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Scripts of Blackness shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism.
In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques—black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)—in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could/would ultimately live in their midst.
Those scripts were often gendered and hinged on notions of demonization, exclusion, exploitation, animalization, commodification, sexualization, consensual enslavement, misogynoir, infantilization, and evocative association with other racialized minorities. Scripts of Blackness attempts to grasp the stories that Western Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effects of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects.
"[A] groundbreaking investigation into three modes of racialization—cosmetic, acoustic, and kinetic—that were produced in the theaters of Spain, France, and England across two centuries. The book enriches existing studies of race and performance by departing from the conventional focus on a single nation and limited period and instead highlighting the correspondences between the racial paradigms produced in these countries...[E]ssential reading for students and scholars of early modern studies."
"[R]ich [and] thought-provoking...This important book issues a compelling call to reassess early modern European performances of blackness in the harsh light of their effects on Afro-descendant subjects."
"This is the first study to my knowledge that puts English, French, and Spanish early modern literatures in conversation with each other through a comparatist method that discusses the history of the African diaspora in each country’s colonial development. Noémie Ndiaye’s scholarship is the soundest I have seen on the topic of early modern race theory."
"Noémie Ndiaye challenges national and disciplinary boundaries by demonstrating that, in order to appreciate the complexity and force with which race cohered as a category in early modern Europe, we must look beyond discursive formations to embodied techniques of what she calls ‘performative blackness.' Performative blackness, Ndiaye argues brilliantly, is ‘a type of racial impersonation that brings into being and fashions what it claims to mimic.' She analyses performance cultures in Spain, France, and England to show how plays, dances, and festivals from these national traditions worked together to render Blackness as a racial category."
"[A] powerful and compelling study...The strengths of this monograph are manifold. Ndiaye successfully negotiates three different performance traditions, histories and languages to portray wide-reaching patterns rippling across Europe. In doing so, Ndiaye unsettles longstanding assumptions about the history of racial impersonation on stage and refutes claims of the irrelevance or Anglo-centrism of early modern critical race theory. This monograph is equally successful in how it disrupts early modern theatrical canons, placing key playwrights like William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Lope de Vega and Molière with non-canonical, even anonymous, sources and demonstrating how these enduring works cannot be read and taught without a conscious negotiation of their place in the foundation of racial power structures. This book is a must read for early modernists, critical race theorists and scholars and practitioners of the stage."
"Studies of blackface performance in the early modern world have focused mostly on English plays, masques, and pageants. As Noémie Ndiaye convincingly demonstrates, those performances did not exist in isolation, and the early modern formation of blackness as a racial category was a transnational European endeavor. Scripts of Blackness is original in that it goes beyond the cosmetics and prosthetics of blackface to consider the ways black characters were made to speak and to move."
Contents
Introduction. Performative Blackness in Early Modern Europe
Chapter 1. A Brief History of Baroque Black-Up: Cosmetic Blackness and Religion
Chapter 2. A Brief Herstory of Baroque Black-Up: Cosmetic Blackness, Gender, and Sexuality
Chapter 3. Blackspeak: Acoustic Blackness and the Accents of Race
Chapter 4. Black Moves: Race, Dance, and Power
Post/Script. Ecologies of Racial Performance
Appendix. Selection of Early Modern Plays Featuring Black Characters
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments