Titus Andronicus is invested in how gender is shaped by empire. Tamora’s prolific motherhood is cast as excessive and foreign. Her ability to transfer that foreigness into an imperial heir is a core aspect of her villainy. Meanwhile, Lavinia’s silence and chastity expose how ideals of Roman womanhood depend on control, objectification, and violence. As revenge unfolds, both figures reveal how imperial power collapses moral distinctions. The play ultimately challenges the audience to question whether silence, consent, and reproductive capacity can hold stable meaning within this imperial frame.

Aaron the Moor lives at the heart of Titus Andronicus. His actions drive the plot while revealing the racial logic of the play’s imperial world. Both shaped by and resistant to racist ideologies, Aaron demonstrates a striking awareness of how Blackness is vilified, even as he asserts a form of Black pride and endurance. His role as a father, particularly in his efforts to protect his child, offers a model of care that contrasts sharply with Roman patriarchal norms. Through Aaron, the play raises unresolved early modern anxieties about race, empire, and morality.

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Titus Andronicus' use of violence seeks to expose how imperial Rome, built on excess and appetite, lost any coherent social and moral order. Drawing on classical ideas of decorum, the play presents a world where an empire’s drive to expand and incorporate others dissolves distinctions between Roman and foreign, civilized and barbaric. If we wipe away all the blood, we can find a cautionary reflection on early modern anxieties about empire, cosmopolitanism, and the unstable boundaries of cultural and racial identity.

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Course description

This graduate course is designed to appeal to students interested in early modern literature, including those invested in early American and early African American literature.

The course views early American literature from a transatlantic perspective, examining the development of racial discourses in the literature—resulting from English/New World encounters with Black Africans and Natives. This course applies the underlying principle of critical race theory: that race has had a profound effect on the social, legal, historical, and literary structures that comprise United States culture. To better understand how US culture arrived at this point, students will journey back to early America to examine the earliest manifestations of racial discourses in an ever-expanding English American empire.

Students will study the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, who was arguably the most widely known novelist from early America, and will read his 1826 novel, The Last of the Mohicans. The book is the account of a frontiersman named Natty Bumppo, or Hawkeye, and his efforts to navigate the backwoods of upstate New York during the French and Indian War in the 1750s. The novel addresses many themes and ideals that are quintessential to how American identity is defined all these years later. Students will interrogate what this novel means and how it means it.

In addition, students will read Cooper's novel intertextually, comparing The Last of the Mohicans to other works of early American literature in order to properly contextualize Cooper and to get a better sense of the literary landscape of early America.

This is a survey course, which means the course’s main objective is to provide students with a general overview of early American literature with a special emphasis on race. Students will examine how early Americans wrote about ‘race,’ how they categorized people based on cultural and geographical differences, and how they defined themselves based on those differences.

The course’s study will emphasize the stakes and the problems racial classification created for each writer in American settler colonialism and imperialism. Why did race matter, how did it matter, and what did these writers do when they encountered figures in the Americas whose actions defied racial classification?

As an important aspect of this examination, students will interrogate Black and Native experiences. What did it mean to be Black or Native in the early Atlantic world? How did early Black and Native writers and thinkers talk about race? In what ways might these figures be seen engaging with their environments in ways that accommodate, challenge, or reshape the racial discourses of the day? These questions will not only help students theorize race in the early modern Atlantic from the perspective of Black Africans and Natives but will also help them reorient their mindset by taking seriously Black Africans and Natives as intellectuals and as cultural doers during the early modern period.

Course objectives

At the conclusion of this course, students should be able to:

• Identify a range of early American/Atlantic texts that display the complex power structures at play in the early Atlantic World.
• Recognize the complex interactions among multicultural groups.
• Read texts from multiple perspectives.
• Write responses that illustrate an understanding of the themes and tensions that characterize early American/Atlantic literature.
• Position themselves within academic discourses relevant to their disciplines and the central themes and issues of this course.

Assignments

Two-page exploratory prompt – Part 1

I am fond of this quote from Maya Angelou: “Intelligence is not knowing the answers but asking the questions.”

These two writing assignments are designed to give you practice in asking open-ended questions that produce avenues for further research. Your job is to pose one or a series of related provocation question(s) about early American literature and culture based on your initial reading of Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. In essence, I am asking you what questions come up for you about what early American literature is, or is not, based on your reading of Cooper’s novel.

In your prompt, you don’t simply present the question(s). You want to also provide a premise or background information about how and why you are asking the question(s).

For example, what in your reading of Cooper’s novel led you to your line of inquiry? You can quote key passages from the text. What are the stakes of finding answers to the question(s)? In other words, how might this line of inquiry change current conceptions of Cooper’s text and/or of early America?

You do not have to answer the question(s) you pose. This is an exercise in exploration and contemplation. Be comfortable with the not-knowing, the mulling over. At the end of the semester, I will ask you to revisit your exploratory prompt. By the end of sixteen weeks, can you answer any of those questions? Do you have new questions?

Two-page exploratory prompt – Part 2

At the end of the semester, you will revisit the question, or series of questions, you posed in the first assignment. After having discussed early American literature and several secondary sources for some 16 weeks, how has your thinking about your initial question(s) changed? How might the other readings help you arrive at an answer to your question(s)? How might the sources complicate your questions(s) or create new questions?

This is a self-reflective exercise that asks you to apply your budding expertise in early American literature to begin formulating answers to your questions.

Abstract assignment

In this abstract assignment, you will present the argument about which you plan to write your final paper. Keep in mind that the abstract is a specific genre; the emphasis is just as much on form as it is on content.

The abstract should be between 250 to 500 words (no more than 1 page, single-spaced): you should clearly lay out what your argument is and what it adds to current discussions about the text(s) you are working with.

In other words, what are you saying that is new? You also want to give a brief example from the text(s) to illustrate your argument. Sample abstracts will be provided for reference. In addition, I want you to search scholarly journals, listservs, and academic websites to find at least one outlet that would be a good fit for the paper you plan to write. The idea is that you will submit the abstract to an active call for papers. I must approve your argument before you can move onto the final stage.  

Conference paper and presentation

As the major project for this course, you are expected to write a traditional, academic presentation-quality paper on a topic relevant to issues we discussed in class. That paper, approximately 8 to 10 pages, should exhibit original thought and make some form of scholarly contribution to the study of early American culture and race. At the end of the semester, you will present a 10-minute version of your essay and share your scholarly findings with your classmates.

Course readings and sequence

In assigned order

Part 1 - Narratives of exploration

Primary texts

• Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. 1826.
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• Native American oral narratives:
  
  • Talk Concerning the First Beginning (Zuni).
  • Creation of the Whites (Yuchi).
  • The Singer’s Art (Aztec).

• Columbus, Christopher.
  
  • Journal of the First Voyage.
  • Narrative of the Third Voyage.

Secondary texts

• Kolodny, Annette. “Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions: Notes Toward a New Literary History of the American Frontiers.” American Literature, vol. 64, no. 1, March 1992: pp. 1–18.
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• Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992).

Part 2 - The Puritan errand into the wilderness

Primary texts

• Smith, John.
  
  • The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624): book III, chapters 2 and 8.
  • A Description of New England. 1616.

• Hariot, Thomas. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. 1588.
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• Winthrop, John. “A Model of Christian Charity.” 1630.
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• Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation: chapters I, IX.
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• Bradstreet, Anne. The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. 1650.
  
  • “The Prologue.”
  • “The Author to Her Book.”
  • “To My Dear and Loving Husband.”
  • “Upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666.”
  • “To My Dear Children.”

• Morrison, Toni. A Mercy (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
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• Rowlandson, Mary White. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. 1682.
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• Hammon, Briton. “A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon.” 1760.
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• Sewall, Samuel. “The Selling of Joseph.” 1700.
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• Saffin, John. “A Brief and Candid Answer to a Late Printed Sheet, Entitled The Selling of Joseph.” 1701.
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• Eliot, John. “Tears of Repentance.” 1653.
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• Mather, Cotton. “The Negro Christianized.” 1706.

Secondary texts

• Arvin, Maile, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill. “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy.” Feminist Formations, vol. 25, no. 1, Spring 2013: pp. 8–34.
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• Bercovitch, Sacvan. “The Typology of America’s Mission.” American Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2, Summer 1978: pp. 135–155.
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• Foster, Frances Smith. “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture.” American Literary History, vol. 17, no. 4, Winter 2005: pp. 714–740.
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• Miller, Perry. “Errand into the Wilderness” The William and Mary Quarterly 10 (January 1953): pp. 3-32.
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• Smith, Cassander L. “Race.” A History of American Puritan Literature, edited by Kristina Bross and Abram Van Engen (Cambridge University Press, 2020): pp. 211–224.

Part 3 - This land is our land

Primary texts

• Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785: Queries VI, XI, XVIIl.
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• Wheatley, Phillis. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. 1773.
  • “To Maecenas.”
  • “Letter to the Right Hon’ble The Earl of Darmouth.”
  • “On Being Brought From Africa to America.”
  • “Letters to Obour Tanner.”

• Apess, William. “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man.” 1833.
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• Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845): chapters 1, 2, 3, 9, 10.
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• Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861: chapters 1, 2, 5, 10, 17, 21.

Secondary texts

• Bynum, Tara. “Phillis Wheatley’s Pleasures.” Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (University of Illinois Press, 2023).
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• Mt. Pleasant, Alyssa, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup. “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies.” Early American Literature, vol. 53, no. 2, 2018: pp. 407–444.
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• Myles, Anne G. “Queering the Study of Early American Sexuality.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 1, January 2003: pp. 199–202.
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• Zafar, Rafia. “Capturing the Captivity: African Americans among the Puritans.” MELUS, vol. 17, no. 2, Summer 1991–1992: pp. 19–35.

