Periodization, Race, and Global Contact

a Periodization, Race, and Global Contact

Ania Loomba University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

In the last few years, medievalists and early modernists have witnessed an increasing and uncanny topicality with respect to the materials they study. Samuel Huntington’s infamous thesis about a “clash of civilizations” is now widely described as a premodern heritage: the pope recently turned to the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus to suggest that violence is endemic to Islam, and jihadi attackers claimed that they targeted London’s King’s Cross Station in July 2005 because its name evoked the Christian violence of the Crusades.1 “Civilizations” are also routinely described in temporal terms, as when the Syrian-American psychiatrist Wafa Sultan spoke of “a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century.”2 Medievalists and early modernists have responded in a variety of ways — some have made visible the long and complex lineages of these contemporary polarizations, arguing that culture wars of the premodern world are indeed the precursors of colonial and postcolonial divisions, while others have preferred to illuminate an equally long history of porous boundaries between the “East” and the “West,” Islam and Christianity, the “medieval” and the “modern.”3 Each of these strategies is offered as historical truth and as the more effective way of connecting our own cosmopolitan but divided world with premodern histories and cultures. Both sets of critics agree that current debates on cultural identities, terror, postcolonialism, and “globalization” need to engage with a longer temporal framework. I want to revisit several connections and fractures between different periods and spaces — medieval, early modern, and modern; “East” and “West”; England and Turkey — to consider what they might tell us about the histories of race and colonialism, and about the politics of periodization. My vantage point is early modern English plays about the East, which obsessively stage cross-cultural contact, conversion, and exchange, while articulating a

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37:3, Fall 2007 DOI 10.1215/10829636-2007-015 © 2007 by Duke University Press parochial fantasy of global relations. These plays, I will suggest, cannot be understood without looking at an earlier and wider literary-cultural history. In turn, they demonstrate that literature is a particularly dense repository of cultural memory, which allows special insights into the nature of racial ideologies and their uneven relationship to colonialism. To this end, I will situate these plays in relation to current debates on early modern race and global relations, as well as to medieval romances of contact and conversion. In doing so, I also want to suggest that to cross temporal and geographic boundaries is, first and foremost, a conceptual exercise, which involves, to paraphrase Chekhov, the correct formulation of a question, rather than the necessary finding of an answer.4

Race, periodization, and history

In the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Othello ( 1 6 0 3 – 4), Desdemona’s father Brabantio responds to Roderigo’s hysterical images of miscegenation by confessing that even before he received the news about Othello stealing his daughter, he had anticipated some such event: “This accident is not unlike my dream, / Belief of it oppresses me already.”5 Even as Brabantio “loved” Othello and “oft invited” him to his house, he harbored fears that his daughter might be stolen from him by such a stranger (1.3.127). Brabantio’s dream reminds us that the racist sentiments in the play are not confined to Iago and Roderigo, and is important in the light of some recent critical suggestions that Othello specifically indicts a Catholic Spanish hatred for Moors, represented by Iago — whose name evokes Santiago Matamoros or St. James the Moor slayer — and Roderigo.6 In contrast to these two “Spanish” characters, the argument goes, stands a tolerant multicultural Venice, which is intended to evoke the Protestant England of Shakespeare’s day, eager to trade with Moors, isolated from widespread international contact, and therefore more benign toward the Moors than toward Catholic Spain. Discussing the differences between the quarto and folio versions of the play, Leah Marcus observes that approximately 160 of the play’s most explicit lines about Othello’s race exist only in the folio version: The first long F-only passage occurs during Iago and Roderigo’s jeering encounter with Brabantio (1.1.81 – 157), during which they attempt to convince the old man that his daughter has eloped with Othello. Both texts include Iago’s scathingly clever, yet indi- rect, references to the coupling of Othello and Desdemona. . . .

596 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.3 / 2007 But only in the folio version does Roderigo chime in with his own much more explicit imagining of Desdemona’s pollution (1.1.119 – 35). . . . [Brabantio’s] speech exists in both Q and F, but only in F do we know exactly what dreadful things he has been dreaming.7

Thus, at least in the folio version, it is unmistakable that Brabantio has long feared losing his daughter to a black Moor and that this is a “community view” of difference. Suggesting that if Shakespeare was the reviser, and added the racially explicit materials, he may himself have been “written by shifting contemporary attitudes toward race,” Marcus asks scholars to correlate the textual revisions with shifting racial ideologies in early modern England.8 This is a tricky task. To begin with, we cannot be certain that the folio version of Othello followed the quarto version, so that the racially explicit lines could have been either added or taken away.9 Moreover, racial ideologies also do not necessarily “progress” in any one direction, and what appears to be new may have surprising lineages. We may begin by questioning conventional periodization, and interrogating the charge of “anachronism” that haunts analyses of early modern colonialism and race. As Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, the horror of anachronism is an integral part of a historicist sensibility.10 Theories of race have been inevitably historicist, plotting the growth of racial ideologies in tandem with the growth of modernity, colonialism, and science. Most theorists of racial difference still conceive of it as a post-Enlightenment ideology forged on the twin anvils of colonialism and Atlantic slavery, which hinges on pseudobiological notions of human differentiation, especially color, and is thus absent in premodern societies whose ideologies of difference were more “cultural.”11 Ironically, viewed from the angle of race, progression is obviously a regression — the fact that slavery is part of a modern sensibility makes it difficult to think about the movement of history as “progress.”12 Julia Reinhardt Lupton suggests that the West’s “ethnographic unconscious” is best understood through a psychoanalytical frame rather than a historical one. Seeking to understand the place of circumcision in Western culture, she writes that “it is not enough to historicize circumcision; we must ask how circumcision poses the question of history per se. Pushing us beyond a contextualization of race and toward its structural understanding as fantasy, psychoanalysis powerfully enables this critical move.”13 Lupton’s framing of the question rightly asks us to meditate upon the protocols and ideologies within which historical inquiry takes place.

