Spenser and Race: An Introduction

Abstract

ulture is not politically neutral. This is particularly true of the culture of the early modern period in which politics is engaged through poetic production. One need not be committed to the study of literature as a political project to recognize that poetry and culture are inherently political. David Norbrook suggested some time ago, “Certainly one should not deny the distinctions between poetry and other forms of discourse. But in the Renaissance these distinctions were by no means as absolute as they become in Romantic theory. . . . The issue is not so much why one should politicize poetry as why critics have for so long been trying to depoliticize it.” Edmund Spenser was invested in the use of poetry as a vehicle for the transmission of political ideas. His politics were deeply embedded in the English colonial project, and we have both argued elsewhere, “the politics and economics that ultimately produced settler colonialism, chattel slavery, the forced migration of peoples, and the development of the British empire animate . . . early English texts.” Spenser’s poetry and politics have different afterlives, and the ideologies that pass through his works adhere to us today. Our bodies themselves signify according to cultural history; understanding what and how they signify requires attending to the histories that have been overlaid on them.When we transmit the terms and relations that produced these histories, we are not simply failing to unravel them, we are, to some extent, reproducing them. Over the past thirty years, early modern studies has been increasingly interested in the emergence of race as a category of identity, one that could variously demarcate groups of people along lines of lineage, nationality,