Title Scripts of blackness : early modern performance culture and the making of race / Noémie Ndiaye

Published Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022] ©2022

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Description 1 online resource (358 pages) : illustrations (black and white, and color) Series RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern Raceb4race. Contents Introduction: Performative blackness in early modern Europe -- A brief history of baroque black-up: cosmetic blackness and religion -- A brief herstory of baroque black-up: cosmetic blackness, gender, and sexuality -- Blackspeak: acoustic blackness and the accents of race --Black moves: race, dance, and power -- Post/script: Ecologies of racial performance Summary Scripts of Blackness shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism. In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques--black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)--in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could/would ultimately live in their midst. Those scripts were often gendered and hinged on notions of demonization, exclusion, exploitation, animalization, commodification, sexualization, consensual enslavement, misogynoir, infantilization, and evocative association with other racialized minorities. Scripts of Blackness attempts to grasp the stories that Western Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effects of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Print version record Subject Race in the theater -- Europe, Western -- History -- 16th century Race in the theater -- Europe, Western -- History -- 17th century Impersonation -- History -- 16th century Impersonation -- History -- 17th century Blackface -- Europe, Western -- History -- 16th century Blackface -- Europe, Western -- History -- 17th century Theater -- Europe, Western -- History -- 16th century Theater -- Europe, Western -- History -- 17th century Drama -- 15th and 16th centuries -- History and criticism Drama -- 17th century -- History and criticism Drama -- 18th century -- History and criticism Black people in literature. SOCIAL SCIENCE / Black Studies (Global). Blackface Impersonation Race in the theater Theater Black people in literature Drama Western Europe Genre/Form History Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book ISBN 9781512822649 1512822647

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