Select annotated bibliography entry
Smith, Ian. Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.
Analyzes the ways in which 16th century English texts deployed the figure of the "barbarous" African for the sake of an English civilizational project. The book focuses on how English discourses fixated upon presumed linguistic errors in speech made by "foreign" speakers in order to buttress a sense of English belonging and displace anxieties about English itself being a barbarous idiom. It regards discussions in the fields of Renaissance studies, language, and English history.
