Kim F. Hall and the Mountain of Evidence
by Miles P. Grier
In her 1995 monograph Things of Darkness, Kim F. Hall threw open the archive doors, exposing dark foils, evocative Africanist figures against which British national identity could emerge in its classed, gendered, and ethnic varieties. As she later recounted in her essay “Othello and the Problem of Blackness,” gaining access to this archive can seem like running a gauntlet of cultural sentinels, from credentialed scholars who conduct peer review to lay people who take up a deputy’s duties.
Here is her recollection of a conversation with a customs agent at Heathrow airport:
“What brings you to London?”
“I am here to do research on Shakespeare’s Othello.”
“Well, let me ask you something. Othello’s a Moor, right? And a Moor is not really black, is he then? He would have been an Arab and not black at all.”
The customs agent in this story took a broad view of the job, guarding England’s physical border by pre-screening the cultural work to be conducted inside it. Hall’s access to the archives could very well have been limited, delayed, or blocked if this agent deemed her a fraud or a dangerous Black radical. Racial profiling of a nonlethal sort ensues, enforcing the notion that neither Black subjects nor Black eyes belong in an archive reserved “for British eyes only.” Hall’s accomplishment in Things of Darkness remains momentous for the ways that it outfoxes the proverbial sheriff and the deputies to conduct work in hostile territory and report back.
While there had been praiseworthy studies of race in drama of the English Renaissance and Restoration, Things of Darkness charted a multi-genre and multi-disciplinary course. Where her predecessors were primarily interested in plays in which nonwhite characters appear, Hall was after something else. Things of Darkness demonstrates that a “dark/light binary” structured English culture from travel literature, sonneteering, drama, portraiture, and personal jewelry.
Kim Hall hears Africanist figures shaking rattles on the borders of Milton’s theology and haunting fair women in the dialogue of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She finds them in the dim shadows of period portraits, trailing behind a great man’s horse or offering a taste of fruit to an elite woman. Her project is not so much one of a recovery of Africans’ subjectivities as it is an insistence that British imperial identity emerged in and through a linguistic, visual, and even sonic project of contrast with Africanist figures. Things of Darkness reveals the cultural prelude to the laws and violence that instituted Atlantic slavery.
Although we might say with certain Shakespearean witches that early modern Britons did “a deed without a name,” scholars now call that deed constructing whiteness. Whiteness is not, of course, a biological fact but the product of a social contest over property, pleasure, and protection. With so much on the line, neither whiteness nor its racial foils could ever be fixed. Indeed, white has remained the favored social category, even as the boundaries of whiteness have been renegotiated — and the bounty redistributed — to accommodate commoners, colonists, ethnic white workers, and white women demanding not to be treated like slaves.
Where etymologists and historians of science treated race as a concept, Hall gives us a view of racist culture in its everyday utility to those striving Britons. Her sensitivity to codes allows a contemporary reader to become a participant observer in the imperial and intramural contests that produced white identification. As historical anthropologists of England, we can study their strange rituals, their collective psychology, their unevolved science, their book and commodity fetishes. Hall’s children — and I am one — have been in pursuit of Black figures’ tremendous rhetorical value while some of our colleagues still think Black Studies will suffice with a headcount of negroes.
Hall’s book was positioned against a powerful prohibition which has largely remained unprinted. However, the historian Anthony Fletcher did voice it in a dismissive review: “Of course there were attitudes about Black bodies [during the English Renaissance]: Shakespeare and other writers bring them into the open.” These attitudes, Fletcher claimed, are a response to the presence of Black bodies and cannot serve the purposes of racial hierarchy until “a concept of races… has made some headway in the popular, or at least the intellectual mind.” Because the English had not yet attached the name “racism” to the social arrangements they were imposing, he contended that the book’s argument is “fundamentally misconceived” and based upon “virtually no historical material.” Virtually does a lot of work in that sentence, as it must nullify his (incomplete) list of the evidence she does bring to bear.
Fletcher tried to insist upon a proper history of ideas in which race becomes a legitimate topic of historical inquiry only when explicitly named and elaborated by intellectuals. His method requires a textual archive, which it designates as the sole location from which a scholar can access a singular national or intellectual “mind.” We are to disregard that intellectuals of any age tend to be peculiar specialists, not in tune with everyday thought. We are to forgo explaining how intellectuals’ ideas enter “the popular… mind” or how that abstract singularity should come to accept one expert notion and not another. We are to assume that beneficiaries of a social hierarchy spoke to themselves about it in that language and wanted subsequent generations to scrutinize their frank admissions.