Part 4 - Sweet land of liberty

Primary texts

• Occom, Samson. “A Short Narrative of My Life.” 1768.
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• Hall, Prince. “To the Honorable Council and House of Representatives.” 1777.
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• Anonymous
  
  • “Mulattos.”
  • “Letter to Bishop Edmund Gibson on Behalf of a Mixed-Race Community in Virginia.” 1723.

Secondary texts

• Bynum, Tara. “Cesar Lyndon’s Lists, Letters, and a Pig Roast.” Early American Literature, vol. 53, no. 3, 2018: pp. 839–849.

Cassander L. Smith explores the enduring myth of respectability politics by tracing its roots from the 18th century to the present day. Beginning with the public response to the killing of Trayvon Martin, she interrogates the impulse to explain racial violence through individual behavior rather than systemic injustice. In the 1789 autobiography of Olaudah Equiano the book reveals how even the most “respectable” Black lives—educated, assimilated, and law-abiding—remained vulnerable under white supremacy.

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Cassander L. Smith teaches rhetorics of race across a vast expanse of time, outside the tunnel-vision of the contemporary politics of race, asking students, what might the writings of Briton Hammon and Phillis Wheatley, and their contemporaries, tell us about the developmental eras of racial thought that have defined the United States’ social politics? What might they tell us about the experiences of Black Americans today?

Introduction

Texts are often deemed literary if they speak to some universal truth that transcends time and place. We ask ourselves, “Will people find value in this text one hundred years from now?” If so, the text gets a ‘literary’ label. This assignment asks students to test out the “literariness” of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, Lucy Terry Prince, and Jupiter Hammon. 

Objectives‍

This assignment is designed to help students focus more closely on literature at the level of diction and denotation/connotation. By the end of this project, students should be more attuned to the ways in which words carry denotative and connotative meanings. The goal is to be more aware also of the deliberate nature of texts: writers carefully construct their messages and students should be able to mimic that process of craft. It also allows students the opportunity to engage early African American literature in a modern-day context. This assignment asks students to use ‘outdated’ prose to articulate the age in which they live.   

This assignement has three parts

1. Write a poem using only the diction and punctuation of early African American poets that have been read in class.  
2. Circulate the poem.  
3. Write a self-reflexive essay about the process of completing the assignment. 

 Part 1: Writing the poem 

Craft a single poem that addresses some current event or issue relevant to today. It can be an event or issue that has occurred within or beyond the borders of the United States. In crafting the poem students must use ONLY lines taken from the poems of Wheatley, Hammon, and Prince.  

• Use only lines from the poems we read in class, including the poem’s title. 
• Use as many lines as needed or wanted from as many of the poems as wanted, provided they are poems read for class. 
• Do NOT use more than two consecutive lines from any poem. Students cannot cut and paste entire stanzas from Wheatley or Hammon or Prince.  
• Craft poems on topics about some current event or issue. 
• Do not add new words, lines, or punctuation. 
• Be sure look up unfamiliar words. 

 Part 2: Circulating the poem

Students should think about the process of getting published for Wheatley. She was interrogated by prominent Bostonians to prove she was the author of her poems. She had to go to England to get her book published.  

Students should ask how will they go about sharing their work with a wider readership. Who do they want to read their poem? How will they get the poem to them? Will they charge readers or give the poem away? How will they pay for distribution, if necessary? What rewards, if any, will they reap in return? Note that part of the process here requires students to decide what ‘publishing’ means today, compared with 1775.  

• Circulate the poem to a wider audience of at least 100 people. 
• Provide proof of circulation. How will the students keep track of who has read their poem? 
• Think about publishing and circulating in broad terms. 

Part 3: Writing a self-reflexive essay 

The final part of this assignment is for students to write a 500–1000-word self-reflexive essay about the experience of using early African American poetry to articulate our current moment. In the essay, students should reflect on the process of completing the assignment. They can address questions like:

• Why did you make certain choices when crafting the poem, and when creating a publication plan?
• What kinds of obstacles did you encounter and how did you overcome them?
• What did you learn about diction and how messages are crafted? 

An annotated syllabus

Created by Cassander Lavon Smith

This course was created and taught for the first time in fall 2020, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. It is based on a 16-week semester.

Course description

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, by Minneapolis police, Black leaders and news commentators filled the airwaves with pleas for people to protest "peacefully," propping up the idea that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to protest. News coverage even homed in on peaceful protestors and castigated those caught looting and starting fires. But is there really a right way to protest? Football quarterback Colin Kaepernick began a silent, nonviolent protest by taking a knee during the playing of the National Anthem. Other athletes white and Black joined in. Their silent, nonviolent protest sparked national outrage, even prompted the president of the United States to call them “sons of bitches.” The protest all but cost Kaepernick his career.  

The violent/nonviolent dichotomy that characterizes our discussions of riots and protests is a false one. Social protests by design transgress—they disrupt the status quo, which makes protest an inherently violent act, an inherently disrespectful act. The rhetoric, especially when directed at Black protest movements, is embedded in a deeper impulse to police the behavior of Black Americans, to describe their behavior in terms of right and wrong, respectable versus disrespectable.

In other words, we attach a moral judgement to forms of protest. It is a kind of respectability politics, the term used to describe a form of assimilation and self-policing that occurs when members of an oppressed group seek to model (and condemn those in the group who do not model) the cultural and social mores of a dominant group in order to illustrate their humanity and advocate for equality. Today, for example, we shun the Black militancy of civil rights leaders like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. We praise the nonviolent strategies of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He is the one who gets a national holiday, the one for whom elementary schools and streets in every major city are named. The irony, of course, is that King, deeply unpopular during his own time, leveraged Black militancy and white violence to advance the civil rights movement. However, we describe the history of that movement in terms of its nonviolent aspects. We are driven to do this, in part, by respectability politics.  

Respectability politics has long circumscribed the Black American experience and the literature produced by Black communities. This course examines some of the earliest examples of that literature to understand where, how, and why protest emerged in African American literature as a strategy to combat American racism and state-sanctioned violence. We will look at how African American writers have engaged the oxymoronic impulse of protestation. Specifically, the course examines the protest tradition as a balancing act whereby Black writers simultaneously protest American racism and state-sanctioned violence while also engaging in discourses of respectability to pronounce their humanity.

Learning objectives

At the conclusion of this course, students will be able to:

• Identify a range of early African American texts that display the complex history of African American protest.
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• Define respectability politics.
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• Position protest traditions and respectability politics within proper historical context and consider the ways in which these coping strategies change over time and geography. Students will discuss how those changes affect opportunities for Black Africans to ‘regenerate’ in hostile locales.  
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• Read texts from multiple perspectives/angles of vision.
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• Write responses that illustrate an understanding of the themes and tensions that characterize an African American literary tradition.
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• Position themselves within academic discourses relevant to their disciplines and the central themes/issues of this course.

Required texts

Primary

• Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. 1845.
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• Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. 1789.
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• Felix. “Petition for Freedom to the Massachusetts General Court.” January 6, 1773. Pamphlet printed as part of The Appendix; Or, Some Observations on the Expediency of the Petition of the Africans, living in Boston, Boston: E. Russell, 1773. Reprinted in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, edited by Herbert Aptheker, Vol. 1 (Citadel Press, 1951): pp. 6–7.
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• Hall, Prince. “Thus Doth Ethiopia Stretch Forth Her Hand from Slavery to Freedom and Equality.” In A Charge, Delivered to the African Lodge, June 24, 1797, at Menotomy, printed by Benjamin Edes, 1797. Evans Early American Imprint Collection (University of Michigan Library Digital Collections).
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• Horton, George Moses. “The Slave’s Complaint” and “On Hearing of the Intention of a Gentleman to Purchase the Poet’s Freedom.” The Hope of Liberty. 1829.
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• Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 1861.  
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• King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” 1963.
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• Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. 1689.  
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• Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997).
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• Morrison, Toni. A Mercy (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
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• Morrison, Toni. Beloved (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).
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• Stewart, Maria W. “What If I Am a Woman?” Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, Presented to the First African Baptist Church and Society, of the City of Boston (Friends of Freedom and Virtue, 1835): pp. 51–6.
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• Walker, David. Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. 1829.
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• Wheatley, Phillis. “On Liberty and Slavery” Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. 1773.
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• Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad (Doubleday, 2016).
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• Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North (George C. Rand and Avery, 1859).

Secondary  

• Harris, Trudier. “African American Protest Poetry.” National Humanities Center TeacherServe: Freedom’s Story (National Humanities Center, 1996–97 updated edition).
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• Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Harvard University Press, 1993).
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• Marable, Manning, and Leith Mullings, eds. Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal: An African American Anthology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000): excerpts.
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• Muhammad, Precious Rasheeda. “Black Protest Writing from WEB DuBois to Kendrick Lamar” (Literary Hub, 2020).
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• Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2 (1987):, pp. 65–81.  

Course sequence with annotations

Week 1 - The roots of American racism

The first week is about introducing students to the topic of race. Through a PowerPoint-based lecture, they learn that race is both a biological myth and social reality. In biological terms, humans are all different as a result of adaptation. It is an objective, observable fact that human beings look different. It is a social fact that humans are treated differently based on those observable differences. The lecture is focused mostly on medieval and early modern Europe, in which students learn about the Western roots of American racism and its malleability in the shaping of racial categories, like whiteness, and the ordering of social, human relations. This foundational information equips them with the historical perspective they will need to engage the primary readings. 

Week 2 - Black Africans in early America

The previous week was about situating race as an idea within an early European context. Students also learned about how the concept of whiteness emerges as a category of privilege, necessitating protest responses against that privilege. In this second week, the PowerPoint lecture is an overview about how, why, and when Black Africans arrived in what would become the United States.  

These first two weeks of the course are designed to equip students with a common vocabulary and basic understanding of the mechanics of race, preparing them to engage with the more nuanced manifestations of racial ideologies reflected in the course readings in subsequent weeks.

