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This book attends to the most essential, lucrative, and overlooked business activity of early modern Europe: the trade of paper, uncovering its hotspots and trade routes, usual dealings, and recycling economies.
Music, that fundamental form of human expression, is one of the most powerful cultural continuities fostered by enslaved Africans and their descendants throughout the Americas. The roots of so much of the music beloved around the world today are drawn directly from the men and women carried across the Atlantic in chains, from the west coast of Africa to the shores of the so-called New World. This important new book bridges African diaspora studies, music studies, and transatlantic and colonial American literature to trace the lineage of African and African diasporic musical life in the early modern period. Mary Caton Lingold meticulously analyzes surviving sources, especially European travelogues, to recover the lives of African performers, the sounds they created, and the meaning their musical creations held in Africa and later for enslaved communities in the Caribbean and throughout the plantation Americas. The book provides a rich history of early African sound and a revelatory analysis of the many ways that music shaped enslavement and colonization in the Americas.
Presents current scholarship on race and racism in Shakespeare's works. The Handbook offers an overview of approaches used in early modern critical race studies through fresh readings of the plays; an exploration of new methodologies and archives; and sustained engagement with race in contemporary performance, adaptation, and activism.
"Grounded in new archival research documenting a significant presence of foreign and racially-marked individuals in Medici Florence, this book argues for the relevance of such individuals to the history of Western music and for the importance of sound-particularly musical and vocal sounds-to systems of racial and ethnic difference. Many of the individuals discussed in these pages were subject to enslavement or conditions of unfree labor; some labored at tasks that were explicitly musical or theatrical, while all intersected with sound and with practices of listening that afforded full personhood only to particular categories of people. Integrating historical detail alongside contemporary per...
Examining the racially white 'others' whom Shakespeare creates in characters like Richard III, Hamlet and Tamora – figures who are never quite 'white enough' – this bold and compelling work emphasises how such classification perpetuates anti-Blackness and re-affirms white supremacy. David Sterling Brown offers nothing less here than a wholesale deconstruction of whiteness in Shakespeare's plays, arguing that the 'white other' was a racialized category already in formation during the Elizabethan era – and also one to which Shakespeare was himself a crucial contributor. In exploring Shakespeare's determinative role and strategic investment in identity politics (while drawing powerfully on his own life experiences, including adolescence), the author argues that even as Shakespearean theatrical texts functioned as engines of white identity formation, they expose the illusion of white racial solidarity. This essential contribution to Shakespeare studies, critical whiteness studies and critical race studies is an authoritative, urgent dismantling of dramatized racial profiling.
Scripturalizing the Human is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that reconceptualizes and models "scriptural studies" as a critical, comparative set of practices with broad ramifications for scholars of religion and biblical studies. This critical historical and ethnographic project is focused on scriptures/scripturalization/scripturalizing as shorthand for the (psycho-cultural and socio-political) "work" we make language do for and to us. Each essay focuses on an instance of or situation involving such work, engaging with the Bible, Book of Mormon, Bhagavata Purana, and other sacred texts, artifacts, and practices in order to explore historical and ongoing constructions of the human. Contributors use the category of "scriptures"—understood not simply as texts, but as freighted shorthand for the dynamics and ultimate politics of language—as tools for self-illumination and self-analysis. The significance of the collection lies in the window it opens to the rich and complex view of the highs and lows of human-(un-)making as it establishes the connections between a seemingly basic and apolitical religious category and a set of larger social-cultural phenomena and dynamics.
Defining class broadly as an identity categorization based on status, wealth, family, bloodlines, and occupation, Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama e xplores class as a complicated, contingent phenomenon modified by a wider range of social categories apart from those defining terms, including, but not limited to, race, gender, religion, and sexuality. This collection of essays – featuring a range of international contributors – explores a broad range of questions about the intersectional factors influencing class status in early modern England, including how cultural behaviors and non-class social categories affected status and social mobility, in what ways hegemonies of elite prerogatives could be disrupted or entrenched by the myriad of intersectional factors that informed social identity, and how class position informed the embodied experience and expression of affect, gender, sexuality, and race as well as relationships to place, space, land, and the natural and civic worlds.
A prehistory of transness that recovers early modern theological resources for trans lifeworlds. In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology. Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious t...
The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference encompasses the states of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The purpose of the conference is to unite persons and organizations within the region with an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre. THS is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and i...
The early modern period opened a new era in the history of dermal marking. Intensifying global travel and trade, especially the slave trade, bought diverse skin-marking practices into contact as never before. Stigma examines the distinctive skin cultures and marking methods of Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas as they began to circulate and reshape one another in the early modern world. By highlighting the interwoven histories of tattooing, branding, stigmata, baptismal and beauty marks, wounds and scars, this volume shows that early modern markers of skin and readers of marked skin did not think about different kinds of cutaneous signs as separate from each other. On the contrary, Euro...