Ndiaye, Noémie. "Race and early modern performance culture." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/race-and-early-modern-performance-culture. [Date accessed].

Race and early modern performance culture

Early modern theater shaped and was shaped by racial narratives

Download the transcript
Noémie Ndiaye
The University of Chicago

Understanding that theater was the mass media of early modern Europe offers a window into how racial categories, narratives, and performance both sustained and exposed the construction of white supremacy in its early formation.

Further learning

Video

Race and transnational theater

The invention of white supremacy in early modernity was a transnational phenomenon, which means that it can only be fully understood through a transnational approach.

Noémie Ndiaye
Activity

Mini exhibition

This assignment engages students in digital research and curation by having them create and analyze their own mini exhibition.

Noémie Ndiaye
Syllabus

Race in early modern drama

This course asks students to read plays and masques from early modern England, Spain, and France to understand how race was crafted through perfomrace and culture.

Noémie Ndiaye

Recommended

Video

Biopolitics and citizenship in Euripides’ Ion

Who is and who is not a citizen, and how this is determined across national and racial lines, has a deeply rooted history. Dan-el Padilla Peralta takes on questions of citizenship, belonging, and national identity in ancient Mediterranean literature.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta
Reading list

Teaching the refugee experience with graphic texts and video games

These narratives, read and experienced alongside historical texts, can deepen student understanding of today’s refugees fleeing war, violence, conflict, and persecution.

Mayte Green-Mercado
RaceB4Race Highlight

Anti-Blackness in colonial Mexico

Miguel A. Valerio discusses anti-Black matters and events in colonial Mexico City and the racialization of slavery more broadly in connection to the people of African descent in colonial Mexico and the Atlantic at large.

Miguel A. Valerio