Week 3 - Black respectability politics and state-sanctioned violence

This course weaves together three threads of discussion—Black respectability politics, state-sanctioned violence, and racism. Throughout the semester students discuss how these three threads, which shape social conditions, are all related. In this third week of class, the focus is on contemporary discussions of these three threads so students can begin to see how they relate in a 21st-century context.

They read the work of Malcom X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They also watch/listen to the musical performances of Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé (optional) and read a couple of think-pieces about how they fit into a larger African American tradition of protest and respectability. As they work through the material this week, pay attention to the term "white liberal." Where is it used? Why? What is a "white liberal," and why might this figure be fundamental to a Black protest tradition? How and why is (neo-) liberalism a problem for Black America?

Additional Resources

• “The Blacker the Berry,” Kendrick Lamar.
• “Black Parade,” Beyoncé.
• Fitzgerald, Kiana. Review of “Black Parade."

Week 4 - Racism and violence; its beginnings

In the first two weeks of the course, students learned more about the historical underpinnings of race. In the previous week, they immersed themselves in some of the contemporary conversations that are a consequence of racial ideologies. After three weeks, the three threads for the course have been established: protest, respectability politics, and racism.  

During the fourth week, there is one more piece to add to the foundational puzzle: social contract theory. This week, students explore how respectability politics, protest, and racism function in a kind of matrix. The three theorists assigned for this week will provide students with vocabulary to articulate that matrix and its mechanics. They are introduced to the work of Charles Mills, John Locke, and Orlando Patterson as a way of thinking about social structures and how/why societies form. Why are we social animals in the first place? How do systems of white supremacy operate and engender privilege, violence, and protest? They will engage with terms such as white fragility, white fatigue, supremacy, privilege, liberty, natural rights, and humanity. After this week, they will have a clearer sense of what we mean when we say "state-sanctioned" violence.

Week 5 - First generation of protest

In this week, discussion turns to early African American literature so students can start to see how the literature of Black America has been circumscribed by and has shaped discourses of race, respectability, and protest. Students will start to see how a protest tradition first emerges in African American literature. They read the introduction to Manning Marable and Lelith Mullings's anthology Let Nobody Turn Us Around. This anthology is an urtext of sorts for those studying the Black protest tradition in African American literature. In addition to that, they read an excerpt from Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography. They also read a petition drafted by a group of enslaved people living in colonial Massachusetts, who were asking the General Assembly for citizenship and freedom on the eve of the Revolutionary War. And they read a pamphlet from the Black Freemason Prince Hall, a leading spokesperson for Black Americans at the end of the 18th century.  

In these primary readings, students can chart the ways in which the writers protest. Questions to guide them might include:

• What are they protesting?
• Who is their audience?
• What strategies do they employ to compel their audiences to action?
• To what extent do they embody tenets of respectability?
• Do they challenge racial ideas at all? If so, how? Where? To what effect?
• Thinking about the social contract, what might any of these writers say about Locke's social contract ideas?
• How do the texts support/challenge the social contract theory? What about liberalism?
• Do the writers valorize a liberal agenda or condemn it?

Week 6 - Respectability as a form of protest

The previous week, students read and discussed several 18th century texts which can be read as originating a protest tradition in early African American literature. This week the emphasis turns to the 19th century and the works of David Walker and Maria Stewart. Both of these Black writers were free-born individuals. That means they never experienced slavery themselves. Yet, Walker dedicates his text, An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, to speaking on behalf of the plight of enslaved Black Africans. Stewart, the first woman (of any race) to speak before mix-gendered audiences in the US, addresses racial inequality in general. She condemns the oppression of Black Americans, both enslaved and free. These writers are two of the earliest civil rights activists in US history. In addition to the primary readings from Walker and Stewart, students will read critical scholarship from Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, who was one of the first historians to theorize respectability politics in the early 1990s. She locates the rise of respectability politics at the turn of the 20th century and coming out of agendas set by Black church women.  

As students read through the texts for this week, they should pay attention to the idea of Black nationalism, which both Walker and Stewart espouse. Questions include:

• How do they call for a Black nationalism?
• What is Black nationalism?
• How does it contrast/compare to Malcolm X?
• What is the role of violence is achieving that Black nationalism and/or racial equality?
• How do the texts support or challenge respectability as a political ideal?
• Thinking in terms of race, how do these Black writers understand race? Is it social, biological, innate? Is it based on climate or godly intervention?

Week 7 - Protest in the slave narrative

 In this week's reading, students discuss a little more in-depth about constructions of masculinity and enslavement in the slave narrative of Frederick Douglass. Hortense Spillers's influential essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" will help students make sense of gender in Douglass's narrative. As students read through his narrative, they can focus on all the ways he proclaims his manhood. Also, note his representations of violence. Some questions to consider include:

• What does violence do for Douglass's condemnation of slavery?
• How does his representation of violence compare with that of Walker and Equiano?
• How might he be in conversation with Stewart?
• Also, students should continue thinking about the social contract, liberalism, and white supremacy. What does Douglass's narrative tell us that can help sharpen students’ understandings of these terms?

Week 8 - Protest as a gendered argument

For this week, students will continue the discussion of Spillers's essay and Douglass's narrative and talk more in depth about gender in relationship to respectability politics and protest in early African American culture. Added to the discussion is Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl for a deeper engagement with issues of gender in an early African American protest tradition. Here are some questions students might ponder:

• What is womanhood for Jacobs? And how does she see herself measuring up?
• What is manhood?
• What function does sex play in how she protests slavery and white supremacy?
• Where is the line for Jacobs between sexual agency and sexual assault? In other words, what does consent 'mean' for an enslaved Black woman?
• What function does violence play in Jacobs's narrative and how does it compare with Douglass's representations?

Week 9 - Protest in early Black fiction

Over the previous two weeks, students discussed the nonfiction slave narratives of Douglass and Jacobs. They discussed how and why Black Americans imagined gender differences in their efforts to protest white supremacy and slavery. This week the conversation turns to a different genre—fiction.

They read one of the first novels written by a Black woman in the United States, Our Nig, by Harriet Wilson. Published in 1859, the novel tells the 'quasi-autobiographical' story of a Black girl named Frado. She is abandoned by her mother and stepfather, forced to live as the ward of a rich white family in the North. Back then, there was no Department of Family and Children Services. Legally, Frado is not enslaved. As an orphan, though, she must work in the home of this family to earn her keep. Her life is characterized by violent abuse, mostly inflected by the family's matriarch, Mrs. Beaumont. As they read through the novel, students can track the kinds of violence to which Frado is subjected. Can this kind of abuse be considered "state-sanctioned"? In order to answer that question, students must first define "state-sanctioned."

Other questions to consider:

• How, if at all, does Frado protest her predicament?
• Do we see elements of respectability politics governing her reaction to the treatment she receives?
• The women seem to abuse Frado more frequently than do the men in the family. Why do you think that is?
• What is Harriet Wilson's rhetorical project?
• If we read this novel within a protest tradition, what is Wilson protesting and why?

Week 10 - Poetics of protest

So far in the course, students have read and discussed narrative forms in early African American literature. This week the course pivots to poetry. Specifically, students read the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, who we credit as the first person of African descent living in what would become the United States to publish a book of poetry. She publishes that book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in 1773.

They will also read poems from George Moses Horton, Wheatley’s literary successor. As students read these poems, they can think about how African American poetry emerges out of and/or fuels a protest tradition. In other words, what is protestive about Wheatley and Horton's poetry? For added context on the protest tradition and poetry, students will read an essay from Professor Trudier Harris.

Weeks 11-14 - Neo-slave narratives and reimagining the protest tradition

The next three weeks of the course focus on 20th and 21st-century African American novels that are part of the neo-slave narrative genre: Morrison’s A Mercy and Beloved, and Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. These contemporary novels evoke the same issues and problems as their 18th- and 19th-century counterparts.

Students are asked to consider how the practice of protest has evolved. For example, does Morrison evoke slavery and racism in A Mercy to challenge the same social structures and oppressions as Harriet Jacobs? How is the writing project different? Returning to the concept of neo-liberalism from week three, how might Morrison’s novel be a statement about neo-liberalism? Ending the course with the three novels here brings the discussion full circle back to week three where students discussed contemporary representations of violence, respectability, and racism.

Summary

This graduate course will appeal to students interested in early modern literature, including those invested in early American and early African American literature. We will view early modern literature from a transatlantic perspective, examining development of racial discourses in the literature—resulting from English/New World encounters with Black Africans and Native Americans. This course applies the underlying principle of critical race theory: that race has had a profound effect on the social, legal, historical, and literary structures that comprise United States culture. To better understand how U.S. culture arrived at this point, students will journey back to 16th and 17th-century England to examine the earliest manifestations of racial discourses in an ever-expanding English-American empire.  

Students should pursue this course while keeping in mind the warnings from race theorists who caution against applying the term ‘race’ to earlier historical periods in which people were classified based on cultural distinctions, not biological ones. They point out that our contemporary understanding of ‘race’ as a scientific, biologically based system of difference is an invention of late 18th and 19th-century scientists. However, as pointed out both by Maria Elena Martinez in Genealogical Fictions and Geraldine Heng in The Invention of Race, in properly historicizing the term ‘race,’ we should be careful not to dismiss its presence and function in earlier periods. Students will operate on the assumption that racial discourses developed before the 19th century and that such discourses were an integral part of early European imperial projects.  

The class will focus specifically on the English: students will examine how the English wrote about ‘race,’ how they categorized people based on cultural and geographical differences, and how they defined themselves based on those differences. This course will emphasize the stakes and the problems racial classification created for each writer in the English empire. Why did race matter, how did it matter, and what did these writers do when they encountered figures in the Americas whose actions defied racial classification?  

Equally important, students will interrogate the Black experience during this period. What did it mean to be Black in the early Atlantic world? How did early Black writers and thinkers talk about race? How did they engage their environs in ways that accommodate, challenge, or reshape the racial discourses of the day? These questions will not only help students theorize race in the early modern Atlantic from the perspective of Black Africans and Natives, but will also help them reorient their mindset by taking seriously Black Africans as intellectuals and as cultural doers during the early modern period.