Loomba / Race and Global Contact 597 But, although race eludes any simple contextual reading, does “fantasy” necessarily lie “beyond” contextualization? Is it not the case that “context” and “history” are both made available to us through expressions of fantasy and are encoded in them?14 I will suggest the necessary converse of Lupton’s formulation — that an engagement with history, particularly as it is medi- ated by literature, allows us to understand the structures of racial fantasy, and the repetitive, looping, even apparently static nature of racial ideologies, which cannot be grasped through a simplistic historicism, but which do not lie outside history either. The revision of the term Renaissance to early modern (or even to early colonial ) has not revised widespread critical assumptions that our modern ideologies, institutions, and practices (capitalism, nation formation, the modern family, humanism, individualism, colonialism, global contact) were engendered in this period. Nor has it shaken the belief that it marked a drastic break with a medieval past mired in religious orthodoxy, undevel- oped notions of subjectivity, and a largely unchanging social order. Never- theless, when it comes to the question of race, these divisions between the medieval and the early modern, as well as affiliations between early modern and modern, are both disavowed. Whereas in other respects the “darkness” of the Middle Ages is routinely contrasted to the “enlightenment” of the Renaissance, with respect to race, the early modern is routinely understood as a pre-modern time when racial ideologies had not taken root. There is a conflation of the medieval and early modern as periods in which the term race connoted family, class, or lineage rather than the classifications of imperial times, and in which the defining features of racial ideologies — the quasi-biological notion that physical characteristics denoted distinct types of human beings with distinct moral and social features — had not yet come into being.15 Thus, with regard to race, many early modernists want to think of their period as offering a potentially radical difference from modernity.16 However, this understanding of race has not resulted in an effort to examine the connections between early modern and medieval ideologies of difference. Whether we conceive of the early modern and the medieval as together marking a time prior to the modern discourses of difference, or we think of the early modern as a “transitional” time, we need to consider the overlaps and differences between them. This has been made difficult by the fact that early modernists write about their period as if it virtually inaugu- rated European contact with non-Europeans. Implicitly (and often explicitly) subscribing to the historicist theories of race, we have not sufficiently attended to the links between what are routinely described as “premodern

598 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.3 / 2007 xenophobia” and “modern race,” connections that also indicate the overlap between ideologies of skin color and other kinds of difference, such as those defined by class, nationality, and, most important, religion. This may be partly due to the fact that until recently, early modern literary scholarship privileged cross-cultural contact in the Americas, impervious to the movement of “the slaving Mediterranean” into “the Black Atlantic” (to borrow an evocative image from David Wallace).17 But the slaving Mediterranean also takes us to Africa and Asia, with their even older histories of exchange and strife. Now these territories are coming into greater critical focus, but this has not yet led to a crossing of temporal boundaries. So far, early modernists have not heeded their medievalist colleagues’ “whisper” in their ears, at least with respect to the question of race and global contact.18 Accordingly, Othello and other early modern dramas are read in terms of a rather shallow history — literary and geopolitical — or at least one that bypasses the medieval period.19 There is, of course, a long tradition of connecting early modern drama to medieval roots. As Margreta de Grazia observes, Coleridge used the word romantic to describe Shakespeare’s flout- ing of classical literary rules, and to connect his plays to a medieval period understood not as “the dark and fallow interval of the later Burkhardtian scheme, but rather a period in which cultural forms are free to develop without subscribing to ancient strictures.”20 Coleridge also famously pronounced that “Othello must not be conceived as a negro, but a high and chivalrous Moorish chief. Shakespeare learned the spirit of the character from the Spanish poetry, which was prevalent in England in his time.”21 Coleridge was right in indicating an older and wider literary heritage for Shakespeare’s play, but neither that heritage nor the play itself allows us to divorce Othel- lo’s color from his “Moorishness.” In fact, it is precisely the mingling of ideologies of skin color with those of religious difference, of chivalric and crusading traditions with histories of slavery, in other words the history of race, that connects the medieval cross-cultural romance with early modern “Eastern” plays. These plays revisit earlier representations of the Muslim-Christian encounter, either explicitly, or through character types, vocabularies of difference, and dramatic structure. But these earlier representations were also profoundly influenced by non-European literary traditions and histories, testimony to the exchange of ideas that shaped even expressions of hostility and distance. Together, medieval and early modern romances illustrate how discourses of race and difference connect with global relations in the premodern world. Precisely because the interrelation between these is not

Loomba / Race and Global Contact 599 mechanical or straightforward, to examine them together, as I will do, questions the spatial, temporal, and conceptual boundaries within which early modern English literature is often confined.

Periodization, cultural contact, and literary study

Peter Hulme has rightly argued that “the most resistant categories of Euro- centrism are those which are so deeply embedded that we have come to think of them simply as parts of a natural geohistorical landscape; and prob- ably none of these categories has a deader hand than that of historical periodization.”22 As Martin Bernal suggested in Black Athena, the Afro-Asiatic dimensions of Greek civilization were obscured before it was appropriated as the major influence on “Renaissance” thought.23 Bernal regards the “Aryan Model” of Greek civilization as an eighteenth- to nineteenth-century product, but the process of its formation began in the early modern period.24 The marginalization of Arab and Jewish scholarship can also be traced back to this time, when key thinkers bypassed the cosmopolitan legacy of medieval scholarship to claim their own unmediated relationship with a “classical” past. Thus, Burkhardtian and post-Burkhardtian scholarship picked up on, and reinforced, early modern constructions of a temporal and geographic- cultural boundary that is part of the very construction of Europe. Although the boundaries of space and time are closely interlinked, to question one is not automatically to destabilize the other. While the notion that the Middle Ages was a backward or unenlightened period is being widely questioned, “its place in a largely unbroken continuum of what construes Western-ness is, if anything, more elaborately developed and more deeply entrenched.”25 This is because the boundary between the West and the Rest has been shored up by the relentless Eurocentrism of literature and comparative literature departments. Gayatri Spivak suggests that a “New Comparative Literature” can cross this divide by engaging with the non- European world as “active cultural media rather than objects of cultural study.”26 Spivak argues for the necessity of close reading of literatures produced in non-European languages, in sharp contrast to Franco Moretti’s advocacy of a method of “distant reading” whereby global “literary diver- sity” and generic histories are mapped through a “quantitative approach to literature” self-consciously modelled on the methodology of world-system theorists.27 These are necessarily contentious subjects — will Spivak’s method simply redraw the conservative boundaries of literary study, or will Moretti’s

600 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.3 / 2007 replicate the Eurocentrism of dominant world-systems scholarship?28 For premodern scholars, the task of engaging with non-Western literature is complicated to an even greater extent by archival and linguistic difficulties. Perhaps the only way of combining close reading with an international angle of vision is through collaborative work. But the crucial point here is that while it is not feasible for every scholar of premodern English literature to become deeply and widely familiar with Ottoman or Arabic texts, it is possible for everyone conceptually to cross Eurocentric boundaries. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said argued for such a crossing via a “contrapuntal method,” through which Western texts can be brought into conversation with a larger world by placing them within the geopolitics of their own time and ours.29 Premodernists can go even further and trace the cosmopolitan heritage of “Western” literary culture (which qualifies the very notion of their “Europeanness”) as well as the possible alignments of geography and temporality that have shaped its study. This kind of work involves a rethinking of our basic assumptions about cultures and histories. In recent years, medieval scholarship has become more open to such an exercise and, consequently, to reflecting on its relationship with postcolonial critique. Not surprisingly, medievalists have also been more interested in challenging conventional periodization, pointing out that even radical early modernists have not able to do so.30 New historicists and cultural materialists were deeply influenced by Michel Foucault’s notion of an epistemic break between the premodern and the modern, and perceived the early modern period as a “liminal space between two more monolithic periods.”31 But Foucault’s temporal scheme also turned upon a geocultural division between “the societies — and they are numerous: China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arabo-Muslim societies — which endowed themselves with an ars erotica” and “our civilization” which is “undoubtedly the only civilization to practice a scientia sexualis.”32 Such a proposition leaves unchallenged the geographic premise of the division, which Chakrabarty calls a “first in Europe, then elsewhere” structure of global historical time and which “made possible completely internalist histories of Europe in which Europe was described as the site of the first occurrence of capitalism, modernity, or Enlightenment.”33 Despite its interest in issues of colonialism and travel, new historicist criticism did not challenge this Eurocentric periodization, although economic and cultural historians, and very recently, early modern literary critics have begun to do so. Jack Goody’s The East in the West argued that European colonial- mercantile companies, regarded as forerunners of modern multinationals,

