Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama - The Other “Other”

Using contemporary Afro-pessimist theories as a foundation for structural analyses of race in the Early Modern Period, this book addresses how race functioned not only as a marker of human identity, but also as an a priori constituent of human subjectivity. Via Othello, Titus Andronicus, and other plays, it argues that Blackness is the marker of social death that allows for constructions of human identity to become transmutable based on the impossibility of recognition and incorporation for Blackness into humanity. It will be an essential volume for those with interest in Renaissance Literature and Culture, Shakespeare, Contemporary Performance Theory, Black Studies, and Ethnic Studies.