Selected annotated 
bibliography of PCRS

This bibliography represents a selection of foundational texts in the field of premodern critical race studies (PCRS). It focuses on secondary sources examining premodern race and how constructions of difference in the past continue to reverberate today. While these entries treat a variety of sociohistorical and linguistic contexts, the studies themselves covered here are all produced in English. This is a continuously expanding document created by the ACMRS Postdoctoral Research Scholars in collaboration with the RaceB4Race Executive Board.

Period
Discipline

Lalla, Barbara. Postcolonialism: Caribbean Rereading of Medieval English Discourse. Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2008.

Interrogates the development of medieval English discourse through a theoretical framing of Caribbean literary history. The book interrogates the ways in which medieval considerations of sociopolitical ills, such as an ambience of iniquity, led to a specific poetics of medieval English as a language expressing popular struggle. The work engages multiple conversations in postcolonial theory, literary theory, vernacularization, and historiography. Lalla makes critical interventions on the theoretical plane, reversing prevalent theoretical-historiographical lenses to better adjudicate an English context from a postcolonial context.

Medieval
Literature

Lee, Christina H. The Anxiety of Sameness in Early Modern Spain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.

This book explores Spanish elite’s obsession with “passing” racially and socially during the 16th and 17th centuries. Lee writes about how Conversos (converted Jews) and Moriscos (converted Muslims) could pass for ‘pure’ Christians, which brought anxiety to Spaniards. She argues that the dominant Spanish identity fears the arbitrariness that separates them from the undesirables of society can therefore be recognized as sameness.

Early Modern
Literature

Liew, Tat-siong Benny. What Is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics? Reading the New Testament. Hawai'i: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008.

This book focuses on the major genres of the New Testament with an Asian American biblical interpretation between 5th century BCE and 5th century CE. It brings together two studies, Asian American studies and biblical studies. Liew evaluates presence and agency of Asian Americans within the field of biblical hermeneutics.

Ancient
Literature

Lipski, John. A History of Afro-Hispanic Language: Five Centuries, Five Continents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Examines speech varieties used by Afro-Hispanics from the 15th century to the 19th century in Iberia and Europe’s New World colonies to evaluate influences that shaped the development of Spanish on four continents. From a comparative historical perspective, this study traces the first attestations of Africans learning Spanish and the study of literary documents. He separates legitimate forms of Afro-Hispanic expression from those that result from racist stereotyping to assess how contact with the African diaspora has had a permanent impact on contemporary Spanish.

Early Modern

Little Jr., Arthur L., ed. White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture, and the Elite. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.

A collection of essays examining how the works of Shakespeare configure whiteness, intervening in common framings of Shakespeare’s “race” plays to demonstrate that all of Shakespeare’s plays are about race. The essays together perform a critical intervention by illuminating the ways in which whiteness remains an unstated normative fixture within the study of Shakespeare and beyond. The volume regards both the conceptualizations of whiteness within Shakespeare’s early modern works and the reception of Shakespeare among white readers in contemporary settings.

Early Modern
Literature

Little, Jr., Arthur L. Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Examines the subject of interracial sex in the works of Shakespeare, attending specifically to narratives of rape. The book is anchored by close readings of Titus Andronicus, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Rape of Lucrece—as well as surrounding materials—to excavate rhetorical strategies of whiteness and masculinity being deployed in early modern England. It engages conversations in the study of Shakespeare, gender studies, the study of sexuality, and English literature.

Early Modern
Literature

Lomuto, Sierra. "Special Issue: The Medieval Undone: Imagining a New Global Past." boundary 2 50, no. 3 (2023).

Special issue exploring the limitations of the category “medieval” in formulating knowledge production. Essays explore the limits of “medieval” as a historiographical category, the role of publishers in challenging and upholding current institutional structures, the borders and politics of periodization, and the potential of theoretical approaches often excluded from the study of the “medieval.”

Medieval

Loomba, Ania, and Martin Orkin, eds. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 1998.

A collection of essays exploring questions of colonialism and race with respect to the works of Shakespeare. The volume is divided into sections examining, respectively, the critical analysis of Shakespeare within early modern European contexts and the later reception of the same works. Shakespeare’s oeuvre is theorized as a constitutive element of global connected histories, an available resource for postcolonial receptions of colonial history, and a lexicographical mechanism for the theorization of colonial processes themselves. The volume as a whole engages conversations in postcolonial theory and Shakespeare studies.

Early Modern
Literature

Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Charts the development of English anglophone thinking about race between the context of Shakespeare’s plays and the beginnings of English colonial expansion in the 17th century. The book draws upon the ways in which Shakespeare’s stage simultaneously coded experience of non-English social worlds for English viewing audiences while being built upon broader cultural understandings of non-English persons. Loomba argues that scholars should avoid conceptualizing European social worlds through the isolation of European lenses alone. The work builds upon prior conversations in the study of Shakespeare, colonialism, and the beginnings of nationalism.