Loomba / Race and Global Contact 601 were also successors to “the earlier forms of partnership such as the com- menda found throughout Eurasia,” obliging us to “modify the view that we are in the presence of a unique Western invention which others could not have achieved.”34 Janet Abu-Lughod’s assessment of Europe as an aspiring new entrant or an “upstart” in the premodern global economy was extended by Andre Gunder Frank, who argued that right until the eighteenth century Europe was only a junior partner in Asian-dominated international trade.35 Gunder Frank contends that it was American silver that allowed Europe to enter the global economy and finally gain ascendancy, a thesis that Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence corroborates and complicates. Pomeranz argues that until the eighteenth century there were no substantial differences in life expectancy, wages, consumption — of ordinary goods as well as luxuries — between the core regions of Eurasia.36 While it is not possible for me to discuss the debates generated by such revisionary scholarship, it has been crucial in reorienting our perspectives on early modern global relations, and in “provincializing Europe” by challenging the Eurocentric core of historicism.37 Literary critics have also begun to emphasize the sovereignty of Asia, in order to insert non-Europeans as acting subjects rather than simply as objects of European representations and actions. Jonathan Burton suggests that a “contrapuntal” method can be used in early modern critique; going beyond Said’s confinement to European literature, he has demonstrated how Muslim writers “engaged with Western discourse, aroused, challenged, and even modified European ideology.”38 Burton suggests that early English fas- cination with Muslim worlds is born not out of a confident superiority and will-to-power, but from a consciousness of marginality, or what Daniel Vit- kus calls “the Christian West’s inferiority complex.”39 Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton’s Global Interests documents a rich artistic and material exchange between Europeans and Turks in order to question the Eurocentrism and the periodization of Burkhardtian Renaissance and post-Burkhardtian “early modern” studies, concluding that an account of the marginalized, exoticized, dangerous East within Renaissance studies [is] not only politically unhelpful but also historically inaccurate. . . . Sixteenth-century art-based transactions reveal a pragmatic engagement between East and West in which each fully acknowledged the participation of the other and nego- tiated workable relationships.40

602 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.3 / 2007 This body of work has rightly challenged the previous tendency to read all non-Europeans as unlettered, savage, and silenced, but it often tends to read Muslim elites as emblematic of all non-Europeans. Ottoman-European relations, and indeed all Muslim-Christian relations, are frequently romanti- cized to downplay the equally important histories of conflict, and to demar- cate “trade” and “exchange” from histories of colonialism, black slavery, and race.41 The picture of anxious or pragmatic European peoples seeking to trade with or emulate Muslims simply reverses the dynamics of later colonialism.42 Viewing Muslim-Christian relations from the other side, the Otto- manist Suraiya Faroqhi offers a different scenario of simultaneous coexis- tence and conflict. Along with Turkish curiosity about the larger world, Faroqhi describes Ottoman xenophobia, concluding that despite the material and cultural exchanges, friendships would have been largely “impossible” between Ottoman Muslims and foreigners.43 To put Ottomans and Europeans in a shared context is also to recognize that cosmopolitanism and ethnocentrism on both sides take comparable forms: just as the “oriental- ism” of European writers was shaped by their reliance on a textual tradition, Turkish writers and travelers also relied on medieval Islamic texts, and “the tendency to view foreign lands in the hands of ‘unbelievers’ as possible objects of conquest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was common to certain Ottoman and European writers.”44 If we trace all that was borrowed and exchanged, moreover, we would have to include ideologies of color and of slavery, both of which were shaped by long histories of contact. To take just one striking example, the belief that blackness as well as servitude were the result of Noah’s curse upon his son Ham (or Cham) is shared by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim com- mentaries from the fourth to the twelfth centuries, a period when black slavery became common in the area now referred to as the Middle East.45 The belief that one should not enslave someone of one’s own religion also entered medieval Christian communities as they confronted the threat of Islam, which had long held such a prohibition. This is most emphatically not to suggest that nothing changed as ideologies and practices crossed borders: if, on the one hand, Muslims and Christians shared assumptions about servitude and blackness, on the other, from the medieval period itself, Mus- lims and Jews were widely described in terms of both blackness and servitude by white Christians. So also the story of Noah’s sons was modulated to suggest an overlap between slaves and non-Christians: “From Shem and

Loomba / Race and Global Contact 603 Japhet come the gentile Christians, and from Cham, the villains which the Christians may give away, or sell as they do other chattels.”46 It is worth not- ing that medieval texts, such as Andrew Horne’s (ca. 1290) just quoted, were often translated and published in English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and circulated and consumed not as “histories” but as contemporary documents.47 Thus the central tenets of early modern European slavery were formulated by both repeating and reformulating medieval as well as non-European ideologies of difference. While tracing early modern ideologies, it is useful to consider recent scholarship on “connected histories,” which challenges the spatial and temporal logic of Eurocentric historiography in another way. Colonial historiography produced internalist accounts of Europe, but also dictated that the rest of the world followed “its own internal rhythms” until it was incorporated into the imperial world.48 Thus, precolonial (sixteenth- and seventeenth-century) India is routinely designated “medieval” rather than “early modern.”49 Such an India cannot be brought into the same analytical frame as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, understood as “Renaissance” or “early modern.” Today, revisionist scholars of South Asia and Ottoman Turkey have begun to challenge this periodization because they have started to undertake comparative work and to rethink global relationships of the period.50 Suraiya Faroqhi argues that there were greater intersections between the different “world economies” (such as Europe and the Ottoman Empire) than has been allowed by world-systems theorists like Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein; both regions are part of a shared context “that, for lack of a better term, we may call ‘early modern.’ ” 51 Like Faroqhi, Sanjay Subrahmanyam challenges Braudel’s and Wallerstein’s understanding that Europe was the birthplace of modernity because it occu- pied a dominant position in the global economy. However, he does not simply invert this logic and place India or China at the center of the early modern world, as does Gunder Frank. Instead, he argues that “the history of modernity is itself global and conjunctural, not a history in which Europe alone first produces and then exports modernity to the world at large.”52 To provincialize Europe we do not need to establish Europe’s provincialism, but rather to reveal its intersections with the rest of the world.53 Literary and cultural criticism can benefit from, but also add to, the accounts of early modernity offered by world-systems theorists or economic historians, who have not had much to say about the connections and ruptures made visible by literature, or by ideologies of racial difference. Like literary forms, racial ideologies are shaped by global interactions, but also by

604 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.3 / 2007 conversations with the past. Both follow a nonlinear movement, a repetition that is more than a simple reiteration, a return that also signals future desire. Any “early modernity” they indicate is articulated in both old accents and new and maps different kinds of interactions between periods and across cultures.

