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 differ- ent 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, repre- sented 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 question- ing 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 impe- rial 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.

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