Early Modern
Literature

MacDonald, Joyce Green. Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Interrogates the techniques by which Black women’s bodies have been re-visibilized in North American and Caribbean adaptations and imaginings of Shakespeare’s works. Beginning from a context in which Black women were encoded as ephemeral presences within Shakespeare’s plays during the early modern period, the book explores how a variety of contemporary works—such as Mosquito, Mississippi Masala, A Branch of the Blue Nile, Harlem Duet, and King Charles III—are used to critically interrogate matters of race in both early modern English contexts and the New World’s social present. It draws upon discussions in the fields of Shakespeare studies and performance studies.

Early Modern
Literature

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

Investigates the racialization of women’s bodies in early modern anglophone dramas. The book takes on a series of case studies—such as Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, and Katherine Phillips’s Pompey—to explore twinned phenomena: the historical invisibilization of racialized non-white bodies in early modern dramas, and the techniques by which those same bodies might be recovered and centered. The work intervenes in discussions within the study of Shakespeare, gender theory, and performance studies.

Early Modern
Literature

Marcocci, Giuseppe. "Blackness and Heathenism: Color, Theology, and Race in the Portuguese World, c. 1450-1600." Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 43, no. 2 (2016): 33–57.

Theorizes the Spanish and Portuguese empires through a religious and biological frame during the 15th – 17th century. It explores the intersections of skin color and the development of an anti-Jewish theory based on blood purity. This article focuses on racialization, religion, and enslavement.

Early Modern
Literature

Marcocci, Giuseppe. "Conscience and Empire: Politics and Moral Theology in the Early Modern Portuguese World." Journal of Early Modern History 18, no. 5 (2014): 473–494.

Explores how politics and moral theology influenced Portugal during the 16th and 17th century. Marcocci argues that Portugal had an imperial consciousness as they began their maritime expansion. It shows how the Mesa da Consciência (“Board of Conscience”) contributed to issues like enslavement, war, conversión, and commerce, and how it shaped Portugal’s imperial ideology.

Early Modern
Literature

McCoskey, Denise, ed. A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

The collection foregrounds the diversity of antique societies (ancient Mediterranean between 3000 BCE and 800 CE)—including Assyrians, Persians, Egyptians, Scythians, Ethiopians, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians—to explore the intersection of race with environment, religion, science, politics, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and more.

Ancient

McCoskey, Denise. Race: Antiquity and its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Explores constructions of race both with and beyond somatic markers in classical Greek and Roman contexts. The book deploys case studies in classical Greek and Roman understandings of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Jewish, and Persian cultures—alongside echoes in contemporary anglophone materials—to map the distances between antique and contemporary formulations of racial difference. It engages conversations in the fields of classical literature, cultural history, and cross-cultural connectivity.

Ancient

Mudimbe, V.Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Interrogates Euro-American epistemological constructions of Africa from Antiquity to the relative present, alongside African scholarly responses within colonially imposed frameworks. The book engages a wide range of themes conjoined by an overarching concern about how African philosophy has, and might still, engage the hermeneutical trappings of Western knowledge systems. Beyond the context of African history, this work engages conversations in history of philosophy, colonial studies, and postcolonial studies.

Ancient
History

Ndiaye, Noémie. Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.

Examines the representation of Black characters by white performers in 16th and 17th century England, France, and Spain. The book traces the performative technologies used by such performers—anchoring its analysis upon blackface, coded speech patterns, and dances—in order to incubate racializing conceptualizations of Black personhood among performers and audiences across Europe. The book engages conversations in performance studies, Blackness, the study of embodiment, and colonialism.

Early Modern
Literature

Ndiaye, Noémie, and Lia Markey, eds. Seeing Race before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World. Tempe: ACMRS Press, 2023.

This volume explores the many ways that race and racial thinking are represented in the visual culture of premodern times, particularly between the 1300s to the 1800s. It explores the visual manifestations of the “racial matrix” across the medieval and early modern era through transnational and multilingual geographies. Contributors aim to debunk claims that “race did not exist” prior to the Enlightenment by incorporating vast visual archives from different centuries.

Nemser, Daniel. “Triangulating Blackness: Mexico City, 1612.” Mexican Studies 33, no. 3 (2017): 344–366.

Investigates accounts of a 1612 Black uprising in Mexico City as well as their reception. The essay explores both the Spanish account of the event—excavating how Black male bodies were coded as predisposed to the rape of white women—and a Nahuatl account of the same event, which reflects upon the effects of the Spanish gaze upon Black bodies. It goes on to parse the slippages in translation, with respect to the Nahuatl account, which tend to reinscribe colonial categories of knowledge. The work considers discussions in the study of slavery, freedom, gender, Blackness, indigeneity, and colonialism.

Early Modern
History

Niebrzydowski, Sue. "The Sultana and Her Sisters: Black Women in the British Isles Before 1530." Women’s History Review 10, no. 2 (2001): 187–210.

Examines the representation of Black women in medieval England prior to 1530. The essay draws upon travelogues, scriptural commentary, visual arts, medical treatises, and surrounding materials to demonstrate how gendered Black bodies were significant loci of theorization for otherness prior to the Elizabethan forms of institutionalized slavery. It engages conversations in Blackness, gender studies, and the development of medieval identities.

Medieval
Literature
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