Writing Race Across the Atlantic World Medieval to Modern [Paperback]

This collection of original essays explores the origins of contemporary notions of race in the oceanic interculture of the Atlantic world in the early modern period. In doing so, it breaks down institutional boundaries between 'American' and 'British' literature in this early period, as well as between 'history' and 'literature'. Individual essays address the ways in which categories of 'race' - black brown, red and white, African American and Afro-Caribbean, Spanish and Jewish, English and Celtic, native American and Northern European, creole and mestizo - were constructed or adapted by early modern writers. The collection brings together a top collection of historians and literary critics specializing in early modern Britain and early America.Introduction; G.Taylor & P.Beidler A Mirror Across the Water: Mimetic Racism and Cultural Survival; B.Fuchs Angells in America; K.O.Kupperman Prehistoric Diasporas: Colonial Theories of the Origins of Native American Peoples; G.Sayre Michelangelo and the Curse of Ham: From a Typology of Jew-Hatred to a Genealogy of Racism; B.Braude Extravagant Viciousness : Slavery and Gluttony in the Works of Thomas Tryon; K.Hall Working Like a Dog : African Labor and Racking: The Human-Animal Divide in Early Modern England; F.Royster Fresh Produce; J.Roach Men to Monsters : Civility, Barbarism, and Race in Early Modern Ireland; D.J. Baker Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan and Other Famous Early American Mahometans; P.Beidler

I found all the essays in this very diverse collection to be at once historical, anecdotal, and a real pleasure to read. I found these essays to be pioneering in their efforts to demonstrate that we must have studies that do more than compare the constructions of race across time and geography. These essays show that we must be attentive to the ways the very exchanges and amiable and inimical encounters across the Atlantic were and remain fundamental to our contemporary devisings of race in Anglicized and Al#µ