Romance, race, and global contact

It is now a critical commonplace that, as a Moor who converts to and defends Christianity, Othello is emblematic of the porous boundaries of and exchanges between otherwise warring territories of the early modern world. But in Europe, and especially in England, border-crossings were usually imagined as traffic in the other direction — Christians, pirates, or merchants shamelessly “turning Turk” to gain access to Mediterranean ports, and a Turkish empire upheld “by the strength and power of soldiers which have been Christians, and now turned to Mahumet’s religion, so that even their own natural language is now out of use among them.”54 By the sixteenth century, moreover, Ottoman sultans had abandoned the practice of dynas- tic marriage, preferring to procreate entirely with kidnapped and enslaved Christian women, so that even future sultans were borne by converted Christians. Indeed, the sultan’s top soldiers, the mothers of his children, and his chief ministers were all drawn from a slave elite, so that John Foxe was not being merely polemical in pointing out that “there are few now remain- ing, which are Turks indeed by birth and blood.”55 In Europe, the liaisons of Christian women with Muslim men were usually portrayed as sagas of “Moorish” lust and cruelty, such as the widely circulating tale of Irene the fair Greek, who was adored and then slain by a Turkish sultan. The audacity of Desdemona’s speech, in which she describes her marriage to Othello in terms of the normative passage of a woman from her father to her husband, would have been readily apparent to a contemporary audience.56 In reality, the alliances of Christian women and “Moor- ish” lords, albeit rooted in violence, could also be mutually passionate, and crucial to East-West diplomacy. Hurrem Sultan, the haseki (or favorite slave concubine) of the powerful Ottoman emperor Suleyman I (r. 1520 – 66), was well known in Europe by her Christian name, Rosa or Roxolana. Although by this time Ottoman rulers did not marry, Suleyman made Hurrem his legal wife when, after being manumitted by him, she refused to share his bed on the grounds that it was sinful for a free woman to cohabit outside wedlock. Hurrem became an important advisor to Suleyman, and her inti-

Loomba / Race and Global Contact 605 mate letters to her husband included political advice as well as declarations of love.57 European as well as Ottoman commentators, both contemporary and of later times, regarded her as inaugurating a manipulative “sultanate of women,” which ultimately brought about the downfall of the Turkish Empire. In his influential Generall History of the Turkes, Richard Knolles follows the famous Ottoman historian Mustafa Ali in holding Roxolana responsible for poisoning her husband’s mind and having his eldest son killed so that her own could inherit the throne; like Ali, Knolles attributes her hold over Suleyman to magic.58 Men across racial and political lines can share views about the dangers of female duplicity; just as Othello and Iago agree that women’s deceit is masked by their fair exteriors, Ali and Knolles both regard Roxolana as an example of such women. Knolles reproduces her picture, warning against the “hateful thoughts” and “deadly poisons” that can be masked behind “fairest lookes” (see fig. 1).59 Knolles also effaces her origins — as does William D’Avenant’s 1656 play, The Siege of Rhodes, which rewrites the 1522 battle in which Suleyman I captured the island — so that Roxolana comes to exemplify Oriental deception. In D’Avenant’s play, Roxolana even declares that she is “no European Queen, / Who in a Throne does sit but to be seen.”60 She is contrasted with the modest Christian beauty Ianthe, who insists that only her husband can lift her veil, and captures the heart of Suleyman so that he finally returns Rhodes to Christians. In practice, women played go-between, but in a very different way from the role given to them in the plays. Hurrem’s daughter-in-law, Nur Banu, the haseki and then wife of Suleyman’s son Selim II (r. 1566 – 74), and Safiye, the equally powerfulhaseki of Nur Banu’s son Murad II (r. 1574 – 95), were also kidnapped Christian women. Both had stable and passionate relationships with their husbands, and, like Hurrem before them, both were very important for the Europeans in their dealings with the Ottomans.61 Despite its knowledge that there was no such person, the Venetian senate encouraged Nur Banu’s claims that she was Cecilia Venier-Baffo, the ille- gitimate daughter of a Venetian aristocratic family; the senate could then expect, and indeed pay large sums of money for, her advocacy of Venetian interests.62 From Nur Bano’s perspective, a Venetian aristocratic heritage not only brought her prestige and wealth, it also gave her an identity she craved, being in reality a girl from the Venetian colony of Corfu. The irony is that these women, in some senses double border-crossers, are barely discussed by Ottoman commentators, so that historians have to rely on contemporary European accounts for their stories, however biased their perspectives may be.63 The women’s own voices are largely but not entirely absent from

606 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.3 / 2007 Figure 1. Roxolana, from Richard Knolles, Reproduced by permission of A Generall History of The the University of Illinois, Turkes (London, 1603), 759. Urbana-Champaign. the historical archive; we have some of Safiye’s letters to Queen Elizabeth I, repeatedly promising that she will advocate the cause of English merchants at the Turkish court, and detailing her exchange of gifts with the English queen.64 Queenly exchanges across religious, national, and color lines have profoundly shaped the history of Western romance.65 Not only does Euro- pean romance deal with such intercultural crossovers, it is, as a form and as a strategy, also the product of such crossovers.66 Contact between Christians and Muslims in Asia Minor in the ninth century was expressed in A Thousand and One Nights, on the one side, and in the Byzantine Digenes Akrites, on the other.67 In Digenes Akrites, Mousour, an Arab emir, converts to Christianity in order to marry Eirene, a beautiful Christian woman; their child, Digenes, thus unites two different groups of people. In depicting this cultural mixing,

Loomba / Race and Global Contact 607 the poem incorporates several elements from Arab and Turkish romances and histories and, in turn, influences later European tellings of border- crossings.68 One of the features that persists is a Muslim mother who questions her son’s conversion and fears that it will lead to a loss of their own heritage; in Digenes Akrites, the questioning is mild, and the lady ultimately converts. In Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale (1387 – 1400), the Sultan’s mother organizes a mass murder, not sparing even her own son, in order to thwart his union with a Christian woman and protect “the holy lawes of oure Alcoran.”69 The name “Eirene” is retained in early modern stories about Christian damsels romanced by Muslim men, where, unlike in Digenes Akrites, the men do not convert but murder the Irene-figure.70 A Thousand and One Nights tells the story of Ali Nur al-Din, who loves Miriam the girdle girl, actually the daughter of the king of France; such liaisons are mir- rored in French stories where Muslim princesses love Christian men. While the direction of conversion may be different, A Thousand and One Nights shares with some of the European tales a horror of blackness and miscegenation; indeed, the entire corpus of tales is framed by the story of two kings who discover that their queens are illicitly coupling with black men. In medieval and early modern literature, willing queenly conversions become shorthand for military victory. War and love are cast as over- lapping not antithetical activities.71 In The Song of Roland (ca. 1100), when Charlemagne’s victorious forces take Sargossa, they search synagogues and mosques, shatter all the “statues” and “idols,” and forcibly convert “more than a hundred thousand” into True Christians, with the exception of the queen. She will be led a captive to fair France; The king wants her through love to take the faith.72