Course Objectives 

• Define critical race theory.
• Identify the tenets of premodern critical race studies. 
• Apply critical race theory to early modern primary texts.  
• Recall pertinent historical, social, political, and cultural issues that characterized English colonial imperial agendas.
• Analyze and critique relevant secondary criticism.
• Write responses that illustrate an understanding of the racial themes and tensions that characterize early English Atlantic literature.
• Approach texts from multiple angles, reading with and against the grain.

Required Texts

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992).

Hall, Kim. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1995).

Course Schedule

1. What is race? What is critical race theory?

Baldwin, James, and Randall Kenan. “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare.” The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (Vintage Books, 2011).

Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (NYU Press, 2017): pp. 1-34.  

2. What is premodern critical race studies?  

Erickson, Peter and Hall, Kim. “‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race.” Shakespeare Quarterly, no. 67.1 (Spring 2016): pp. 1-13.

Hendricks, Margo. “Race: A Renaissance Category?” Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Blackwell, 2003): pp. 690-98.

Hendricks, Margo. “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race.” Folger Shakespeare Library (September 2019). https://www.folger.edu/institute/scholarly-programs/race-periodization/margo-hendricks.

Smith, Ian. “We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies.” Shakespeare Quarterly, no. 67.1 (Spring 2016): pp. 104-24.

Optional

Heng, Geraldine. “Defining Race, Periodizing Race.” Folger Shakespeare Library (September 2019). https://www.folger.edu/institute/scholarly-programs/race-periodization/geraldine-heng.

3. Blackness in the early modern (white) imagination

Primary

• Africanus, Leo. A Geographical History of Africa. 1600.  
• Best, George. A True Discourse of the Travels of Martin Frobisher. 1578.  
• Eden, Richard. “First English Voyages to Africa.” Principal Navigations. Hakluyt, Richard, ed. 1555.  
• Mandeville, John. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. 1350.

Secondary  

Barthelemy, Anthony. “Chapter 1 Satan’s Livery: Blackness and the Western Tradition.” Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

Hair, P.E.H.. “Early Sources on Guinea.” History in Africa, no. 21 (1994): pp. 87-126.

Morrison, Toni. “Black Matters.” Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1993).

Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan. “Before Othello: Elizabethan Representation of Sub-Saharan Africans.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Series 3, no. 54.1 (Jan. 1997): pp. 19-44.

Whitford, David. “This Heavy Curse: Popularizing the Curse of Ham.” The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era (Ashgate Publishing, 2009): pp. 105-140.

Optional

Gomez, Nicolás Wey. “Preface” and “Introduction” and “Chapter 1: Machina Mundi.” Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (The MIT Press, 2008): pp. xiii-xvi, 3-57, 59-106.  

Loomba, Ania and Jonathan Burton. Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (Palgrave, 2007).

4. Race as cultural aesthetics

Primary

Herbert, Edward. "Blackness Poems" 

• “To Mrs. Diana Cecyll.”
• “To Her Eyes.”
• “The Brown Beauty.”
• “To Her Hair.”
• “Sonnet to Black Beauty.”
• “Another Sonnet to Black Itself.”

Herbert, George. “A Negro Maid Woos Cestus, a Man of a Different Color.”

Secondary

Hall, Kim F. “Introduction” and “Fair Texts/Dark Ladies: Renaissance Lyric and the Poetics of Color.” Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1995): pp. 1-24, 62-122.

5. Black absence/presence in the early modern archives; beyond imagination

Primary

Drake, Francis. Sir Francis Drake Revived. 1573.

Secondary

Bumas, E. Shaskan. “The Cannibal Butcher Shop: Protestant Uses of las Casas's ‘Brevísima relación’ in Europe and the American Colonies.” Early American Literature, no. 35.2 (2000): pp. 107-36.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 26 12.2 (June 2008): pp. 1-14.

Smith, Cassander L. “Introduction: Black Africans, A Black Legend, and Challenges of Representation.” Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (Louisiana State University Press, 2016).

Optional

Habib, Imtiaz. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Ashgate, 2008).

Hall, Kim F. “Reading What Isn’t There: ‘Black’ Studies in Early Modern England.” Stanford Humanities Review, vol. 3, no. 1 (1993): pp. 23-33.

Kaufman, Miranda. Black Tudors: The Untold Story (OneWorld Publications, 2017).

Smith, Cassander, L. “Africans in Early America.” A Companion to American Literature Vol I, eds. Susan Belasco and Theresa Strouth Gaul (Wiley Publishing, 2020).

6. Race and the power of an idea  

Primary

Shakespeare, William. Othello.

Secondary

Morrison, Toni. “Romancing the Shadow.” Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1993).

Smith, Ian. “Othello’s Black Handkerchief.” Shakespeare Quarterly, no. 64.1 (2013): pp. 1-25.

Optional

Chaplin, Joyce. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Harvard University Press, 2003).

Chapman, Matthieu. Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other “Other” (Routledge, 2017).

Grier, Miles P. “Staging the Cherokee Othello: An Imperial Economy of Indian Watching” The William and Mary Quarterly, no. 73.1 (January 2016): pp. 73-106.

Wheeler, Roxanne. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).

7. Performing race

Primary

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest.

Secondary

Chaplin, Joyce. “Race.” The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, eds. David Armitage, Michael Braddick (Red Globe Press, 2009): pp. 173-92.

MacDonald, Joyce Green. “Acting Black: Othello, Othello Burlesques, and the Performance of Blackness.” Theatre Journal, no. 46.2 (May, 1994): pp. 231-49.

Smith, Ian. “White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage.” Renaissance Drama, no. 32 (2003): pp. 33-67.

Optional

Kumar, Rebecca. “‘Do You Love Me, Master?’: The Erotic Politics of Servitude in The Tempest and Its Postcolonial Afterlife.” Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology, eds. Cassander L. Smith, et. al. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Kunat, John. "Play me false: Rape, Race, and Conquest in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly, no. 65.3 (Fall 2014): pp. 307-27.

Thompson, Ayanna. “The Blackfaced Bard: Returning to Shakespeare or Leaving Him?” Shakespeare Bulletin, no. 27.3 (Fall 2009): pp. 437-56.

Thompson, Ayanna. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press, 2011).

8. Whiteness and the invisibility of race

Primary

Jonson, Ben. Masque of Blackness (1605) and Masque of Beauty (1608).

Secondary

Hall, Kim F. “Dramas of Alliance.” Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1995).

Optional

Barthelemy, Anthony. “Beauty’s Beast: Blacks in the Court Masque.” Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

Callaghan, Dympna. “‘Othello was a white man’: Properties of Race on Shakespeare’s stage.” Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (Routledge, 2000).

Hall, Kim F. “‘These Bastard Signs of Fair’: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Post-Colonial Shakespeares, eds. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (Routledge, 1998).

Royster, Francesca. “White-limed Walls: Whiteness and Early Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly, no. 51. 4 (2000): pp. 432-55.

9. Whiteness and empire

Primary

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave. 1688.

Secondary

Hudson, Nicholas. “From Nation to Race: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth Century Thought.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, no. 29.3.

Mallipeddi, Ramesh. “Spectacle, Spectatorship, and Sympathy in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, no. 45.4 (Summer 2012): pp. 475-96.

Optional

Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. “Introduction” in New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849 (Duke University Press, 2014).

MacDonald, Joyce Green. “The Disappearing African Woman: Imoinda in "Oroonoko" after Behn,” ELH, no. 66.1 (Spring, 1999): pp. 71-86.

10. Toward a theory of Black experience

Primary

Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African.

Wheatley, Phillis – from Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

• “On Being Brought from Africa to America”
• “On Virtue”
• “To S.M.”

Letter to Samson Occom

Selected Letters to Obour Tanner

Secondary

Bynum, Tara. “Phillis Wheatley on Friendship,” Legacy, no. 31.1 (2014): pp. 42-51.

Marren, Susan. “Between Slavery and Freedom: The Transgressive Self in Olaudah Equiano’s Autobiography.” PMLA, no. 108.1 (Jan. 1993): pp. 94-105.

Optional

Caldwell, Tanya. “‘Talking Too Much English’: Languages of Economy and Politics in Equiano’s ‘The Interesting Narrative.’” Early American Literature, no. 34.3 (1999): pp. 263-82.

Carretta, Vincent. “Introduction.” Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (University Press of Kentucky, 2013): pp. 1-16.

Paul, Ronald. "‘I Whitened My Face, That They Might Not Know Me’: Race and Identity in Olaudah Equiano's Slave Narrative.” Journal of Black Studies, no. 39.6 (July, 2009): pp. 848-64.

Zafar, Rafia. We Wear the Mask: African-Americans Write American Literature, 1760–1870 (Columbia University Press, 1997).

11. The Black experience, continued: the intersectionality of race and gender

Primary

Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes. 1657.

Secondary

Boose, Lynda “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman.” Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (Routledge, 1994): pp. 35-54.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review: pp. 1241-99.

Morgan, Jennifer L. "‘Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, no. 54.1 (Jan., 1997): pp. 167-92.

Optional

Hall, Kim F. “Epilogue: On ‘Race,’ Black Feminism, and White Supremacy.” Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1995): pp. 254-68.

MacDonald, Joyce Green. Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

12. Gleaning experience in the archival snippets

Primary

• A Blackmore Maide – from “New England’s First Fruits”
• Isabella de Olvera – “Petition”
• Candy – Salem Witch Trials Testimony
• Enslaved Woman complains of rape – from New England’s Rarities (John Josselyn)  

Secondary

Shaw, Jenny. “In the Name of the Mother: The Story of Susannah Mingo, a Woman of Color in the Early English Atlantic.” The William and Mary Quarterly, no. 77.2 (April 2020): pp. 177-210.

