Selected annotated 
bibliography of PCRS

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Examines the narrative about the fictional character Alisaundre Becket in the 13^th-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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.