Although “love” here refers to love of Christianity rather than of a man, the two are widely conflated in romances of conversion. The dynamic is captured by the early-fourteenth-century The King of Tars and the Soudan of Damas, in which an Armenian princess marries a Tartar khan in order to effect a peace between the two cultures. Their child is born a shapeless lump of flesh but is miraculously transformed by a Christian baptism. The father also converts to Christianity, his black skin is transformed to white, and he becomes a militant crusader himself. The most famous telling of this story is Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, in which the beautiful Custance marries and converts both the king of Syria and the king of Northumberland to

608 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.3 / 2007 Christianity; the latter union is eventually successful in converting an entire population and producing an heir.73 Whereas early modernists have been turning East to indicate a pre- colonialist past, medievalists are less squeamish about naming these stories as protocolonialist fantasies compensating for the historical failure of military prowess. Geraldine Heng argues that religious conversion is a name for the will-to-power of a dominant civilization and the inflicting of its practices, institutions, and cultures upon a subordinate, recipient civilization, whose own native practices, institutions, and cultures are concomitantly weakened through the invasive imposition.74

While early modernists have rightly been at pains to unsettle the idea of Christianity as a “dominant” power and Muslim nations as a “subordinate” civilization in premodern times, we can certainly see strategies of appropria- tion and fantasies of power in these romances. Dorothee Metlitzki also suggests that geographic distance exacerbates the idea of cultural and religious difference, so that the English romances are much more intolerant than the Arab and Byzantine ones.75 Scores of early modern English plays, civic pageants, and masques continued to yoke stories of mercantile or colonial ventures with interracial sexual relations and/or religious conversions.76 On the one hand, like the medieval romance of conversion, they imagine European/Christian mastery over the East as the romantic and religious surrender of a high-born or royal, but always fair, foreign woman. On the other, the threat to Europe takes the form of theft of white Christian womanhood. As in the earlier period, these dramas mediate global relations of the time, which can be understood only by bringing into simultaneous focus the histories and contemporary forms of material and ideological exchange and borrowing as well as the equally long and complicated histories of difference as precipitated by intercultural and international contact. Early modernists largely ignore earlier histories and literatures in their analysis of this literature. Thus, they con- clude that English Renaissance drama was avant-garde in disseminating a racial vocabulary that was otherwise not widely in evidence or was at odds with the global power relations of the time.77 But the medieval romance of conversion shows us that it was possible to have stereotyping of the Muslim even when the relationship between East and West was not as asymmetrical as it became in the colonial period.78 I suggest that what appears as avant-

Loomba / Race and Global Contact 609 garde in early modern literature about the East is a reworking of a legacy, a memory formed by hostility and exchange, love, and fear, over several centuries, shaped most persistently by literature and repeatedly evoked to manage new anxieties. None of these plays can be understood only in relation to emergent discourses of English nationalism. The privileging of nationalism obscures the simultaneous consolidation of a transnational European identity with religious as well as racial connotations. “Crusading ideology and emotions,” Christopher Tyerman reminds us, did not decline with the end of formal crusading but “infected other sorts of warfare in a process from which emerged the sanctified patriotism distinctive of the late medieval and early modern Europe.”79 Writers from John Foxe to Fulke Greville worried about a divided Christendom “while these Turkes climbing up united staires . . . / leave us as to the Jewish bondage heirs.”80 Precisely to project a pan-national brotherhood, Christian heroes in early modern plays are often cast as Catho- lic and Iberian, and as chivalric knights of an older mold, rather than the merchants or pirates of contemporary English ventures in the East, as in Philip Massinger’s The Renegado (1624) and John Fletcher’s The Island Prin- cess (1621). Like a number of other plays, notably Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1594), Nathan Field, Philip Massinger, and John Fletcher’s The Knight of Malta (1618) evokes crusading history, as Christian soldiers from a variety of European nations collectively face the Ottoman enemy. In imagining a pan-national Christian community, these dramas play with time and space, realigning non-European and European histories. For example, Othello brings together the 1570 Turkish attack on Cyprus with the 1522 siege of Rhodes, while Thomas Kyd’s Solyman and Perseda (1592) entirely eliminates the forty-four years that lapsed between the fall of Rhodes and the death of Soliman, in order to show him dying upon a kiss from the poisoned lips of Perseda. Early modern plays also strategically replay the Muslim threat; William Rowley’s All’s Lost by Lust (1633) evokes the Muslim conquest of Spain as the black Mulymumen is crowned “the first of Moores that ere was King of Spain.”81 In these plays, Christians must learn to bury their differences and form a community, as well as strategically to incorporate outsiders. Thus, they anxiously stage disruptions posed to the community from within even as they feature an external (usually Muslim) threat. The boorish and inef- fectual Portuguese Ruy Diaz in The Island Princess, the renegade English pirate Grimaldi in The Renegado, and the French knight Monteferrat in The Knight of Malta must be overcome or integrated back into the fold. (In The

610 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.3 / 2007 Jew of Malta earlier, Christian unity is also premised on vanquishing internal and external enemies, but there the former, represented by the Jew, cannot be appropriated in quite the same way.)82 As in the medieval romance, political alliances and ruptures take the form of sexual and romantic desire, as well as marital unions. In The Knight of Malta, the Ottoman military threat is ampli- fied by Sultan Suleyman’s desire for the beautiful Oriana. Sought by a variety of Christian knights, Oriana is finally married to the Spaniard Gomera, producing a child who, it is imagined, will grow up to “toss a Turk.”83 If this marriage hints at a pan-Christian unity, the machinations of Monteferrat threaten to disrupt it. Historically, the French faced accusations of double standards because they continued to affiliate themselves with the Knights of Malta even as France had a much-critiqued and long-lasting alliance with the Turks. Monteferrat’s lover and ally is the black Zanthia, in her “black shape, and blacker actions / Being hels perfect character” (4.1; 136). Zanthia is also referred to by the Muslim name “Abdella,” a conflation of color and religion that is typical of these romances, inherited and reworked from the medieval tradition. Counterposed to her is Lucinda, “A Turkish captive of incompa- rable beauty / And without question, in her Countrey Noble” (3.2; 121), who is wooed and converted by the Christian Collona, “pittying such a beauteous case should hide / A soule prophan’d with infidelity” (5.2; 160). In medieval as well as early modern romances, religious difference is persistently manifested in terms of color. But there are telling differences between the earlier and later texts which are crucial for understanding the changes in racial ideologies, and their organic connection with questions of faith, gender, and nation. In medieval texts, white Christian women can convert infidels, and produce Christian children with them, and conversion can whiten infidels, as in The King of Tars or the thirteenth-century Cursor Mundi. Othello cannot be whitened, and his future children with Desde- mona are described as the beastly products of an unnatural union. In fact, with the exception of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, there are no children born of black-white unions on the early modern stage. In play after play, white female bodies are both the bulwark against, and a vulnerable gateway for, Muslim and black invasions. Accordingly, the biggest threat to the formation of a European community in early modern drama is the potential capitulation of white women to Muslim or black men. In Thomas Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion (first performed in 1600, although not published until 1657), it is the Queen Mother of Spain whose “amorous flames” for the Moor Eleazar threaten to “make all Spain a bonefire”; such flames can only be quenched by the expulsion of all Moors from the land.84