Warren, Wendy Anne. “‘The Cause of Her Grief’: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England.” The Journal of American History, no. 93.4 (Mar., 2007): pp. 1031-49.

Optional

Fuentes, Marisa. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

13. Premodern critical race studies and the charge of presentism

Grady, Kyle. “Othello, Colin Powell, and Post-Racial Anachronisms.” Shakespeare Quarterly, no. 67.1 (2016): pp. 68-83.

Wilson, Jeffrey R. “Historicizing Presentism: Toward the Creation of a Journal of the Public Humanities.” Public Humanities (Spring 2019).

Optional

Presentist Shakespeares, eds. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (Routledge, 2007).

Fernie, Ewan. “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism.” Shakespeare Survey, no. 58 (2005): pp. 169-84.

In her teaching, Cassander L. Smith regularly includes multiple opportunities for students to craft questions as well as answer them. Her approach requires students to challenge assumptions and invite explorations by providing a background statement and reasons that the question matters. She builds on students’ provocative questions further in writing and reflection assignments.

Using provocation questions as the basis for writing and reflective prompts

These two writing assignments are designed to give students practice in asking open-ended questions that produce avenues for further research. The goal is to pose one or a series of related ‘provocation’ question(s) about early American literature and culture based on an initial reading of Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans.

Prompts should not simply present the question(s). They should also provide a premise or background information about how/why the student is asking that question(s). For example, what in their reading of Cooper’s novel led them to their line of inquiry? They can point to key quotes/passages from the text. What are the stakes of finding answers to the question(s)? How might this line of inquiry change current conceptions of Cooper’s text and/or of early America?  

Students do NOT have to answer the question(s) they pose. This is an exercise in exploration and contemplation. At the end of the semester, students are asked to revisit their exploratory prompt.

Students revisit their question or questions

After having discussed early American literature and several secondary sources, students should ask themselves, how has your thinking about your initial question(s) changed? How might the other readings help arrive at an answer to their question(s)? How might the sources complicate their questions(s) or create new questions? This is a self-reflective exercise that asks students to apply their budding expertise in early American literature to begin formulating answers to their questions.

A model of a provocation question

This example provocation question is based on Olaudah Equiano’s slave narrative. Note the format and the buildup to the actual question. Provocation questions should  do more than simply ask a question. These questions should lay out a logic for reasoning. Questions should include background and an explanation for how the student arrived at their question. Provocation questions should also want to mention the stakes of the question, and why their line of inquiry matters in a larger context.  

Benjamin Franklin has been deemed the quintessential self-made American, embodying in his Autobiography all the mythical characteristics that make this country a great nation, a land of opportunity. His narrative has been upheld as a model of the opportunities available to any person striving toward virtue and diligence. He Americanizes the myth of the self-made man, a myth of regeneration in the New World. His story of self-made manhood is quite similar to that of Olaudah Equiano, who also tells a story of diligence and virtue. And although he has been adopted into the American literary canon, Equiano did not identify himself as American and spent very little of his life on American soil. Given that these two men offer very similar stories of self-construction, in what ways might Equiano’s narrative trouble the notion of self-made manhood as an American phenomenon, given that most of his rise occurs on the sea? Does it matter that his narrative precedes Franklin’s? What is his position in American literature? And how does this discussion change if we consider Vincent Carretta’s recent scholarship that argues Equiano was born in South Carolina? How would a comparison of Franklin’s and Equiano’s narratives change how we conceive self-made manhood as an American construction, an American myth?

How and why books became valuable in 18th-century Britain was not simply a story of taste and scholarship, but one fueled by the vast profits of slavery and plantation economies. As sugar wealth flooded the market, it transformed secondhand texts like Shakespeare’s First Folio into coveted symbols of status, embedding slave-produced capital into the foundations of literary material culture. To understand our libraries and editorial traditions today, we must confront how deeply these systems of value were shaped by the economics and injustices of the transatlantic slave trade.

Carol Mejia LaPerle offers three interpretive questions to introduce the ways early modern frameworks scaffold modes of racialization:

• Who is friend and foe?
• Whose power is legitimate?
• Whose suffering matters?

By looking at Shakespeare's tragedies through these questions, students learn how early modern texts embed and develop structures of race and racial difference. These questions do more than reveal how early modern representations of evil, of legitimacy, and of suffering evoke racial difference. They invite us to dismantle the racializing logics that have perpetuated over long periods of time.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a play often studied for its representations of colonialism and imperialism in the early modern world. Carol Mejia LaPerle suggests using an analysis of affect—namely, the use of smell in the text—to dig at another layer of racialization in the play. Enslaved by Prospero and abhorred by Miranda, Caliban is called a lying slave, a hag seed, a monster, a villain. With so many insults unleashed by the European castaways, it is easy to gloss over the moment Caliban is called a fish. When shipwrecked sailors come upon him, they establish his identity by how he smells.  

This framework allows students to wonder how our 21st-century olfactory judgements serve to reinforce inequity. The act of labelling someone as smelly is often a reflection of cultural prejudices that establish hierarchy based on race and class. It is a gatekeeping mechanism that distinguishes between insider and outsider status. A close reading of the olfactory as a tool of regulation and exclusion in The Tempest invites critical thinking and self-reflection for students who might otherwise be unaware of their affective biases.

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Understanding that theater was the mass media of early modern Europe offers a window into how racial categories, narratives, and performance both sustained and exposed the construction of white supremacy in its early formation.

Early modern racial thinking was shaped not within a single nation but through the constant circulation of stories, performances, and ideas across Europe. From transnational plotlines linking French, Italian, Spanish, and English plays to the spread of racial impersonation techniques in music and theater, these cultural exchanges reveal how racial narratives took shape through a shared artistic ecosystem.

In this assignment, Noémie Ndiaye asks students to curate a mini exhibition consisting of three objects. Each student will select objects produced in early modern Europe (or beyond) and organize them around a unifying theme or guiding question that serves as the central focus of their exhibition. 

The accompanying paper should analyze how this selected group of visual materials participates in processes of race-making. The paper should use the following guidelines:

1. Each object should be discussed in detail, with attention to medium, size, use, function, and intended audience.
2. The analysis should also consider how each object engages with its spectators as it invites, involves, or manipulates viewers’ attention and responses. 
3. Students should examine the discourses or visual tropes that each object draws upon, circulates, responds to, or complicates.
4. The paper should then move beyond analysis of individual items to explore what new insights emerge when these objects are placed in dialogue with one another. What forms of tension, resonance, or contradiction arise from their juxtaposition? Ultimately, what does this act of curation make visible about the cultural, aesthetic, or racial dynamics of the period? 

Students are expected to draw on (and fully cite) digital collections and online museum databases. Using these open access collections allows students to explore a broad visual archive, compare materials across geographic regions, and practice critical engagement with digital resources. 

Recommended platforms for student research

(annotated by Noémi Ndiaye)

• Oxford English Dictionary. The ultimate dictionary and the only one you should use in a research paper.
• Early English Books Online (EEBO). Contains almost all books printed in English from Gutenberg through Shakespeare’s lifetime and beyond.
• The Digital Image Collection of the Folger Library. Home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection. This collection is useful for thinking beyond the textual medium.
• The Catalogue of the Newberry Library exhibition. Seeing Race Before Race. This catalogue is also useful for thinking beyond the textual medium, and for finding connections between plays and visual culture. 
• The Lost Plays Database. Because the early modern plays that we can read today are but a small fraction of the theatrical production of the period, this database is useful for finding out whether some themes captured early modern dramatic imagination more than the extant record tells us.
• Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. The largest available database of Spanish texts from the 16th and 17th century (in Spanish). This is the Spanish equivalent of EEBO. 
• Out of the Wings. Contextualized resources for English-speakers on Spanish plays starting in the early modern period. The resources include short synopses of plays for deciding which plays to read in their entirety.
• Gallica. Digital collection of the French National library, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The French equivalent to EEBO and the Folger Digital Collections.
• CESAR. This database contains information on all aspects of the French theater between 1600 and 1800 covering plays, operas, ballets, fairground productions, street performances, etc., whether they were performed or published or merely described in contemporary documents.
• JSTOR, Project Muse, and ProQuest are the main sources of scholarly articles, useful for finding out how other scholars have read the plays you are working on.

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Course description

This seminar explores the representation and fashioning of race in 16th and 17th century drama from England, Spain, and France. In 16th century Europe, race was a complex system of power distribution that relied primarily on religious or rank-based difference. With the development of colonization and color-based slavery in the Atlantic world, the early modern racial matrix produced a new paradigm: Europeans started thinking about physiological difference—for which skin color was a shorthand—in racial terms too.

This course asks the questions: How were those various racial paradigms (religion, rank, skin color) represented in one of the most important mass media of the time—theatre? How did those paradigms interact in one given play or one given national culture? Did they reinforce or work against one another? Which features were specific to nationally defined racial epistemes? Which features circulated across national borders? How did the translation and mistranslation of racial notions from one culture into another shape a sense of shared whiteness in early modern Europe? Which performance techniques did actors use to impersonate racial others, and what effect did those techniques have on spectators? In short, how did early modern theatre participate in the making of race?

To answer those questions, we will focus on a rich corpus of plays staging “Jews,” “Moors” and “Blackamoors,” New World “Indians,” “Gypsies,” and “Turks.” We will read plays and masques by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Molière, Marc Lescarbot, Robert Daborne, and Diego Ximénez de Enciso in conversation with secondary readings drawn from the field of critical race studies.  

Learning objectives

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Discuss major literary figures of the early modern period such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Molière.
• Contrast and compare the esthetics, economies, and structures of English, Spanish, and French theatrical cultures in the early modern period.
• Explain key concepts from critical race theory.
• Diagram the racial matrix in early modern England (how did race in early modern England work?) and locate that diagram both transnationally (how did race in early modern England relate/differ from race in the rest of early modern Europe?) and transhistorically (how did race in early modern England relate/differ from race here and now?).
• Pinpoint the unique contribution of theater to the development of the racial matrix.
• Mobilize this knowledge to explain early modern plays and texts that you have not studied in class, by identifying and contextualizing the specific intervention of those new texts.

