Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies A Critical Anthology [Hardcover]

Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies brings into conversation two fieldsEarly Modern Studies and Black Studiesthat traditionally have had little to say to each other. This disconnect is the product of current scholarly assumptions about a lack of archival evidence that limits what we can say about those of African descent before modernity. This volume posits that the limitations are not in the archives, but in the methods we have constructed for locating and examining those archives. The essays that make up this volume offer new critical approaches to black African agency and the conceptualization of blackness in early modern literary works, historical documents, material and visual cultures, and performance culture. Ultimately, this critical anthology revises current understandings about racial discourse and the cultural contributions of black Africans in early modernity and in the present across the globe.

1. Introduction: The Contours of a Field (Cassander L. Smith, Nicholas R. Jones, Miles P. Grier)

Part I. Space and Field

2. Maroons in the Montes: Towards a Political Ecology of Marronage in the Sixteenth ?Century Caribbean (Gabriel de Avilez Rocha)

3. Women/Animals/Slaves: Race and Sexuality in Wycherleys The Country Wife (Derrick Higginbotham)

Part II. Archives and Methods

4. Choreographies of Trans-Atlantic Primitivity: Sub-Saharan Isolation in Black Dance Historiography (Esther J. Terry)

5. Ventriloquizing Blackness: Citing Enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, 1655-1685 by Ashley Williard

6. Candy No Witch in Her Country: What One Enslaved Womans Testimony During the Salem Witch Trials Can Tell Us About the Origins of Early American Literature (Cassander L. Smith)

Part III. Period Tensions

7. Is Black SlÃ,