Loomba / Race and Global Contact 611 In this play, Spain is the scene of widespread miscegenation, but it is also, reassuringly, the site of an ethnic cleansing. The ideal female go-between is one who both attracts Muslims and guards herself from them, as in Kyd’s Solyman and Perseda. This play opens by evoking the cosmopolitan world of medieval romance, where Turks from Tripolis, “the Knight of Malta,” and “the Moore upon his hot Barbarian horse” can joust together.85 In this world, Erastus, in trouble at home, can flee to Turkey to which the passage [is] short, The people warlike, and the king renownd, For all heroiyicall and kingly virtues. (2.1.265 – 67)

The Turkish king values Erastus and makes him the captain of his Janis- saries. Here ends any similarity with earlier worlds. Precisely because the play goes back to the 1522 siege of Rhodes in which Suleyman I captured the island, Erastus must insist that he cannot turn against his own island, even though he can engage “the Persians or the barbarous Moore” on behalf of the Turks (3.1.130). Although Soliman honors this request, their friend- ship cannot survive Soliman’s uncontrollable desire for Erasmus’s beloved Perseda. Unlike the medieval Constance, her early modern sisters cannot effect group conversions, and they must not cohabit with the alien monarchs who are captured by their beauty, must not, in fact, either breed with or convert them. Christian men, on the other hand, remain successful win- ners of Eastern high-born women, who, like Donusa in The Renegado and Quisara in The Island Princess, are sexually forthright and exceptionally fair, although their beauty is in constant danger of being besmirched by their faith. Notably, both women convert only after their Christian suitors have been shown to come dangerously close to turning Turk. Evoked in a context where international “traffic” was seen to result in dangerous kinds of “turning,” these older images, languages, and tropes are more than just repetitions. The tendency to express religious difference in somatic vocabularies, to explain color in terms of faith, or even to depict Muslims as black, came to suggest that both belief and body are unchangeable and explain one another. In All’s Lost by Lust, Iacinta describes the prospect of marrying the black Mulymumen as a “second hell / A Chris- tians armes embrace an infidel” (4.1.183 – 84), telling him later that “Thine inside’s blacker than thy sooty skin” (5.5.15). In Lust’s Dominion, Eleazor refers to himself as “a Moore. A Devill / A slave of Barbary, a dog,” asserting at the same time that despite his skin being “tawny,” in his

612 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.3 / 2007 veines, Runs blood as red, and royal as the best And proud’st in Spain. (1.2.154 – 56)

But the play makes clear that Eleazor’s blood is in fact different from the rest. When the Spanish king promises to banish all “Moors” from the land, his proclamation uses the language of skin color, not religious difference, to make the point: “it shall be death for any Negroes hand, / To touch the beauty of a Spanish dame” (3.2.48 – 49).

I am suggesting that the conflation of color and religion in early modern drama is no simple confusion arising from the double meaning of “Moor,” but is strategically deployed from time to time and serves the very precise function of indicating an unchanging inner essence. It is no accident that many of these plays are set in the context of Moorish-Christian sexual alliances in Spain, where Inquisition laws posited increasing distinctions between Moorish, Jewish, and Christian blood, precisely because it was not possible to distinguish visually between Christians and converts to Chris- tianity.86 To cast Muslims and Jews as literally black, or with other easily identifiable physical characteristics, was also to offer a reassurance that their difference could be easily identified. In so many of the places where we look for early modern histories of blackness, we find skin color intricately connected with the question of faith. Biblical passages, fables, and emblem books, which speak about the impossibility of whitening an “Ethiopian,” a “Man of Inde,” or a “blacka- moor,” do so by comparing blackness to the inflexible nature of “those who are accustomed to do evil,” or the “stubborn heart of heretics.”87 In fact, the subject here is often not blackness but the wicked or unbelieving heart; but of course the comparison serves to suggest that blackness is unchangeable and that it is accompanied by heresy or lack of faith. As ideologies of “racial” difference become more inflexible, there is both a repetition of older com- parisons of color with faith and a shift in their deployment. So, for example, when George Best suggests that blackness is not a result of the scorching of the skin by the sun, as was often supposed at the time, but a “curse and infection of blood” that is passed down through “lineal descent,” he reverts to the biblical story of Noah’s curse upon Ham as an explanation of blackness.88 Similarly, George Sandys argues that it is neither black people’s “seed, nor the heat of the climate” that is responsible for their color, because “other

Loomba / Race and Global Contact 613 races” will not become black in hot climates, nor will the black “race grow to better complexion [in cold climates]”; blackness emanates “rather from the curse of Noe upon Cham in the posterity of Chus.”89 Both Best and Sandys debunk the climate theory of color, both suggest that blackness is rooted in the blood, and yet both revert to the story of Ham in order to suggest that blackness originates in sinful behavior, which transmits itself over the generations. Any changes that we may want to chart in the racial ideologies of early modern England are unlikely to be made available through a narrow focus on the here and now, for the vocabularies of difference are culled from a wider world and an older time and then made to speak to the present or the future. Brabantio’s romancing of the Moorish warrior Othello and his antipathy toward the black man who wooed and won his daughter both have old and interconnected histories made manifest in the return of early modern plays to older scenarios of romance. But the scandal of Desdemona’s love for Othello lies in the play’s departure from all earlier and contemporary patterns, for in no other play does a virtuous white woman love a black man who will not be washed white. Brabantio’s dream thus revisits but also reshapes an old fantasy. It is in yoking and twisting two very old scenarios that Shakespeare responds to and inscribes newer attitudes to “difference.” Today we are often told that we now inhabit a world in which “culture” rather than “biology” is primary in defining our differences, that our “neoracism” is like premodern “protoracism,” and that both bookend an age of racism.90 But, I have tried to suggest, ideologies of difference have always connected the body with belief systems, biology with culture, albeit in vary- ing ways and to different effects. Early modern plays about the East remind us that the discourses of “modern” racism were shaped by vocabularies of love and war appropriated from worlds that are today regarded as being on the “other” side of temporal, ideological, and geographic borders. a

