Marking Strangers: Muslims and Racial Profiling in Early Modern England | Watch the full talk

Presented by Hassana Moosa at Geneologies: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2022

Hassana Moosa here draws upon the critical tools of premodern critical race studies and Shakespeare studies to investigate genealogies of early modern race-making as they pertain to Muslims. Through an in-depth study of the Prince of Morocco’s character in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (c. 1598), Moosa demonstrates how the racialization of Muslims is keyed to a set of geographic, political, and sartorial markers which ultimately evacuate any other signifiers from the figure of the Muslim. In this way, the early modern English stage comes into view as a site where a simplified notion of Muslims—as embodied symbols of a culture of foreign violence—was transmitted to audiences. Moosa’s analysis further connects the early modern English context to today’s securitized Western settings, in which practices of border control and policing cannot be disentangled from the deeper history of staging anti-Muslim racism.