Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage

1. Auflage 2007
ISBN: 978-0-415-95721-2
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd (Sales)

Buch, Englisch, 192 Seiten, Format (B × H): 234 mm x 162 mm, Gewicht: 386 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage provides the first sustained reading of Restoration plays through a performance theory lens. This approach shows that an analysis of the conjoined performances of torture and race not only reveals the early modern interest in the nature of racial identity, but also how race was initially coded in a paradoxical fashion as both essentially fixed and socially constructed. An examination of scenes of torture provides the most effective way to unearth these seemingly contradictory representations of race because depictions of torture often interrogate the incongruous desire to substitute the visible and manipulable materiality of the body for the more illusive performative nature of identity. In turn, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage challenges the long-standing assumption that early modern conceptions of race were radically different in their fluidity from post-Enlightenment ones by demonstrating how many of the debates we continue to have about the nature of racial identity were engendered by these seventeenth-century performances.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Thompson, Ayanna

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft Theatertheorie, Ästhetik des Theaters, Theaterkritik
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft Theatergeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft Theatersoziologie, Theaterpsychologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Gewalt Politische Unterdrückung & Verfolgung

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Illustrations. Acknowledgments 1. Interrogating Torture and Finding Race 2. A Matter that is No Matter: Religion, Color, and the White Actress in The Empress of Morocco and Xerxes 3. When Race is Colored: Abjection and Racial Characterization in Titus Andronicus and Oroonoko 4. Racializing Civility: The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards 5. Racializing Mercantilism: Amboyna: or, The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants 6. Combating Historical Amnesia: On the Images of Prisoner Abuse from Abu Ghraib. Notes. Bibliography. Index

Über Autor(innen)

Ayanna Thompson in Assistant Professor of English and Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. Her edited collection, Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, was published by Routledge in 2007.