“I Had Peopled Else”: Shakespeare’s Queer Natalities and the Reproduction of Race

Chakravarty, Urvashi

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-72769-1_3

Cited by 5 publications

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“…Urvashi Chakravarty points to the common pun on Moor and more, used by Aaron in Titus Andronicus, that 'always already articulat[es] the Moor' as 'superfluous and excessive'. 22 Othello's characterization as an 'extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere' likewise plays on this theme (1.1.151-2). 23 The stage directions of Alcazar only refer to Muly Hamet as 'the Moor', but unlike Othello and Aaron he is not the only Moor depicted in this play.…”

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'You shall see me do the Moor'

MacLeod

2022

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The repertory of the Blackfriars children frequently alluded to plays performed by adult companies across the Thames. In Jonson’s Poetaster, a boy player performs a scene as ‘the Moor’ from Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar. These parodies of adult performances in the children’s repertory not only evidence early modern acting style but also specifically reference styles of performing racial difference on the early modern stage. I argue that this parody showcased playing skill associated up to this point with adult actors, and that the Blackfriars children used these references to racialized characters to highlight skill and appeal to audience taste.

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'You shall see me do the Moor'

MacLeod

2022

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“…Although this labour is articulated in Petrarchan terms, with Miranda as his 'sweet mistress' (3.1.11) whom he 'serve[s]' (3.1.6), this manual labour is also directly compared to the work of Caliban, who is also compelled to 'Fetch … wood' (1.2.312).The difference, of course, is that whereas for Ferdinand this labour is temporary, for Caliban it is indefinite. For a reading of the dynamics of consent and subjugation in The Tempest, see Sanchez, 2008; for a reading of Ferdinand's labour within the terms of family and natality, seeChakravarty, 2018. Tom Lindsay understands Ferdinand's labour in terms of 'an experience that both delayed and facilitated the marriages of many early modern young people: domestic service'(Lindsay, 2016, p. 410, n. 46).…”

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“…The difference, of course, is that whereas for Ferdinand this labour is temporary, for Caliban it is indefinite. For a reading of the dynamics of consent and subjugation in The Tempest , see Sanchez, 2008; for a reading of Ferdinand's labour within the terms of family and natality, see Chakravarty, 2018. Tom Lindsay understands Ferdinand's labour in terms of ‘an experience that both delayed and facilitated the marriages of many early modern young people: domestic service’ (Lindsay, 2016, p. 410, n. 46).…”

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Spirited away: Race, slavery and childhood in early modern England

Chakravarty

2021

Literature Compass

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This essay explores the insidious but persistent desire to affix whiteness to modes of bondage and to argue for an original 'white slavery' located in early modern forms of traffic, indenture and forced transport. This essay aims to recover the genealogy of this belief, beginning with one of its conceptual origins: the practice of 'spiriting' in the seventeenth century. Reading accounts of 'spiriting', I firstly trace the narrative genealogies of English bondage to argue that consent emerges as a racialised rubric. Secondly, I think in particular about the representation of (very different kinds of) spirits in contemporary literary and cultural texts, including The Tempest, to suggest that even as they engage and anticipate the practice of 'spiriting', they also strategically elide their own histories of the traffic and transport of non-white bodies. As one early modern understanding of 'spiriting' specifically comes to associate the practice with the capture and bondage of children, the nexus of slavery, race and children emerges as particularly fraught. If 'white slavery' denotes the limit case for the legibility of slavery, the photographs of 'white' enslaved children later circulated by white abolitionists in the nineteenth century to invoke sympathy for their cause played on the fundamental irreconcilability of 'whiteness' and bondage even as they re-asserted the imbrication of slavery and sanguinity. This study attends to the trajectory of discourses of slavery written on and in the body to explore the histories of both a contemporary and an insistently current investment in frameworks of 'white slavery', as it attempts to discover the early modern

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‘Thrice fairer than myself’

Austin Britton

2024

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race

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This chapter draws attention to the hyper-whiteness of Adonis in Venus and Adonis, arguing that Shakespeare’s epyllion cannot produce a future for racial whiteness because sexual desire is darkened and linked to non-White people. Adonis’s hyper-whiteness points towards asexuality as absence of sexual desire, which, ironically, only makes Adonis more desirable to Venus. His whiteness is repeatedly threatened by Venus, whose body is less white than Adonis’s and darkened by sexual passion. Yet, in Adonis’s disinterestedness in Venus and sexual reproduction, his hyper-whiteness dies with himself. Although his whiteness has no future in the poem, it does in the desires of young, elite, White male readers. This chapter then suggests that the racial futures of whiteness can be traced through the history of reading, in how White readers read, quote, and use Shakespeare’s works.

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“I Had Peopled Else”: Shakespeare’s Queer Natalities and the Reproduction of Race

Cited by 5 publications

References 11 publications

'You shall see me do the Moor'

'You shall see me do the Moor'

Spirited away: Race, slavery and childhood in early modern England

‘Thrice fairer than myself’

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