Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature ed. by Carol Mejia LaPerle (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature ed. by Carol Mejia LaPerle Christina Kolias Carol Mejia LaPerle, ed., Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature (Tempe: ACMRS Press, 2022), vii + 221 pp., 4 ills. Carol Mejia LaPerle’s Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature is a welcome and noteworthy contribution to the Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) field, as it is the first collection to discuss race’s direct relationship to affect theory in early modernity. In recent years, there has been an increase in interest and resistance to the rich history of PCRS scholarship, which seeks to question the supposed universality of early modern canonical literature. La-Perle’s collection embodies a similar task, where the past contributes to present understandings of racial formation and race-making. What sets this collection apart is each scholar’s personal connection and racial investment in exposing white supremacy and its affective relations in early modern texts and culture. Each contributor, through their means of rhetorical resistance and reckoning, proves that affect is a powerful lens to investigate race. Considering “affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations” (Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010], 1), every chapter in this collection highlights not just the stark anti-Blackness of the period and its preservation of racist ideologies and categorizations but race’s many passionate affects that inform (un)belonging. Tracking the nuances of affect displays its variability as a verb and noun, where affect is expressive through thoughts (internal) and actions (external). Even LaPerle’s introductory reference to critical works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Fred Moten, and Calvin L. Warren draws attention to the collection’s focus on one retrospective question—how does race feel? The importance of feelings and passions in affect studies highlights the imbrication of externalized disgust and difference internalized by racialized subjects. Even though the collection analyzes early modernity’s attempts at dominance and disempowerment, the authors in this collection, as LaPerle notes, capture the spirit [End Page 250] of bell hooks’s “oppositional gaze.” Each contributor’s use of hooks’s gesture as methodology not only lays a foundation for the change they desire in the field but also, most importantly, illustrates the interplay between criticism and activism. The collection contains three equally balanced sections, each applying intersectional and/or cross-disciplinary lenses committed to uncovering racializing regimes and the importance of feeling race as evidenced in early modern literature and culture. The editor skillfully assembles a first-class group of contributors, including Margo Hendricks, whose foreword contextualizes the collection as a “next gen PCRS” (vii) project. As respected specialists in the field, these contributors provide intuitive readings that draw attention to a new vocabulary of affective distortion, where race is feeling and feeling is race because external stimuli affect interiority and vice versa. The first section critically analyzes how the language of early modern texts constructs racialized groups to be demonized, desired, disgusting, and/or feared. Ambereen Dadabhoy begins with a powerful yet personal opening chapter discussing Philip Massinger’s The Renegado and how it exposes a tradition of Islamophobia in what Dadabhoy calls the “staged Mediterranean,” as well as its relation to Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone.” Her chapter highlights the exclusionary traumas and affects early modern narratives carry when readers and scholars, like Dadabhoy herself, embody non-English, non-white, and non-European identities—identities, furthermore, that are classified as targets of imperial and xenophobic ambitions on page and stage. Mira ‘Assaf Kafantaris plays a pivotal role in thinking of affect as a similar means of control. She furthers themes of foreign contamination and infection in the canon and the risks they pose to white futurity. Similar to Dadabhoy’s exploration of race and beauty, Kafantaris’s analysis of Edmund Spenser’s linguistic warfare on Duessa’s foreign and disgusting queenship—compared to Una’s sentimental image of white Protestant virtue...