Course sequence

1. Setting the stage with Marlowe  

• Marlowe, Christopher. The Jew of Malta (recommended edition: Broadview Press, 2011):
  
  • “Introduction,” pp. 14-28.
  • “Appendix A: Jewishness in Marlowe’s England”: John Foxe; Holinshed, pp. 191-196.
  • Sir Thomas Browne. pp. 219-226.
    
• Heng, Geraldine. “Reinventing Race, Colonization, and Globalisms Across Deep Time: Lessons from the Longue Durée.” PMLA, Vol. 130, No. 2 (2015): pp. 358-366.

• Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. “Racial Formations.” Racial Formation in the United States (Routledge, 2015): pp. 9-15.

2. Jews in Spanish theater

• de Vega, Lope. The Holy Innocent Child of La Guardia (recommended edition: translation by Michaele Jacobs, Oberon Books, 2001).
• Nirenberg, David. “The Case of Spain and Its Jews.” Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (University of Chicago Press, 2008): pp. 71-88.  
• Beusterien, John. “The Blood Libel as Play.” An Eye on Race: Perspective from the Theater in Imperial Spain (Bucknell University Press, 2006): pp. 86-88.  
• de la Haza, José María Ruano. “The World as a Stage: Politics, Imperialism and Spain’s Seventeenth-Century Theatre.” A History of Theatre in Spain (Cambridge University Press, 2012): pp. 57-78.

3. Shakespeare and the Jews

• Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice.

4. Performing Shylock  

• Berek, Peter. “‘Looking Jewish’ on the Early Modern Stage.” Religion and Drama on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge, 2011): pp. 55-70.  
• Watch: RSC 1984, Playing Shylock (50’).
• Shapiro, James. “The Pound of Flesh.” Shakespeare and the Jews (Columbia University Press, 2016): pp. 113-130.

5. Shakespeare and Blackness

• Shakespeare, William. Othello (recommended edition: Othello: Texts and Contexts, The Bedford Shakespeare Library, edited by Kim F. Hall).  
  
  • “Blackness and Moors,” pp. 177-203.
• Feerick, Jean. “Bloodwork.” Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (University of Toronto Press, 2010): pp. 3-24.

6. Performing Othello  

• Callaghan, Dympna. “Othello Was a White Man: Properties of Race on Shakespeare’s Stage.” Alternative Shakespeares II (Routledge, 1996): pp. 75-96.
• Watch: Orson Welles’ Othello (3’).
• Watch: David Harewood on blackface Othello (from 19’25 to 26’14).
• Watch: RSC Othello 2015 (3’).
• Listen: Hugh Quarshie’s Othello (14’).
• Cooper, Michael. “Is blackface Othello dead?” The New York Times (2015).

7. Playing Black after Shakespeare

• Hamilton Cobb, Keith. American Moor (Methuen Drama, 2020).
• Hall, Kim F. “Othello Was My Grandfather.” Shakespeare Anniversary Lecture Series, presented by the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC ,June 27, 2016.
• Listen: “Keith Hamilton Cobb on American Moor.” Shakespeare Unlimited, Folger Shakespeare Library (2016).

8. “Oh Super-Black”: Blackness in Spanish theater  

• de Enciso, Diego Ximénez. The Famous Drama of Juan Latino: pp. 69-202.
• Beusterien, John. “Skin Displays: Seeing the Black.” An Eye on Race: Perspective from the Theater in Imperial Spain (Bucknell University Press, 2006): pp. 101-114.
• Wright, Elizabeth. “Juan Latino: A Lost Portrait and a Forgotten Name.” The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2016): pp. 3-18.  

9. “A Spanish Ottoman”: Turks in Cervantes’s theater

• de Cervantes, Miguel. The Great Sultana (recommended edition: "The Bagnios of Algiers" and "The Great Sultana": Two Plays of Captivity, edited by Barbara Fuchs and Aaron J. Ilika, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
  
  • “Introduction:” pp. ix-xxviii  
  • “Passing Pleasures: La Gran Sultana:” pp. 63-65 and 80-86.
• Balibar, Etienne. “Racism and Nationalism.” Nations and Nationalism: A Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2005): pp. 37-67.
• Fuchs, Barbara. “The Spanish Race.” Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (University of Chicago Press, 2008): pp. 88-99.

10. Turning Turk on the English stage

• Daborne, Robert. A Christian Turn’d Turk.
• Vitkus, Daniel J. Three Turk Plays From Early Modern England (Columbia University Press, 1999): pp. 1-16, 23-39, 43-45.
• Degenhardt, Jane Hwang. “Introduction: Seduction, Resistance, and Redemption: Turning Turk.” Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh University Press, 2010): pp. 1-31.

11. Lope de Vega and New World Indians

• de Vega, Lope. The Discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus.‍
• Shannon, Robert. “Introduction.” Visions of the New World in the Drama of Lope de Vega (American University Studies, 11.67): pp. 1-15, 27-32.  
• de Las Casas, Bartolome. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Penguin Classics, 1992).
• Burns, Kathryn. “Unfixing Race.” Histories of Race and Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present (Duke University Press, 2012): pp. 188-203.

12. New World Indians in French theater

• Lescarbot, Marc. The Theatre of Neptune in New France: pp. 73-81.
• Wasserman, Jerry. Marc Lescarbot and the Spectacle of Empire (Talonbooks, 2006): pp. 13-46.
• Melzer, Sara E. “France’s Colonial History: from Sauvages into Civilized French Catholics.” Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011): pp. 91-121.
• Aubert, Guillaume. “The Blood of France: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World.” The William and Mary Quarterly (July 2004): pp. 439-460.

13. How beauteous mankind is!  

• Shakespeare, William. The Tempest.

14. O brave new world that has such people in it!

• Hall, Kim F. “Marriages of State.” Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1996): pp. 141-153.
• Watch: The Tempest, directed by Julie Taymor (110’).
• Goldberg, David Theo. “The Comparative and the Relational: Meditations on Racial Method.” A Companion to Comparative Literature (Blackwell Publishing, 2011): pp. 357-168.  

15. Spanish Gypsies

• de Cervantes, Miguel. The Little Gypsy Girl: pp. 3-70.
• Charnon-Deutsch, Lou. “Cervantes, Precious Jewel of Love.” The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession (Penn State University Press, 2004): pp. 17-44.

16. Gypsies on the English stage

• Jonson, Ben. The Gypsies Metamorphos’d.
• Cressy, David. “Trouble with Gypsies in Early Modern England.” The Historical Journal, 59.1 (March 2016): pp. 45-70.

17. French Gypsies

• Molière, The Scams of Scapin (recommended edition: Scapin & Don Juan: The Actor's Moliere - Volume 3, translated by Albert Bermel): pp. 2-55.
• Newman, Karen. “La Gitanilla in France, From Page to Stage.” Republics of Letters, 4.2 (2015): pp. 1-10.  
• Taylor, Becky. “Breaking Bodies, Banishing Bodies.” Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (Reaktion, 2014): pp. 65-86.  
• Stoler, Ann Laura. “Racial Histories and their Regimes of Truth.” Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times (Duke University Press, 2016): pp. 369-391.  

18. Concluding play presentations  

• Erickson, Peter and Kim F. Hall, “‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1 (2016): pp. 1-13.

This syllabus draws on the expertise of many colleagues including Chris Warren, Nicole Wallack, Aaron Ritzenberg, Julie Stone Peters, and the consultants of the Eberly Center.

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Medieval North and East African art played a central role in shaping the cultural and artistic networks of the medieval world. Regions such as Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia produced vibrant artistic traditions that both influenced and interacted with Byzantium and the broader Mediterranean. Africa & Byzantium, an exhibit curated by Andrea Myers Achi at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, highlighted these connections to reframe medieval history to recognize Africa’s integral and enduring contributions to global art and culture.

Curating through the lens of critical race studies challenges the neutrality of museums by interrogating whose stories are told, who tells them, and who has been excluded. Achi approaches curation as an act of pedagogy. Careful curation uses exhibitions to confront power structures, reshape public understandings of history, and highlight racial and cultural complexity. By centering marginalized narratives within art history, museums can become stronger, more inclusive spaces.

The work of editing early modern texts is never neutral. Editorial decisions establish perspectives while also modernizing punctuation and spelling, all influencing the interpretation and understanding of the text at hand.  

To give students hands-on approaches to reading through and understanding editorial influence in modern editions of texts, Patricia Akhimie assigns her students a series of editing activities. In these activities, students are given interpretive and editorial authority over premodern texts. Students become editors, critics, and meaning-makers and are required to pay attention to the mediations of their own editorial choices.

Identifying the editorial process

Students begin by reading two editions of Romeo and Juliet Act 1, Scene 2. They identify meaningful differences and then create their own edited version of the scene.  

Students must articulate a rationale for every change they make. “If you're going to remove a comma,” Akhimie insists, “you better know why.” Further, students are encouraged to consider how textual variance challenges their beliefs about the singularity and ubiquity of a Shakespeare play.

Comparative editing: Romeo and Juliet, Act 1 Scene 2

• Compare two early modern versions of the scene.

• Identify the textual differences—what changes, what stays, and why might these differences matter?

• Create your own edited version of the scene.

• Write a rationale for each editorial choice.

Editing an early modern play

After students become familiar with the types of decisions editors make, and how those decisions influence the meaning of the text, they are then ready to expand their skillset by editing a lesser-known early modern play. These plays should be chosen from plays that have not yet received a disciplinary editorial spotlight.

Students, usually in groups, become contemporary (sometimes the first) editors of these lesser-known plays, and thus must make editorial decisions that do not have centuries of precedence.  

