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

Ramos, Eduardo. “Imagined Invasions: Muslim Vikings in Laȝamon’s Brut and Middle English Romances.” Speculum 99, no. 2 (2024): 432–57.

Study of medieval English romances which depict invasions of England by Vikings and Muslims. The article demonstrates how these texts create a theoretical space in which Scandinavian foreigners can be incorporated into the Christian English social world while Muslims are held up as an irredeemable contrast. Of interest to students of English, medieval studies, and religious studies.

Medieval
Literature

Rankine, Patrice D. Aristotle and Black Drama: A Theater of Civil Disobedience. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013.

Rankine explores a theater of civil disobedience through Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s understanding of civil disobedience in the face of unjust laws. However, Rankine argues that the performance of civil disobedience is a deeply artistic practice that can be found in Black theater, where the Black body challenges the normative assumptions of classical texts and modes of creation. This book frames the theater of civil disobedience to challenge the hostility that still exists between theater and Black identity.

Ancient

Richardson, Kristina L. Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

Explores the construction of physical difference among Muslims in medieval Egyptian and Levantine contexts. Richardson's work presents a cultural landscape of Islamic disability and difference through a wide range of sources, providing evidence from both theoretical and representational sources, attending not only to societally normative perspectives but to those of stigmatized persons as well. This work engages conversations in the study of religion, embodiment, Islam, gender, and disability.

Medieval
History

Royster, Francesca T. Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Examines anglophone representations of Cleopatra between early modern Europe to the contemporary United States. The book demonstrates how the image of Cleopatra has been invested across contexts with concerns about racial ambiguity, sexual danger, and other cultural concerns. It engages conversations in performance studies, English literature, the study of Blackness, the study of gender, and the study of sexuality.

Early Modern
Literature

Royster, Francesca T. “White-limed Walls: Whiteness and Early Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 4 (2000): 432-55.

This article deals with the issue of miscegenation in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus as a way to undo the white/black binary and argue for the instability of racial identities. The text suggests that the representation of Moors, Goths, and Romans in Titus Andronicus illustrates Elizabethan anxieties of an “infiltraed England.” The work engages in topics of mixed-race children, racial passing, sexuality, and gender.

Early Modern
Literature

Royster, Francesca T. “The ‘End of Race’ and the Future of Early Modern Cultural Studies.” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 59-69.

Surveys the state of early modern race studies at the turn of the twentieth century, arguing for a nuanced approach to the past’s relevance to the present, and against the erasure of the history of race from the public sphere. The essay demonstrates the significance of the history of race by focusing on the depiction of Othello in a 1995 film directed by Oliver Parker. The work is of interest to students of Blackness, Shakespeare, and American studies.

Early Modern
Literature

Samuels, T. "Herodotus and the Black Body: A Critical Race Theory Analysis." Journal of Black Studies 46, no. 7 (2015): 723-741.

Engages the conceptualization of Blackness in the 5th-century B.C.E. Greek work of Herodotus. The essay surveys prior approaches to racial thought among Greek and Roman thinkers in conjunction with an analysis of Herodotus' works, in order to pose a methodological critique of anti-Blackness as an emergent trend in the early modern period without any significant prior history. It engages conversations in the study of Greek literature and Blackness.

Early Modern
Literature

Scheil, Andrew. The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Investigates early medieval Anglo-Saxon thought regarding Jews in England up through the 10th century. The book surveys a variety of sources to extract key themes such as Christian prefigurations of the self with respect to Jews, the conceptualization of England as Israel, and anti-Semitic Christian pieties. The book engages the study of Christianity, anti-Semitism, and medieval England.

Medieval

Sévère, Richard ed. "Special Issue: Race and Arthurian Legend." Arthuriana 31, no. 2 (2021).

Special issue on race in Arthurian legends that invites recognition that race is malleable and critically interrogates “racial practices” ranging from religious discrimination to “environmental terrorism.” Its essays demonstrate that analysis of Arthurian-themed subject matters often reveals contemporary identity constructions entrenched in historical racism and colonialism. Several contributions juxtapose medieval Arthurian texts with modern adaptations.

Medieval

Sherman, William E.B. Singing with the Mountains: The Language of God in the Afghan Highlands. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023.

Interrogates the interplay between race and religion through studying a 16th century messianic movement in the Afghan highlands. The book shows us how Mughal and British theories of Afghan beginnings have generated an over-reliance upon a predetermined heuristic of Afghan ethnicity. Sherman then turns to self-understandings of the messianic movement in question (the Roshaniyya) to show how collective striving for “the language of God” deconstructs prevailing colonial parameters for understanding Afghan history. Beyond the context of Afghanistan, this book provides a framework for thinking through the interplay between race, religion, apocalypse, and language.

