The "Ethiope," the "tawny Tartar," the "woman blackamoore," and "knotty Africanisms"—allusions to blackness abound in Renaissance texts. Kim F. Hall's eagerly awaited book is the first to view these evocations of blackness in the contexts of sexual politics, imperialism, and slavery in early modern England. Her work reveals the vital link between England's expansion into realms of difference and otherness—through exploration and colonialism-and the highly charged ideas of race and gender which emerged. How, Hall asks, did new connections between race and gender figure in Renaissance ideas about the proper roles of men and women? What effect did real racial and cultural difference have on the literary portrayal of blackness? And how did the interrelationship of tropes of race and gender contribute to a modern conception of individual identity? Hall mines a wealth of sources for answers to these questions: travel literature from Sir John Mandeville's Travels to Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa; lyric poetry and plays, from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest to Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness; works by Emilia Lanyer, Philip Sidney, John Webster, and Lady Mary Wroth; and the visual and decorative arts. Concentrating on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hall shows how race, sexuality, economics, and nationalism contributed to the formation of a modern ( white, male) identity in English culture. The volume includes a useful appendix of not readily accessible Renaissance poems on blackness.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title "Speak of me as I am," Othello, the Moor of Venice, bids in the play that bears his name. Yet many have found it impossible to speak of his ethnicity with any certainty. What did it mean to be a Moor in the early modern period? In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when England was expanding its reach across the globe, the Moor became a central character on the English stage. In The Battle of Alcazar, Titus Andronicus, Lust's Dominion, and Othello, the figure of the Moor took definition from multiple geographies, histories, religions, and skin colors. Rather than casting these variables as obstacles to our—and England's—understanding of the Moor's racial and cultural identity, Emily C. Bartels argues that they are what make the Moor so interesting and important in the face of growing globalization, both in the early modern period and in our own. In Speaking of the Moor, Bartels sets the early modern Moor plays beside contemporaneous texts that embed Moorish figures within England's historical record—Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Queen Elizabeth's letters proposing the deportation of England's "blackamoors," and John Pory's translation of The History and Description of Africa. Her book uncovers the surprising complexity of England's negotiation and accommodation of difference at the end of the Elizabethan era.

ReSignifications links classical and popular representations of African bodies in European art, culture and history.

For over 1500 years before the Empire Windrush docked on British shores, people of African descent have played a significant and far-ranging role in the country's history, from the African soldiers on Hadrian's Wall to the Black British intellectuals who made London a hub of radical, Pan-African ideas. But while there has been a growing interest in this history, there has been little recognition of the sheer breadth and diversity of the Black British experience, until now. This collection combines the latest work from both established and emerging scholars of Black British history. It spans the centuries from the first Black Britons to the latest African migrants, covering everything from Africans in Tudor England to the movement for reparations, and the never ending struggles against racism in between. An invaluable resource for both future scholarship and those looking for a useful introduction to Black British history, Black British History: New Perspectives has the potential to transform our understanding of Britain, and of its place in the world.

Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2018 A Book of the Year for the Evening Standard and the Observer A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor England… They were present at some of the defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. The untold stories of the Black Tudors, dazzlingly brought to life by Kaufmann, will transform how we see this most intriguing period of history.

Scenes from Bourgeois Life proposes that theatre spectatorship has made a significant contribution to the historical development of a distinctive bourgeois sensibility, characterized by the cultivation of distance. In Nicholas Ridout’s formulation, this distance is produced and maintained at two different scales. First is the distance of the colonial relation, not just in miles between Jamaica and London, but also the social, economic, and psychological distances involved in that relation. The second is the distance of spectatorship, not only of the modern theatregoer as consumer, but the larger and pervasive disposition to observe, comment, and sit in judgment, which becomes characteristic of the bourgeois relation to the rest of the world. This engagingly written study of history, class, and spectatorship offers compelling proof of “why theater matters,” and demonstrates the importance of examining the question historically.

The Tudor period remains a source of timeless fascination, with endless novels, TV programmes and films depicting the period in myriad ways. And yet our image of the Tudor era remains overwhelmingly white. This ground-breaking and provocative new book seeks to redress the balance: revealing not only how black presence in Tudor England was far greater than has previously been recognised, but that Tudor conceptions of race were far more complex than we have been led to believe. Onyeka Nubia's original research shows that Tudors from many walks of life regularly interacted with people of African descent, both at home and abroad, revealing a genuine pragmatism towards race and acceptance of difference. Nubia also rejects the influence of the 'Curse of Ham' myth on Tudor thinking, persuasively arguing that many of the ideas associated with modern racism are in fact relatively recent developments. England's Other Countrymen is a bravura and eloquent forgotten history of diversity and cultural exchange, and casts a new light on our own attitudes towards race.

On the plains of Wiltshire in England lie the remains of ancient giant stones. Exactly which people built these stones remains the eternal question. Just like the pyramids of Egypt its origins remain shrouded in mystery. Various theories have been put forward as to the race or otherwise of these builders, but still, much uncertainty remains. The evidence is simply overwhelming that the earliest inhabitants of Britain and Ireland were Blacks. Mythological, archeological, linguistic and other sources have substantiated this remarkable fact. Candid authorities like the British Egyptologists Gerald Massey and Albert Churchward, the Scottish historian David Mac Ritchie, and the British antiquarian Godfrey Higgins, have done exhaustive research and brought many facts to our knowledge. Tacitus, Pliny, Claudian and other writers have described the Blacks they encountered in the British Isles as "Black as Ethiopians," "Cum Nigris Gentibus," "nimble-footed blackamoors," and so on. This book reveals much about the Black presence in the early British Isles, including the "mysterious" builders of Stonehenge. We learn about the Black Fomorians, Partholonians, Nemedians, Firbolgs, Tuatha De Danann, Black Danes, Black Douglases, the giants or Cyclopes and so on. We also learn about the Black serpent-worshiping Druids who built serpentine monuments like those at Avebury and Carnac, as well as the builders of the Round Towers of Ireland. The fact remains, that Blacks have played a very important role in the early history, traditions, religion and so on, of early Britain and elsewhere than is generally known and acknowledged. This is a must-read book.