Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies ― A Critical Anthology

Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies brings into conversation two fields—Early Modern Studies and Black Studies—that traditionally have had little to say to each other. This disconnect is the product of current scholarly assumptions about a lack of archival evidence that limits what we can say about those of African descent before modernity. This volume posits that the limitations are not in the archives, but in the methods we have constructed for locating and examining those archives. The essays that make up this volume offer new critical approaches to black African agency and the conceptualization of blackness in early modern literary works, historical documents, material and visual cultures, and performance culture. Ultimately, this critical anthology revises current understandings about racial discourse and the cultural contributions of black Africans in early modernity and in the present across the globe.

Cassander L. Smith is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama, USA. Her publications include a monograph, Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (2016), and a co-edited volume, Teaching with Tension: Race, Reality, and Resistance in the Classroom (forthcoming).

Nicholas R. Jones is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Africana Studies at Bucknell University, USA. His publications include the forthcoming monograph Staging Habla de negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain and articles in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, and Hispanic Review, among others.

Miles P. Grier is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, USA. He is finishing a book manuscript on Othello and the racialization of Atlantic literacy. His publications include essays in The William and Mary Quarterly, Politics and Culture, and The Journal of Popular Music Studies, among others.