Notes

My thanks to David Wallace and Jennifer Summit for their encouragement and critical engagements with my work; to Zachary Lesser for many insightful suggestions; to Jonathan Burton, Margreta de Grazia, Valerie Traub, Walter Cohen, Benedict Rob- inson, Leah Marcus, Rita Copeland, Gordon McMullan, Hugh Grady, and David Brownlee for sharing their work and ideas; to audiences at the Universities of Pennsyl- vania, Stonybrook, and Cambridge, and at the World Shakespeare Congress in Bris-

614 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.3 / 2007 bane where this essay was presented; and to Suvir Kaul for engaging with this essay at every stage of its writing. 1 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” Foreign Affairs 72.3 (1993): 22 – 49. 2 Wafa Sultan, “For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats,” New York Times, March 11, 2006, Saturday Profile, 1. 3 The former is exemplified by Lisa Lampert, “Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo-) Mid- dle Ages,” Modern Language Quarterly 65 (2004): 391 – 422; the latter by Gerald M. MacLean, ed., Re-Orienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 4 “You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.” Anton Chekhov, Letters of Anton Chekhov, trans. Michael Henry Heim with Simon Karlinsky (London: Bodley Head, 1973), 117, letter to Alexei Suvorin, October 27, 1888 (emphasis in the original). 5 William Shakespeare, Othello 1.1.143 – 45, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Further citations will be given parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line numbers. 6 Eric Griffin, “Un-sainting James: Or,Othello and the ‘Spanish Spirits’ of Shake- speare’s Globe,” Representations 62 (Spring 1998): 52 – 99. 7 Leah S. Marcus, “The Two Texts of Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Race,” in Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama, ed. Lukas Erne and Margaret Jane Kidney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 21 – 36, at 24 – 25. 8 Ibid., 33. 9 I thank Zachary Lesser for reminding me of this point. 10 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Colonial Differ- ence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 248. 11 Joyce Chaplin, “Race,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500 – 1800, ed. David Armit- age and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 154 – 72. See also Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Race,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 274 – 87; Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 31; Roberto Bernasconi and Tommy Lee Lott, The Idea of Race (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000); Brian Niro, Race (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 12 Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern (London: Verso, 1997). 13 Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Ethnos and Circumcision in the Pauline Tradition: A Psycho- analytical Exegesis,” in The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 193 – 210, at 206 – 7. 14 My argument here follows Fredric Jameson’s well-known formulation: “if interpreta- tion in terms of expressive causality or of allegorical master narratives remains a constant temptation, this is because such master narratives have inscribed themselves in

Loomba / Race and Global Contact 615 texts as well as in our thinking about them: such allegorical narrative signifieds are a persistent dimension of literary and cultural texts precisely because they reflect a fun- damental dimension about our collective thinking and our collective fantasies about history and reality.” The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 34. 15 For examples of this view among early modern, Restoration, and eighteenth-century criticism, see John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 25; Bridget Orr, Empire on the English Stage, 1 6 6 0 – 1 7 1 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 18; Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Wheeler rightly takes issue with histories of race that begin in the nineteenth century and privilege skin color, but curiously concludes that those who trace racism back to the sixteenth century are guilty of making antiblack racism a “constant feature of white people’s psyche” and of disregarding historical change (300). 16 Medievalists, on the other hand, stress continuity. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonialism and Cultural Change, 950 – 1350 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), concludes that “the mental habits and institutions of European racism and colonialism were born out of the medieval world” (313). 17 David Wallace, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004), 189. 18 David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject,’ ” in Culture and History, 1350 – 1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing, ed. Aers (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 177 – 202. 19 Thus, John Gillies suggests that Shakespeare’s “world view” was shaped by the legacy of classical literature rather than the “new geography,” not because Shakespeare was less intimate with cartographic advances than his contemporaries, but because “in the Shakespearean moment, the old geography had the advantage of . . . ‘the power of forms,’ of historically entrenched mythological and rhetorical forms” (Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, 36). 20 Margreta de Grazia, “When Did Hamlet Become Modern?” Textual Practice 17 (2003): 485 – 504, at 491. 21 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Table Talk and Omniana, ed. T. Ashe (London: G. Bell, 1923), 15. 22 Peter Hulme, “Beyond the Straights: Postcolonial Allegories of the Globe,” in Postco- lonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 41 – 61, at 42. 23 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (London: Free Association Press, 1987). 24 W. Montgomery Watt, Muslim-Christian Encounters: Perceptions and Misperceptions (London: Routledge, 1991), 94 – 95. 25 Maria Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heri- tage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 7.

616 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.3 / 2007 26 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia Univer- sity Press, 2003), 9. 27 Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54 – 68; and Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (Lon- don: Verso, 2005), 1, 4. 28 Judith Halberstam, “The Death of English,” Inside Higher Ed, May 9, 2005, at http:// www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/05/09/halberstam(Mar. 26, 2007); Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 108 n. 1. 29 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage Books, 1994), 36, 59 – 60. 30 Aers, “A Whisper.” 31 Jean E. Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 13 – 43, at 25. 32 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 57. Even when Foucault regretted this formulation, he continued to think in terms of a geographic divide between “our” culture and “theirs.” 33 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7. 34 Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 116. 35 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, a.d. 1 2 5 0 – 1 3 5 0 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 12; Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 36 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Mod- ern World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). 37 The phrase is from Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. 38 Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579 – 1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 39, 45. Burton’s discussion is useful in the light of current debates on how Western critics can engage with non-Western materials. 39 Daniel J. Vitkus, introduction to Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 7. Such a thesis comes close to simply invert- ing Huntington’s explanation for Muslim attitudes toward the West today. 40 Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 61. 41 This can happen on various grounds — that England was not yet a colonial power, or that it was eager to trade with Muslim lands, or that its enmity with Spain and Catholicism was primary; see Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Emily C. Bartels, “Othello and Africa: Postcolonialism Reconsidered,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 54 (1997): 45 – 64; Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 42 See Benedict Robinson’s perceptive analysis of this in Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (New York: Palgrave Mac- millan, 2007). 43 Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World around It (London: I. B. Tauris, 2 0 0 4 ) , 1 7 6 – 7 7.

