Macdonald 2002

Macdonald, Joyce Green. Women and Race in Early Modern Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.

black lady and wild knight tournament in James's court --played by a white woman with black leather coverings? or by an African in his court?

"Allusion and displacement, rather than excess and denaturalization, seem to me to mark a fundamental descriptive axis of the representational practices surrounding race in the early modern period." (4)

"If the racialized body is thus curiously subject to abstraction and displacement, it was also and simultaneously endowed with a stubborn materiality." (5)

African women explicitly described as white -- "the unspecified skin color or, more frequently, the Petrarchan whiteness of the Renaissance African women whose stories I examine here seem to function as a rhetorical assertion of the opposite of the racial difference whose existence was being forcefully experienced by Europeans in an age of colonization and exploration. The racial 'sameness' that these women's white skin apparently proclaims does not, in fact, repudiate the idea of racialized norms of femininity, since other kinds of difference -- sexual, political, behavioral -- will be fully identified as racial matters within the newly whitened social body." (9-10)

"My book will trace two of these gendered tactics of communicating empire: the removal of dark-skinned women from representation, and the submersion of Englishwomen's racial identity into gender." (10)

critique of post-colonialism and its "evacuation of race" (13-14)

Cleopatra, Dido, Sophonisba

"the fluidity of racial identity in these texts and in the culture which produced them answers particular ideological needs. Race performs specific kinds of work, and I want to speculate on and argue about what the racing and unracing of African women was made to mean." (18)