The Renaissance of Race and the Future of Early Modern Race Studies

Abstract

I n reflecting on the state of Renaissance studies, I want to begin by thinking about the terms in which we frame this inquiry. In addition to examining the state of the field, what does it mean to interrogate the state of the field? To interpret a “state” as a material or immaterial condition, a state of affairs, offers perhaps themost conventional way of addressing this question. Such a state is necessarily temporally specific and bound, and later in this essay I shall turn to thinking about possible directions for the field and the alternate ways in which we might conceive of futures or futurity. But without being glib, I also want to register the pun on “state” which is, for me, activated here: a state not only as a condition, but as an entity, a polity, an inclusive but also exclusive and sometimes impenetrable space. The project of analyzing the state of the field might offer the possibility of studied neutrality, of careful examination and dispassionate assessment—or conversely, of the opportunity to remove oneself from the position of neutral inquiry, and think instead in the terms of interpellation, even implication. I write in a moment, of course, when the nation state is under increasing pressure from the frighteningly ascendant forces of nationalism and nativism. To harp on the assonances between the nation state and a disciplinary “state”may seem facile or pedantic on the one hand, or unhelpfully polemical or political on the other. And as an untenured, tenuretrack scholar, and an immigrant, I am all too aware of my simultaneous precarity and privilege. But I do so, firstly, in order to underscore the ways in which Renaissance studies may operate as a disciplinary apparatus in its own right, may display and police its own boundaries and borders. Secondly, to call attention to the interstices of Renaissance studies with questions of migration, borderlands, and language, to think about the place of