The Arts of English Poesie: Making Worlds and Making Race | Watch the full talk

Presented by Debapriya Sarkar at Poetics: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2023

In this talk, Debapriya Sarkar explores the connections between English-language figurative speech and racecraft through an examination of George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (c. 1589). Situating Puttenham’s text within broader early modern conversations regarding rhetorical value in the English language, Sarkar brings out how English theories of figuration theorize language on a spectrum of mobility and fixity which in turn generate possibilities of “familiar” and “alien” meaning for specific words. This basic configuration, Sarkar argues, leads directly into racializing processes in which language is key. To demonstrate such processes, Sarkar turns to a close reading of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1607), focusing on the work being done in Shakespeare’s language to naturalize a link between the person of Cleopatra and the place of Egypt, showing us how the identification of a woman with an “alien” territory naturalizes the dehumanization of the racialized subject.