The Invention of Race and the Postcolonial Renaissance

Abstract

An academic generation before mine, early modern studies, although primarily based in the global north, became the beneficiary of ground-making work along two key intellectual strands emerging from wider connections. First, there was the rich scholarship in premodern critical race studies, with Kim Hall, Ian Smith, Margo Hendricks, and Ayanna Thompson, among others, using the towering intellectual energies of US-based but transatlantic-movement-informed intersectional Black studies. Second, therewas the influence of globe-spanning, globequestioning, postcolonial studies—with Eldred Jones, Imtiaz Habib, Ania Loomba, Jyotsna Singh, and Poonam Trivedi, among others, variously using the works of such intellects as Stuart Hall, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. It is impossible to overstate how deeply this energization of early modern studies as a field has contributed to its continued presence and appeal, even urgency, in the twenty-first century. Without these late-twentieth-century foundations in critical race and postcolonial studies, early modern studies today would have been a far more provincial field than it is, and even more invested in white supremacist fantasies of insular excellence. And arguably, none of the new and generative directions of study, such as of eco-critical early modernisms, transnational early modernisms, borderland and migration studies, global performance studies, food studies, critical book history, Chicanx studies, Dalit Shakespeares, Indigenous studies, and critical disability studies would have found a substrate here on which to grow and build. (See, for instance, new and emerging work by scholars such as Ashley Sarpong, Lubaaba Al-Azami, Noémie Ndiaye, Ruben Espinosa, Alexa Alice Joubin, Amrita Sen, Jennifer Park, Brandi K. Adams, Laura Lehua Yim, Vijetha Kumar, Justin Shaw, and others operating in these emerging streams of study.) However, one of the challenges of scholarly work along the UK-US-axis—and this axis remains the most powerful in my field—is the resistance to widespread discussions of the interlocked legacies of colonialism and capitalism that still shape our world. The United Kingdom, with its deep colonial bequest, is so eager