Selected annotated 
bibliography of PCRS

This bibliography represents a selection of foundational texts in the field of premodern critical race studies (PCRS). It focuses on secondary sources examining premodern race and how constructions of difference in the past continue to reverberate today. While these entries treat a variety of sociohistorical and linguistic contexts, the studies themselves covered here are all produced in English. This is a continuously expanding document created by the ACMRS Postdoctoral Research Scholars in collaboration with the RaceB4Race Executive Board.

Period
Discipline

Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Draws on archives in the Caribbean and the American South to consider how the expectation of enslaved women’s reproductive ability shaped their experience with enslavement and racialization. Morgan argues that African women’s physical and reproductive labor is at the center of the system of slavery and that enslavement impacts familial structures. This work takes part in conversations about gender, embodiment, and Black feminism.

18th Century
History

Morgan, Jennifer L. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.

Considers the lives of enslaved African women in the 16th and 17th centuries. The work centers enslaved women’s worldviews and explores how they understood their inclusion in the racializing logics of enslavement and reproduction. Morgan articulates how early modern ideas of numeracy, value, and commodification in the Atlantic co-constituted African women’s understanding of motherhood and kinship. Engages in the African diaspora, Black feminism, racial categories, and discussions of embodiment.

18th Century
History

Mudimbe, V.Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Interrogates Euro-American epistemological constructions of Africa from Antiquity to the relative present, alongside African scholarly responses within colonially imposed frameworks. The book engages a wide range of themes conjoined by an overarching concern about how African philosophy has, and might still, engage the hermeneutical trappings of Western knowledge systems. Beyond the context of African history, this work engages conversations in history of philosophy, colonial studies, and postcolonial studies.

Ancient
History

Murray, Jackie. “A Critical Race Studies Approach: Race and Racecraft in Apollonius’s Argonautica.” In The Epic World, ed. Pamela Lothspeich. 15-29. London: Routledge, 2023.

Study of classical Greek epic literature about the Argonauts. The chapter shows how the Argonauts dehumanize particular opponents—the people of Cyzicus, the Bebrycians, and a Libyan herder—and argues that these slain enemies are configured along the lines of racial monstrosity. Of interest to students of the Classics, Greek literature, and mythology.

Ancient
Literature

Ndiaye, Noémie. Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.

Examines the representation of Black characters by white performers in 16th and 17th century England, France, and Spain. The book traces the performative technologies used by such performers—anchoring its analysis upon blackface, coded speech patterns, and dances—in order to incubate racializing conceptualizations of Black personhood among performers and audiences across Europe. The book engages conversations in performance studies, Blackness, the study of embodiment, and colonialism.

Early Modern
Literature

Ndiaye, Noémie, and Lia Markey, eds. Seeing Race before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World. Tempe: ACMRS Press, 2023.

This volume explores the many ways that race and racial thinking are represented in the visual culture of premodern times, particularly between the 1300s to the 1800s. It explores the visual manifestations of the “racial matrix” across the medieval and early modern era through transnational and multilingual geographies. Contributors aim to debunk claims that “race did not exist” prior to the Enlightenment by incorporating vast visual archives from different centuries.

Nemser, Daniel. “Triangulating Blackness: Mexico City, 1612.” Mexican Studies 33, no. 3 (2017): 344–366.

Investigates accounts of a 1612 Black uprising in Mexico City as well as their reception. The essay explores both the Spanish account of the event—excavating how Black male bodies were coded as predisposed to the rape of white women—and a Nahuatl account of the same event, which reflects upon the effects of the Spanish gaze upon Black bodies. It goes on to parse the slippages in translation, with respect to the Nahuatl account, which tend to reinscribe colonial categories of knowledge. The work considers discussions in the study of slavery, freedom, gender, Blackness, indigeneity, and colonialism.

Early Modern
History

Newton, Melanie J. The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.

Examines the political movements of free people of color in Barbados during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This book complicates understandings of these people as both enslavers and kin to enslaved peoples. Newton argues that although they were often a marginalized population, free people were a vital part of the political landscape during the abolition and amelioration period. This text engages with the history of Afro-Barbados, racialization, and enslavement.

18th Century
History

Ng, Su Fang. "Making Race in the Early Modern East Indies." New Literary History 52, no. 3 (2021): 509-33.

Examines early modern English and Malay accounts of cross-cultural encounters to consider racial formation in the Indian Ocean during the advent of European maritime expansion. The essay focuses on the epistemological encounter between Arabic physiognomy and European ideas about skin, the use of ethnic categories, and the emergence of “Malay” as a category. This scholarship is of interest to students of early modern studies, the Indian Ocean, Orientalism, and colonialism.

Early Modern
History

Niebrzydowski, Sue. "The Sultana and Her Sisters: Black Women in the British Isles Before 1530." Women’s History Review 10, no. 2 (2001): 187–210.

Examines the representation of Black women in medieval England prior to 1530. The essay draws upon travelogues, scriptural commentary, visual arts, medical treatises, and surrounding materials to demonstrate how gendered Black bodies were significant loci of theorization for otherness prior to the Elizabethan forms of institutionalized slavery. It engages conversations in Blackness, gender studies, and the development of medieval identities.