Early Modern
Religious Studies

Smith, Ian. Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Explores narratological and historiographical patterns of resistance to studying the works of Shakespeare with reference to race. The book parses ways in which early modern English audiences worked with preexisting racial concepts in order to make sense of the details in Shakespeare's work. The book engages discussions in the study of Shakespeare, Blackness, and performance.

Early Modern
Literature

Smith, Ian. “Othello’s Black Handkerchief.” Shakespeare Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2013): 1–25.

Interrogates the construction of Black subjectivity in Shakespeare's Othello with reference to a handkerchief deployed in the play as a critical plot device. The essay poses an argument regarding the use of black cloth as a metonymic code for Blackness on the Elizabethan stage as well as the broader cultural landscape within which Othello's handkerchief functioned. The essay engages conversations in performance studies, cultural history, and the study of Shakespeare.

Early Modern
Literature

Smith, Ian. Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

Analyzes the ways in which 16th century English texts deployed the figure of the "barbarous" African for the sake of an English civilizational project. The book focuses on how English discourses fixated upon presumed linguistic errors in speech made by "foreign" speakers in order to buttress a sense of English belonging and displace anxieties about English itself being a barbarous idiom. It regards discussions in the fields of Renaissance studies, language, and English history.

Early Modern
Literature

Smith, Cassander L. Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016.

This book offers a socio-historical account of Black Africans in the early Atlantic world in the 16th and 17th centuries. The text asks how literary and archival sources mediated encounters between Black Africans and Spain in the early Americas. The work engages with constructions of race, trans Atlanticism, and early American and African American literature.

18th Century
History

Smith, Cassander L., et al. "Introduction: The Contours of a Field." In Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology, edited by Cassander L. Smith, Nicholas R. Jones, and Miles P. Grier, 1-12. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.

This book engages disparate fields—Black Studies, Early American Studies and Early Modern Studies (15th century to 19th century)—to converse with one another about how material and visual culture informed and misinformed constitutions of the African continent, slave trading and slavery, and the racial difference of Black Africans. The anthology places Black life at the center of analysis and critical inquiry to access voices and subversive acts. It uncovers the power of Blackness as a cultural, ideological, and structural category that affirms Black life and identity.

Early Modern
Literature

Stevens, Scott Manning. "New World Contacts and the Trope of the 'Naked Savage.'" In Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey, 125-140. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.

Stevens examines the encounter between the inhabitants of the Old World and New during the early modern period through Walter Ong’s visual metaphors and tropes. He explores the naked body as a problematic signifier since a recurring figure within the many narrative accounts of the New World encounters is that of the “naked savage.” This article traces the discourse of self and the naked body of the Native as trope to understand that the signification of this body did not always imply a person.

Early Modern

Stevens, Scott Manning. “The Historiography of New France and the Legacy of Iroquois Internationalism.” Comparative American Studies 11, no. 2 (2013): 148–165.

This article examines the French portrayal of Haudenosaunee culture and politics established by Jesuits writers in 17th century New France. Stevens explores the generic shifts that occur in the writings associated with Indigenous and French encounters during the early modern period. Stevens argues that over the centuries the Haudenosaunee embraced the notion of ongoing resistance to colonialism and their role as spokespeople in Indigenous affairs throughout the Americas.

Early Modern
Literature

Stevens, Scott Manning. "Tomahawk: Materiality and Depictions of the Haudenosaunee." Early American Literature 53, no. 2 (2018): 475-511.

This article investigates the enduring stereotype of the warlike Iroquois in early American writings and visual representations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Stevens traces the material culture of the tomahawk and its associations in portrayals of the Haudenosaunee people. Through a triangulated research paradigm, this article examines the Haudenosaunee culture and its representations by European settlers.

Early Modern
Literature

Stevens, Scott Manning, Nancy Shoemaker, Jean M. O'Brien, Juliana Barr, and Susan Sleeper-Smith. Why You Can't Teach United States History without American Indians. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

A collection of essays which offer a reconceptualization of U.S. history from the early modern period to the present underpinned by Native history and sovereignty. The work is geared towards offering educators today a set of crucial pedagogical devices. The essays in this compendium engage the study of U.S. history, anticolonialism, and sovereignty among many other fields.

Early Modern
History

Stevens, Scott Manning. “From ‘Iroquois Cruelty’ to the Mohawk Warrior Society: Stereotyping and the Strategic Uses of a Reputation for Violence.” In Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past, Engaging the Present, edited by Jeff Ostler, Joshua L. Reid, and Susan Sleeper-Smith, 86-105. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021.

This chapter interrogates French representations of the Haudenosaunee in the 17th and 18th centuries. The essay examines the enduring stereotype of “savagery” created to demonize Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Stevens traces the stereotype from the legacy of Haudenosaunee ferocity from written and visual representations created by the French during their colonial project in North America.

Early Modern
Literature
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