This assignment is in part a translation project: students are tasked with making the play legible for contemporary readers. But the goal is transformation, more than accessibility. Students write an introduction to their edition of the work, construct a descriptive dramatis personae, and annotate the play with explanatory footnotes.

Through these activities, students become conscious of making critical interventions as well as shaping interpretation.  

“There is no authority except you,” Akhimie tells her students.  

In a field where students are usually the consumers of centuries of accumulated criticism, this reorientation is often liberating.  

Editing an early modern play assignment

1. Select a play that lacks a modern edition.  

2. Prepare the text for a contemporary audience:
   
   • Write an introduction situating the play historically and thematically.
   • Construct a dramatis personae with character descriptions.
   • Annotate the text with explanatory footnotes (language, allusions, historical context).
   • Optionally, create a “SparkNotes”-style companion with scene summaries and thematic notes.

3. Reflect on the editorial process: What interpretive frameworks guided your decisions? How might your edition shift a future reader’s understanding?

Through the process of editing a play themselves, students learn to see how texts are shaped by history, evolving cultural preferences and practices, and ideology.  

By analyzing editorial choices, students begin to ask their own questions: What do editorial choices reveal or obscure? What politics are embedded in the footnote, the gloss, the cut? And when students see the contours of editorial choices—by practicing making editorial choices themselves—they access a richer understanding of literature across editions and temporalities.  

Premodern texts as vehicles for critical discussions

As we medievalists and early modernists continue to find ourselves in departments defined outside of temporal constraints, many of us end up regularly teaching courses that are not explicitly “premodern.” This annotated syllabus models one way to use early medieval materials to contextualize and illuminate the braided relationship between the past and the present through the structures of language and law.  

Course description

This seminar examines the historical and ongoing entanglement of Indigenous women and Anglophone legal systems, moving from early medieval England to the Pacific and North America. We begin with Old English legal codes that governed women’s rights and social positions in early medieval English societies and question how these texts established gendered legal frameworks that later informed colonial legal structures.  

As we move geographically and temporally, we trace the ways British and American legal systems constructed Indigenous women as subjects of empire, shaping their legal status, kinship structures, and sovereignty. A central theme of the course is Indigenous women's resistance to settler legal impositions. Through case studies—including early colonial legal battles, the forced removals of women and children, and contemporary struggles for justice and land rights—we will examine how Indigenous women have asserted legal and extralegal agency in the face of colonial authority.

Our readings include historical legal texts, Indigenous feminist scholarship, primary documents such as treaties and court cases, secondary sources and commentaries, novels, documentaries, films, and podcasts.

Primary readings and films

• Old English Laws of Æthelberht, Hloþere and Eadric, Wihtred, Alfred, and Edgar.

• Oliver, Lisi. The Beginnings of English Law (University of Toronto Press, 2002).

• Jurasinski, Stephan and Lisi Oliver, eds. The Laws of Alfred: The Domboc and the Making of Anglo-Saxon Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

• Robertson, Agnes J., ed. and trans. The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry I (Cambridge University Press, 1925).

• The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Wulf and Eadwacer, and The Wife’s Lament. Ophelia Hostetter’s Old English Poetry Project https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu

• The Indian Act (Canada, 1876), Section 3 “Terms.”  https://nctr.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/1876_Indian_Act_Reduced_Size.pdf

• The Dawes Act (United States, 1887). https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/dawes-act

• Treaty of Waitangi (Aotearoa, New Zealand, 1840). https://unimelb.libguides.com/c.php?g=925155&p=6681291

• Erdrich, Louise. The Round House (Harper, 2013).

• Long Solider, Layli. WHEREAS: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2017).

• Club Native (dir. Tracey Deer, 2008).

• Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2023).

• Mary Two-Axe Earley: I am Indian Again (dir. Courtney Montour, 2021).
  

Selected secondary readings and sources

• Rabin, Andrew. “Law and Justice,” The Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies (Wiley Blackwell, 2012): 85-98.

• Scheck, Helene and Virginia Blanton, “Women,” The Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies (Wiley Blackwell, 2012): 265-279.

• Johnson, Amanda Louise. “Thomas Jefferson’s Anglo-Saxon Genesis,” Modern Philology 114.3 (2017): 680-701.

• Modarelli, Michael. The Transatlantic Geneaology of American Anglo-Saxonism (Routledge, 2018). Selections.

• Young, Iris Marion. “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective,” Signs 19.3 (1994): 713-738.

• Suzack, Cheryl. “Emotion Before the Law,” Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture (University of British Columbia Press, 2010): 126-151.

• Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014). Selections.

• Piatote, Beth. Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and the Law in Native American Literature (Yale University Press, 2017). Selections.

• Nagle, Rebecca. By The Fire We Carry (Harper, 2024). Selections.
  
  • Alternatively, listen to selected episodes of the podcast This Land season 2.
• Goeman, Mishuana. Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota, 2013). Selections.

• Warrior, Robert. “The Missing Politics of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon,” New Lines Magazine. https://newlinesmag.com/essays/the-missing-politics-of-scorseses-killers-of-the-flower-moon/

• Pihama, Leonie. “Mana Wahine: Decolonising Gender in Aotearoa,” Australian Feminist Studies 35.106: 351-365.

• Simmonds, Naomi. “Mana Wahine: Decolonising Politics, ”Women’s Studies Journal 25.2 (2011): 11-25.

• Nauman, Qasim. “Why New Zealand’s Maori Lawmakers Protested with a Traditional Dance,” The New York Times, Nov. 15, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/15/world/asia/new-zealand-parliament-maori-haka.html

• Wall Kimmerer, Robin. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants (Milkweed, 2015). Selections.

• Betasamosake Simpson, Leanne. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). Selections.

• Harjo, Laura. Spiral to the Stars: Myskoke Tools of Futurity (University of Arizona Press, 2019). Selections.  

Unit 1: The shaping of law, language, and culture

I begin with Old English laws because their short, often repetitive clauses offer an accessible entry point into the course’s central concern: the role of language in constructing legal and cultural norms. These texts open a focused conversation about how law functions as a linguistic technology, building categories of personhood and belonging. From there, we shift to early English poems that expand this discussion to include cultural narratives of gender. The poems allow us to consider the contrasting roles available to men and women in the early English world and to examine how literary forms reinforce or trouble legal structures.

To support students—especially those new to medieval studies—I pair primary texts with short, accessible readings from sources like The Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies and editions by scholars such as Lisi Oliver. These secondary materials help clarify how key concepts like “law” and “gender” are historically contingent and remain in flux, even within the early medieval period. Pairing legal codes with poetic texts emphasizes a core throughline of the course: law, language, and culture shape one another. Secondary readings from Stacey Klein and others widen our view of the early English world, inviting students to trace how legal discourses encode specific cultural values. In a short lecture that concludes this unit, I highlight how early English laws construct gendered and classed categories of personhood that become portable archetypes within the Anglophone imperial imagination.

Unit 2: Modern iterations  

Transitioning into the modern period, we turn to Amanda Louise Johnson’s “Thomas Jefferson’s Anglo-Saxon Genesis” and selections from Michael Modarelli’s The Transatlantic Genealogy of American Anglo-Saxonism. These readings show how architects of the U.S. legal system explicitly drew from early English legal models to imagine a settler state. This framing helps students understand why we next place the Indian Act (Canada) and Dawes Act (U.S.) at the center of our study—because these statutes deploy inherited legal categories like “man” and “woman” to execute programs of land theft and Indigenous elimination.

To ground students in the vocabulary necessary to analyze this material, I suggest that students who have not yet done so read Patrick Wolfe’s “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” alongside the required reading of Mishuana Goeman’s (Tonawanda Band of Seneca) “Land as Life: Unsettling the Logics of Containment.” These texts provide a shared foundation for discussing settler colonialism and Indigenous conceptions of land. I also incorporate films and readings that center the lived experiences of Indigenous women. In Canada, this includes explorations of state-recognized belonging and gendered violence, particularly through the lens of Tracey Deer’s and Courtney Montour’s films and the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples endemic to North America more broadly.

Readings and media by Audra Simpson (Mohawk), Beth Piatote (Nimii:puu / Nez Perce), Cheryl Suzack (Batchewana First Nation), and Rebecca Nagle (Cherokee Nation) offer Indigenous feminist critiques of settler gender systems and legal structures. Louise Erdrich’s novel The Round House and Layli Long Soldier’s poetry collection WHEREAS deepen the literary dimension of the unit, illustrating both the affective impact of colonial law and Indigenous modes of resistance. At this point in the semester, students often begin to recognize recursive patterns in the mechanics of settler colonialism. I pause here to invite discussion of how these structures continue to shape the present, helping to draw the stakes of the course into the students’ own lives.  

From here, the course may either remain focused on North America—perhaps by watching Killers of the Flower Moon and engaging with critiques like Robert Warrior’s “The Missing Politics of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon”—or move through the Anglophone Empire toward the Pacific. I usually take the latter route.

Unit 3: Women and law in Aotearoa

In our final unit, we turn to Aotearoa (New Zealand) and the Treaty of Waitangi, reading it alongside Pacific scholarship. This a robust and deep field of scholarship so I’ll mention just a few names here as a way to encourage you toward some of this work: Kanaka Maoli scholars J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Hi’ilei Hobart, and Maili Arvin; Maori scholar Madi Williams and Leonie Pihama (also a medievalist!); and Aboriginal scholars Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Bronwyn Carlson.  

I choose readings for this section to think about how gendered laws impact Indigenous peoples in places on the assumed periphery of the Anglophone Empire and base those choices largely on how the course has taken shape up to this point to pick up on both threads and gaps that have emerged. Ending in Aotearoa (at least in 2025 when I write this) also offers a way to incorporate some other new media with clips of the recent parliamentary protest against dismantling Waitangi by MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke. Her act of ripping up the proposed bill and starting a haka, a ceremonial Maori dance, on the parliament floor went viral on the internet and clips of it offer a powerful and hopeful closing image of Indigenous resistance within legal and gendered frameworks inherited from the Anglophone Empire.

