"An evill race": Utopia, Spenser, and the Dangers of Cultural Hybridity

Abstract

Abstract:The potential of interracial, interreligious, and intercultural mixing—that is, cultural hybridity—was a frequent source of anxiety in the literature of sixteenth-century England. Following the start of the Tudor conquest of Ireland, contemporary writers and makers of Anglo-Irish policy emphasized that Irish culture, especially its language, laws, and customs, was seen as debilitating to English hegemony and demanded eradication. This article examines Tudor attitudes toward colonialization and cultural hybridity in two texts, Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Edmund Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ire-land (1596), each of which focus on the position of one product of cultural intermarriage, the hybrid child. Through an interrogation of both More's portrayal of an idealized aftermath of colonial enterprise and Spenser's genocidal fantasy of English imperialism in Ire-land, I argue that cultural hybridity is simultaneously rendered integral and dangerous to the former and inherently destructive to the latter due to the ontological liminality of the hybrid child.