Loomba / Race and Global Contact 617 44 Ibid., 24. 45 James Sweet suggests that Christians learned to disparage blackness from Iberian Muslims, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 54 (1997): 143 – 66. Robin Blackburn, Making of a New World Slavery, offers a more nuanced evaluation. 46 Andrew Horne, The Mirrour of Justices, ed. William C. Robinson (Washington, D.C.: John Byrne, 1903), 124. 47 Many such documents are reproduced and discussed in Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton, eds., Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). I am grateful to Jonathan Burton with whom I have thought through so many of these ideas. 48 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, From the Tagus to the Ganges (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 4. 49 So hegemonic is this periodization that it is reproduced by scholars who otherwise challenge dominant cultural assumptions, such as Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000); and Susie J. Tharu and K. Lalita, eds., Women Writing in India: 600 b.c. to the Present (Delhi: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1993). 50 Subrahmanyam, From the Tagus to the Ganges, 4; Faroqhi, Ottoman Empire, 1 1 – 2 5 . 51 Faroqhi, Ottoman Empire, 11. 52 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century,” Representa- tions 91 (Summer 2005): 26 – 57, at 28. 53 Hence, whereas Dipesh Chakrabarty claims that spaces not fully interpolated in Western modernity are marked by multiple temporalities, Subrahmanyam is at pains to establish a single temporal frame across regions often treated as not only culturally but also temporally distinct. 54 John Foxe, Second Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History Containing the Acts and Monu- ments of Martyrs (London, 1641), 964. 55 Ibid.; Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 72. I am indebted to Peirce’s account of the royal women. 56 See Othello 1 . 3 . 1 8 5 – 8 8 : So much duty as my mother showed To you, preferring you before her father So much I challenge that I may profess Due to the Moor my lord. 57 Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 105. See also Peirce, Imperial Harem, chaps. 3 and 4. 58 For Ali’s views, see Pierce, Imperial Harem, 89, 308 n. 157. 59 Richard Knolles, A Generall History of the Turkes (London, 1603), 759. 60 William D’Avenant, The Siege of Rhodes 2.2, in The Dramatic Works of Sir William D’Avenant, vol. 3 (Edinburgh, 1873). This edition has no line numbers. 61 See S. A. Skilliter, “Three Letters from the Ottoman ‘Sultana’ Safiye to Queen Eliza- beth I,” in Documents from Islamic Chanceries, First Series, ed. S. M. Stern (Oxford: Bruno Cassiere, 1965), 119 – 57; Pierce, Imperial Harem, chaps. 4 and 8.

618 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.3 / 2007 62 Benjamin Arbel, “Nur Banu (c. 1530 – 1583): A Venetian Sultana,” Turcica 24 (1992): 24 1 – 59. 63 See Pierce, Imperial Harem, 1 1 3 – 1 8 . 64 Skilliter, “Three Letters.” 65 Here it is important to think about romance not just as a conventionally defined genre but in the Jamesian sense of a strategy that appears in a number of genres: F. M. War- ren, “The Enamored Moslem Princess in Orderic Vital and the French Epic,” PMLA 29 (1914): 341 – 58; Norman Daniel, The Arabs and Medieval Europe (London: Longman; Beirut: Libraire du Liban, 1975); Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Jacqueline de Weever, Sheba’s Daughters: Whitening and Demonizing the Saracen Woman in Medieval French Epic (New York: Garland, 1998); Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), chaps. 1 and 4. 66 Walter Cohen queries the separation of European and non-European literatures in a different way. He suggests that Cervantes’s engagements with the Muslim world are not to be traced so much in his overt treatment of Islam, as in the very form adopted by his novel Don Quijote, which draws its formal lineage from the novella and the frame tale, all shaped by Arabic, Persian, and Indian materials: “In short, the origins of what is arguably the quintessential European form lie in north Africa and south- western and south Asia.” Cohen, “Don Quijote and the Intercontinental History of the Novel,” Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar 4 (2004), at http://eserver .org/emc/1-4/cohen.html (Mar. 26, 2007). 67 Metlitzki’s Matter of Araby makes this important point. 68 John Mavrogordato, ed., introduction to Digenes Akrites (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), lxxii. 69 Geoffrey Chaucer,Th e Tale of the Man of Lawe 2.332 (London, 1884), 35. 70 See, for example, William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure (1567) (London, 1890), 197; Knolles, History of the Turks, 350. 71 Sharon Kinoshita, “The Politics of Courtly Love: La Prise d’Orange and the Conver- sion of the Saracen Queen,” Romanic Review 86 (1995): 265 – 87. 72 The Song of Roland, lines 3671 – 74, trans. D. D. R. Owen (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boy- dell Press, 1990), 143. 73 Precisely because King Alla of Northumberland is not a Muslim, his conversion underlines the failure of Custance’s Syrian voyage. 74 Heng, Empire of Magic, 183. Kinoshita, “Politics,” 267, also indicates a “medieval colonialism” at work in such narratives. 75 Metlitzki, Matter of Araby, 167. 76 Burton, Traffic and Turning, 257 – 58, provides a helpful list; and Samuel Chew, The Crescent and The Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), summarizes many such plays (chaps. 10 and 11). 77 Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, 13, makes the point in relation to Moors; Peter Berek, “The Jew as Renaissance Man,” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 128 – 62, suggests the same in the case of Jews.

Loomba / Race and Global Contact 619 78 The stereotyping need not be negative — as medievalists well recognize, the figures of the malignant and the glamorous Arab can go hand in hand, so that the latter is not necessarily an index of smooth relationships between cultures. 79 Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095 – 1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 324. 80 Fulke Greville, “A Treatie of Warres,” in Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes of the Right Honorable Fulke Lord Brooke (London, 1633), 82. 81 William Rowley, All’s Lost by Lust 5.4.204, in William Rowley, His “All’s Lost by Lust” and “A Shoemaker, a Gentleman,” ed. Charles Wharton Stork (Philadelphia: Univer- sity of Pennsylvania, 1910). Further citations will be given parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line numbers. 82 Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2004), 81 – 114, also demonstrates how the play’s publication history in the 1630s reveals a desire for Christian unity, albeit shaped by more national religious debates. 83 The Knight of Malta 5.1, in The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), 150. This edition has no line numbering. Further citations will be given parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and page number. 84 Thomas Dekker, Lust’s Dominion or The Lascivious Queen 1.1.194, 196, in The Dra- matic Works of Thomas Dekker, vol. 4, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). Further citations will be given parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line numbers. It is worth mentioning that this play was long attributed to Marlowe, perhaps because its Moorish theme reverberated with both Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta. 85 Thomas Kyd, The Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda 1.1.53 – 56, ed. John J. Murray (New York: Garland, 1991). Further citations will be given parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line numbers. “Solyman” appears in the book’s title but the name is spelt “Soliman” throughout the play. 86 George Mariscal, “The Role of Spain in Contemporary Race Theory,” Arizona Jour- nal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 2 (1998): 7 – 23; Jerome Friedman, “Jewish Conver- sion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws, and Reformation: A Revisionist View of Racial and Religious Anti-Semitism,” Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (1987): 3 – 2 9 . 87 Jeremiah 13:23 – 25, in the Geneva Bible (1560), Bishop’s Bible (1568), and the King James or Authorized Version (1611); “Impossible Things,” in The Emblems of Thomas Palmer: Two Hundred Poosees, Sloane MS 3794, ed. John Manning (New York: AMS Press, 1988), 56; Geffrey Whitney,A Choice of Emblems (Leiden, 1586), 57. 88 George Best, A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discovery (London, 1578), 24 – 2 6 . 89 George Sandys, “Relations of Africa,” in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. 6 (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1905), 213. 90 Etienne Balibar, “Is There a Neo-racism?” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Waller- stein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991), 17 – 28, offers the most sophisticated version of this argument. Balibar does not counterpose biology to culture but suggests that culture can function “like a nature” in becoming an inflexible barrier between peoples (23).

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