The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900

The essays collected here consider how conceptions of blood permeate discourses of human difference from 1500 to 1900 in England and continental Spain and in the Anglo- and Ibero-Americas. The authors explore how ideas about blood in science and literature have supported, at various points in history, fantasies of human embodiment and difference that serve to naturalize social hierarchies already in place. Situating the complex relationship between modern and pre-modern conceptions of race at the junction of early modern medicine, heredity, religion, and nation, The Cultural Politics of Blood challenges established accounts of the genealogy of modern racism.

Kimberly Anne Coles is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, USA. She is the author of Religion, Reform, and Women's Writing in Early Modern England (2008/10) and has published articles in ELR, Modern Philology, and RES.

Ralph Bauer is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. His publications include The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (2003/8).

Zita Nunes is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, USA. She is the author of Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature of the Americas (2008) and has published widely on African Diaspora literature and politics.

Carla L. Peterson is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Maryland, USA. Her books include Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (2011).