Possible Assignments

To foster consistent engagement and make our critical conversations more collaborative, I assign weekly group annotations using Perusall, an annotation platform integrated with Canvas. I’ve found this format far more generative than traditional discussion posts or short response papers, and, thus far, it tends to resist easy automation. Each week, students annotate a selected piece of secondary criticism, guided by specific expectations: typically, a minimum of seven original annotations and three thoughtful replies to peers. I offer concrete guidance on what qualifies as a meaningful annotation, emphasizing that comments should connect course readings or larger thematic concerns, not simply react or paraphrase. A good annotation might draw on an earlier text to expand a point or pose a substantial question that opens interpretive possibilities. Contrarily, comments that could be replaced with an emoji or answered by a quick Google search don’t meet the mark.

Because this is an upper-division or advanced seminar, the course culminates in a semester-long research project. Students submit a proposal in week 5, an annotated bibliography in week 9, and an outline and partial draft in week 12 for structured, in-class peer review. The final paper (typically around 15 pages) is due in the final week of the semester. This structure helps students build and refine an argument over time, with clear opportunities for feedback and revision.

That said, I’ve also had great success offering students an alternative final project format, one that invites creative engagement with the course’s central ideas. Inspired by Cynthia Turner Camp’s model, this version allows students to design a project that reflects what they found most meaningful in a medium that most effectively demonstrates their intellectual change over time. I ask for an accompanying artist’s statement that explains their interpretive choices, and we reserve our final class session for a show-and-tell to celebrate the work. These projects have included cookbooks (these, delightfully, usually come with in-person snacks), playlists, meme chapbooks, children’s books, beadwork, rap battles, and photographic installations—each a critical engagement with the material, and often a deeply personal interpretation of its significance. These projects always reshape my own relationship to the material and influence how I revise the class from semester to semester.

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Disciplinary boundaries and conventional periodization often isolate the early medieval English world from the contemporary world that our students navigate daily. This separation can make the field feel remote, irrelevant, or inaccessible. The readings collected here aim to close that distance by inviting students to see medieval studies not as a retreat into the past, but as a critical lens for understanding the present and imagining different futures.

The list begins by introducing students to history and literature not as static disciplines, but areas of study shaped by political commitments and effects. From there, it offers examples of scholarship that reapproach these disciplines in critical and imaginative ways. These readings challenge linear conceptions of time and equip students with methodological frameworks for connecting their lived experiences to the premodern material in discussion.  

Each thematic cluster pairs key summaries and critiques from both Anglo-European and Indigenous thinkers. This pairing allows for comparative thinking and reveals tensions, parallels, and productive frictions between epistemological traditions. As an instructor, I work to ensure that classroom conversations resist hierarchical logics that position texts or peoples as either advanced or backward, good or bad. Instead, these readings create space for inquiry grounded in respect, curiosity, and a shared commitment to critical thinking.

On history and power

• Deloria Jr., Vine. “Anthropologists and Other Friends,” Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (University of Oklahoma Press, 1988).

• Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 3^rd edition (Zed Books, 2021).

• Trouillot, Michel-Rolf. “Introduction” to Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Penguin Random House, 2015).

Literature and periodization

• Davis, Kathleen. “Introduction” to Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

• Justice, Daniel Heath. “Preface” and “Introduction” to Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2018).

• Maracle, Lee. “On Oratory,” Memory Serves (NeWest Press, 2015).

• Rifkin, Mark. “Introduction” to Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self Determination (Duke University Press, 2017).

Medieval influence in the modern world

• D’Arcens, Louise. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (Cambridge University Press, 2016).  Selections.

• LaVoy-Brunette, Sarah and Dusti Bridges, “Anglo-Saxonism and Indigenous Dispossession: Land Grab Universities and the Emergence of Medieval Studies,” Speculum 100, no. 1 (2025): 46-78.

• Miyashiro, Adam. “Our Deeper Past: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Medieval Heritage Politics,” Literature Compass 16, no. 9-10 (2019).

Selected models of transtemporal scholarship

• Andrews, Tarren. “Gendered Exile in the Past and Present: An Indigenous Feminist Medievalist in Search of Serial Collectivity,” Yearbook of English Studies 52 (2022): 69-85.

• Cleaves, Wallace. “From Monmouth to Madoc to Māori: The Myth of Medieval Colonization and an Indigenous Alternative,” English Language Notes 58, no. 2 (2020): 21-34.

• Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh. “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure,” Literature Compass 16, no. 9-10 (2019).

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Settler colonialism is not a strictly a modern phenomenon. Its logics were already present in the early medieval North Atlantic. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History narrates a divine mission and conversion project to legitimize conquest and settlement. By framing medieval sources alongside Indigenous critiques and theories, students can begin to trace the historical continuity of colonial structures.

Tarren Andrew’s transtemporal teaching methodology invites students to become curious about the law and how history is shaped across time. By reading Old English law alongside Indigenous criticism and incorporating multiple kinds of media in conversation with primary sources, students begin to perceive the elasticity of the law. Through reading the law as a genre alongside other literary forms students are equipped to question static categories and imagine new possibilities.

Abdulhamit Arvas assigns these texts in a course on racialized genders that visits multiple locations and periods in search of connected histories of sexuality, gender, and race. For instance, when Iago cries out, “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise!” he is using an interracial, bestial fantasy to incite racism in the Venetian world of Othello as well as displaying the racial and sexual anxieties of his white English audience. Arvas provides this list of readings to demonstrate the intersecting histories of race, gender, and sexuality in their emergence in the early modern period.

By reading across genres which are in dialogue with one another—travel writing, medical treatises, and drama—students can attend to how knowledge about bodies and desires was produced, circulated, and contested. These texts offer distinct but overlapping representational strategies:  

• Travel narratives imagine and exoticize gender and sexuality abroad, often encoding fantasies of racial and sexual difference.

• Medical writings classify and pathologize bodily variation, producing “monstrous” anatomies that shaped early modern ideas of sex, race, and embodiment.

• Drama, meanwhile, stages these discourses, dramatizing gender variance, racialized eroticism, and imperial desire for metropolitan audiences.

These readings contextualize early modern drama within broader archives of cross-cultural encounter, imperial cartography, and scientific inquiry. Drama both reflects and critiques the medical and ethnographic logics of its time. Gender and sexuality were constructed as mobile, unstable categories within the overlapping regimes of empire, science, and art. This reading list aims to trace genealogies of the contemporary intersections of sexuality, gender, and race—revealing continuities, ruptures, and crossings between past and present.

Travel writing

Early modern travel writing imagined foreign bodies through fantasies of racial, sexual, and gendered difference, often depicting sodomy, monstrosity, and gender variance to contrast European norms. These texts function as sexual ethnographies that link imperial knowledge production to the regulation of desire.

• Leo Africanus. A Geographical Historie of Africa. Translated by John Pory. 1600.
  Excerpt: Section 4.1 on women witches of Fez.

• Linschoten, Jan Huygen van. Iohn Huighen van Linschoten. His Discours of Voyages into Ye Easte & West Indies, Deuided into Foure Bookes. London: Printed by [John Windet for] Iohn Wolfe, printer to the Honorable Cittie of London, 1598.
  Excerpt: Section 17. on women’s bodies in Asia.

• Lithgow, William. The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures & Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares Travayles from Scotland to the Most Famous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia and Affrica. Project Gutenberg, 1632.

• Mandeville, John. Mandeville’s Travels.  
  Excerpt: section XXII ‘Of folk of dyuerse schap’: on diverse “kinds” or monstrous races in various islands including giants, dwarves, two-sexed.

• Montaigne, Michel de. The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels in Italy by Way of Switzerland and Germany in 1580 and 1581 : V.3. Vol. 3. England: J. Murray, 1903.  
  Excerpt: Section, 1580-81: Observation on same-sex marriages and gender troubling figures in France and Italy.

• Nicolay, Nicholas de. Navigations, Peregrinations, and Voyages Made into Turkey London 1585.
  Excerpt: Section 4.2 on Turkish bathhouses and improper Turkish women.

• Sandys, George. A Relation of a Journey Begun an Dom 1610, London, 1615.
  Excerpt: Section on lesbianism in Turkey; whiteness of women.

Medical treatises

Medical treatises pathologized bodily variation and pleasure, defining norms through figures like hermaphrodites, sodomites, and monstrous births. These texts reveal how scientific discourse reinforced gender and sexual binaries by moralizing physical difference.

• Avicenna, and O. Cameron Gruner. A Treatise on the Canon of Medicine of Avicenna. Ann Arbor, Mich: University Microfilms, 1966.
  Excerpt: Chapters 42, 43, 44 on sodomy, hermaphrodites, women’s pleasure.

• Crooke, Helkiah. Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man, 1618.
  Excerpt : "Of Monsters and Hermaphrodites."

• Paré, Ambroise. Of Monsters and Prodigies. London: T. Cotes and R. Young, 1634.
  Excerpt: Chapters 1, 4, 5, 12 on monstrosity, sodomy, hermaphrodites.

Drama

Early modern drama staged the embodied consequences of imperial and medical discourses, bringing to life anxieties about race, gender, and sexuality through figures like eunuchs, Moors, and cross-dressers. Plays transformed abstract knowledge into affective spectacle, while questioning and reproducing social norms simultaneously.

• Arvas, Abdulhamit. “Early Modern Eunuchs and the Transing of Gender and Race.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (2019).
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• Bosman, Anston. “‘Best Play with Mardian’: Eunuch and Blackamoor as Imperial Culturegram.” Shakespeare Studies 34 (2006): 123–57.
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• Burton, Jonathan, Kate Fisher, and Sarah Toulalan. “Western Encounters with Sex and Bodies in Non-European Cultures, 1500–1750.” In The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, 1st ed., 495–510. Routledge, 2016.
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