Medieval
Literature

Nirenberg, David. "Was There Race Before Modernity? The Example of 'Jewish' Blood in Late Medieval Spain." In The Origins of Racism in the West, edited by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, 232–264. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Explores Christian attitudes towards Jews in medieval Castile and Aragon, with specific reference to the stakes of contemporary discourse about premodern race. The essay provides a historiographical argument about how contemporary knowledges about the Spanish context were produced through both deployments of and aversions to race as a heuristic, while also examining the emplotment of biological thinking about race in the 15th century with respect to Spanish Christian concerns about Jewish lineage. The essay regards conversations in the study of historiography, genealogy, anti-Semitism, and the history of race.

Medieval

Otaño Gracia, Nahir I. The Other Faces of Arthur: Chivalric Whiteness in the Global North Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.

Considers Arthurian romances in Scandinavia, Britain, Iberia and North Africa in the 12th-15th centuries. The work examines whiteness as constructed through chivalry in the global North Atlantic.  Otaño Gracia argues that the translation and circulation of these texts embedded racial hierarchies and served to normalize domination and violence. The book will interest scholars of Arthuriana, chivalry, translation studies, and the global medieval world.

Early Modern
Literature

Otaño Gracia, Nahir I. “Vikings of the Round Table: Kingship in the Islendingasögur and the Riddarasögur.” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 47 no. 1 (2016): 69-101.

Explores the reception of Arthurian legends in medieval Scandinavia, with attention to medieval Icelandic translators of the literature. The essay argues that Icelandic Arthurian literature is marked by both representational and ideological differences from English and French versions, such as emphases on knights’ travels, practices of gift-giving, and a sense of the transcultural. This work is of interest to students of medieval studies, Arthurian literature, and Scandinavian studies.

Medieval
Literature

Otaño Gracia, Nahir I. "Borders and the Global North Atlantic: Chaucer, Pilgrimage, and Crusade." English Language Notes 58, no. 2 (2020): 35-49.

Explores the conceptualization of Africa and Iberia within the medieval English works of Chaucer. The article illuminates the ways in which Chaucer deployed key concepts of pilgrimage and crusade to formulate a vision of European Christian military-commercial dominance over Muslim and non-Christian 'frontiers' and foreign lands. It engages the study of religion, English literature, and (proto)colonialism, among other fields.

Medieval
Literature

Phillips, Susan E. Learning to Talk Shop: Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.

Examines vernacular phrasebooks and conversational manuals used by non-elite readers in 15th and 16th century England. Phillips argues that these popular texts offer a valuable practical and mercantile literacy. The work offers a new perspective on premodern pedagogy beyond classical schooling. The book is of interest to students of pedagogy, marketplace literacies, multilingual texts, and non-elite education.

Early Modern
Literature

Piedra, José. "Literary Whiteness and the Afro-Hispanic Difference.” New Literary History 18, no.2 (1987): 303-332.

Analyzes how Antonio de Nebrija’s work during the 15th century became the grammatical endorsement for Spain’s ethnic assertion. He discusses how “writing white” was a tool to avoid racial identification and racialization in literary texts. Piedra traces the origins of Afro-Hispanic writings to factual and fictional differences within the model of literary whiteness.

Literature

Piedra, José. "The Black Stud's Spanish Birth.” Callaloo 16, no.4 (1993): 820-846.

Piedra argues that the birth of the Spanish nation comes from the libidinal implications under various faiths and cultures–Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and sub-Saharan Black culture. He theorizes that the figure of the Black stud is the "Black other" of the Afro-Islamic other for the Hispanic self’s fantasy in Spain during the 12th – 15th century. Piedra examines how Spain views itself as a dominant white self and any culture or faith outside of that as a Black other.

Early Modern
Literature

Rainey, Brian. Religion, Ethnicity and Xenophobia in the Bible: A Theoretical, Exegetical and Theological Survey. London: Routledge, 2012.

Investigates representations of “foreign” persons in Mesopotamian and Biblical literatures. The book argues that the authors of such texts conceptualized their society through notions of ethnic foreignness, which were themselves anchored by notions of common ancestry and territorial beginnings. It engages discussions in the study of Biblical hermeneutics, Mesopotamia, and otherness.

Ancient

Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh. "The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure." Literature Compass 6, no. 9-10 (2019).

Examines the use of the word “Saracen” in scholarship on the Middle Ages. Through an auto-ethnographic critique, the article argues that the word “Saracen” should be replaced with Muslim in scholarship on European representation of Muslims in the Middle Ages. It further argues that certain academic practices viewed as authoritative yield criticism that reproduces the racism and Islamophobia of the objects of study.

Medieval
Literature

Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh. “Alisaundre Becket: Thomas Becket’s Resilient, Muslim, Arab Mother in the South English Legendary.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 10 (2019): 293–303.

Examines the narrative about the fictional character Alisaundre Becket in the 13th-century South English Legendary, with specific reference to the character’s non-Christian and non-English background. The article argues that the narrative treatment of Alisaundre Becket’s voice both estranges and empowers her within the broader text and marks an early moment of racial and religious identity theorized as distinct. The work is of interest to students of English literature, medieval studies, and Orientalism.

Medieval
Literature
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