Ill-Will as Racialized Affect: Early Modern Volition, Critical Race Theory, and Shakespearean Ill-Will

Abstract

Abstract:Seventeenth-century accounts of will are a fundamental part of race-making. By reading critical race theory's interventions alongside early modern accounts of volition, I reveal the implications of social contract theorists' consideration of will as a means to calibrate one's relationship to power. Embedded within these discourses is a fundamental, rather than circumstantial, disavowal of participation in the commonweal. I theorize this category of exclusion as "ill-will," a selectively essentialized category that does not require empirical evidence but is instead a pre-emptive anticipation of threat.Ill-will marks relational incompatibility, an abnormal volition, attributed to racialized subjects. As a racializing mechanism in the early modern period, ill-will precludes civic participation. The essay concludes with considerations of how these categories of preclusion inform William Shakespeare's representations of race. Performances of volition, along with affects that the history of will attaches to intention, desire, and ability, are crucial features of Shakespeare's representation of ill-will as a racialized affect.