Reading Fletcher’s dismissal of Hall’s research, I can’t help but recall that Things of Darkness appeared the same year as the infamous verdict in the O.J. Simpson criminal trial. A powerful image emerged to explain the acquittal: the jury who found Simpson not guilty was represented as poor, Black, and too uneducated to comprehend the “mountain of evidence” introduced by the prosecution’s experts. Never mind the two white people and one Latino who joined the unanimous verdict. The misrepresentation secured the rhetorical Blackness of the jury, which proved essential to invalidate the verdict as the product of people incapable of reasoning.
Yet the prosecution’s mountain had a twin peak. Far from scientifically illiterate, the jury might well have viewed the prosecution’s narrative in the shadow of a “mountain” of community knowledge. Their suspicions of corruption within the LAPD were viewed as baseless until the Rampart scandal unfolded in 1999 and revealed a practice of framing Black and Brown suspects so common that more than 100 convictions had to be thrown out. I’d call that a mountainous number of dismissals, proof that framing a Black suspect was a reasonable possibility.
Returning to view the impressive evidence Hall compiled and dissected across five chapters, I cannot help but think the objection was not that she had no evidence but that she was viewing it with what some deemed the wrong eyes. As Paul Gilroy reminds us, African people and their perspectives have traditionally had no place in a proper understanding of British national identity. Yet, it seems we should hold scholars to a higher standard than that to which we hold soccer fanatics chanting “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack, send the bastards back!” Back… back before they migrated here? Before they got fellowships to study the founders of our literary tradition? Back before a multicultural England?
As I travel back there, I do not see an entirely English or even exclusively European audience. Rather, I see Pocahontas at Ben Jonson’s 1617 court masque The Vision of Delight. I think to myself how little we still know of what non-white contemporaries made of these Europeans’ curious rituals and pageants (Joseph Roach catalogues at least four entertainments for diplomats from Africa, Persia, and North America from 1703–1710).
As I think on these viewers, I thank Kim Hall for stirring our curiosity about what one might term early anthropologists of this dispensation of whiteness — a curiosity that encompasses not only what Pocahontas might have made of this display but why the courtier, John Chamberlain, noted that she was “well placed” in the audience when the point of the masque was to direct attention to King James. Somehow — Chamberlain does not tell us how he reached this conclusion — he comes to believe that returning to Powhatanland is “sore against [Pocahontas’] will.” This interest in her will suggests that John Chamberlain was not quite himself that day; he found himself thinking of — and as — an indigenous woman of the Americas.
Whether his conclusions were accurate is not my concern here. Rather, it is to continue pursuing the pathways opened by the Black feminist protocols that Hall — along with Margo Hendricks, Francesca Royster, and Joyce MacDonald — imported into early modern cultural studies. That project has a recovery component that allows us to try to reconstruct what a person like Pocahontas might have made of Jonson’s court masque. But it also gives us license to speculate about who John Chamberlain became when he stopped thinking as an ideal courtier and wondered — going native if only for a moment — what and how she saw.
When we can elude the customs agents and get behind the archival door, we suddenly find that we cannot speak about “what the early moderns” thought within an Anglocentric frame, or even a Eurocentric one. The non-Christian and the non-European were there and they not only had eyes, but they changed the atmosphere around them. Their knowledge precedes and is, in fact, the basis for fields such as Black Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Indigenous Studies.
The work did not begin when these fields found academic homes. Universities incorporated an ongoing intellectual project that had previously been conducted outside their walls. Kim Hall’s contribution to that project will continue to inspire efforts to restore the perspectives and the impact of Europe’s subalterns while also providing insights about whiteness as an unstable, dependent social formation — one that could actually be undone through redistribution of those raced and gendered economic relations that structure modern capitalism.
Miles P. Grier is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. He is the author of the monograph tentatively entitled: Othello and the Formation of White Interpretive Community, 1604–1855 (forthcoming from University of Virginia) and co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies. Essays addressing illiteracy and commercial ineptitude as crucial markers of racial subordinates in early modern English Atlantic culture have appeared in William and Mary Quarterly and the volume Scripturalizing the Human. More contemporary work on the history of racial profiling and Joni Mitchell’s blackface pimp alter ego has been published in Politics and Culture, Genders, and Journal of Popular Music Studies.
