Many scholars have now shown how somatic difference, belief, and lineage established moral and religious hierarchies that provided a foundation for justifications of colonial enterprises and the slave trade. Attention to the language used to describe non-European peoples and the material practices of staging non-Europeans in drama has exposed the role of race in the early capitalist enterprises of international trade and the rise of the commercial theater. Studies have examined the extent to which early modern English people understood themselves as distinctive and different from the Spanish, the Irish, Africans, Asians, and the indigenous peoples of their so-called New World. Scholars have uncovered how early moderns understood the causes of bodily difference-skin color and the multiple valences of complexion, for example-between different groups of people. Indeed, the varied usages of the word “race” in early modern texts make it a rich site for examining the complexity and intersections of early modern embodiment, identity formation, representational practices, and power relations.
Over the past thirty years, early modern studies has been increasingly interested in the emergence of race as a category of identity, one that could variously demarcate groups of people along lines of lineage, nationality, religion, and skin color. When we transmit the terms and relations that produced these histories, we are not simply failing to unravel them, we are, to some extent, reproducing them. Our bodies themselves signify according to cultural history understanding what and how they signify requires attending to the histories that have been overlaid on them.
His politics were deeply embedded in the English colonial project, and we have both argued elsewhere, “the politics and economics that ultimately produced settler colonialism, chattel slavery, the forced migration of peoples, and the development of the British empire animate … early English texts.” 2 Spenser’s poetry and politics have different afterlives, and the ideologies that pass through his works adhere to us today. … The issue is not so much why one should politicize poetry as why critics have for so long been trying to depoliticize it.” 1 Edmund Spenser was invested in the use of poetry as a vehicle for the transmission of political ideas. But in the Renaissance these distinctions were by no means as absolute as they become in Romantic theory. David Norbrook suggested some time ago, “Certainly one should not deny the distinctions between poetry and other forms of discourse. One need not be committed to the study of literature as a political project to recognize that poetry and culture are inherently political. This is particularly true of the culture of the early modern period in which politics is engaged through poetic production.