey played a pivotal role: "If F.D.R. was their hero, Marcus Garvey was their God. The name of the fiery, Jamaican-born black nationalist of the '20s was constantly evoked around the table" (5). Small wonder, then, that his spirit, in the form of ethnic solidarity as ideal, hovers over the novel. But far from simply subscribing to Garveyism, the novel is locked in a dialectical struggle with the notion of ethnic solidarity. It is thus characterized by dualities: Its protagonist rebels against a communally prescribed ethnic identity and yet comes to a kind of reconciliation with her community1; the novel harshly criticizes and yet celebrates the Barbadian community. The result for the protagonist is a reluctant but inescapable hybridity.Garveyism was one of the most important expressions of ethnic nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century. In its more extreme forms, this form of ethnic nationalism could pose as an answer to every question in life. Marcus Garvey, in "African Fundamentalism" (1925), exhorted his readers to "remember always that the Jew in his political and economic urge is always first a Jew; the white man is first a white man under all circumstances, and you can do no less than being first and always a Negro, and then all else will take care of itself" (qtd. in Clarke 158). "Race" appears here as the basis of all action. Know who you are, "racially," and you know what to do. Solidarity underwrites bo...

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