Scripts of Blackness

"Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism. In this book, Noâemie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques-black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)-in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them"--