Required Reading: Kim F. Hall’s Things of Darkness at 25
by Ambereen Dadabhoy
The Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in January 2020 featured several panels on race in the premodern period and in Shakespeare Studies in particular. As a scholar of race who had been attending these meetings for almost a decade, this was an unusual occurrence. In the past, it had been quite normal to hear one person on a panel give a talk on race or maybe one panel featuring race but treating race more as a metaphor than a system of embodied and asymmetrical relations of power rooted in shoring up the construction of whiteness and non-whiteness.
It shouldn’t have been shocking to see the MLA finally acknowledging and promoting discussions that had been shaking up (#ShakeRace) the field of early modern studies. Over the past three years, critical race studies in Shakespeare has become more central to scholarly conversations in the field through symposia such as The Globe Theatre’s “Shakespeare and Race Festival” (2018), the RaceB4Race bi-annual conference (2019), and increased attention directed to the topic at the Shakespeare Association of America’s annual conference. Sitting in the audience at one such panel at MLA 20, I was gratified to hear every speaker cite Kim F. Hall’s paradigm-shifting book Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Finally, it seemed that after twenty-five years, Hall’s work was getting the widespread and necessary attention that was its due.
One speaker’s remarks, in particular, stood out and continue to reflect my thinking about what makes Things of Darkness such an important work not only for those working on race in the premodern, but more broadly for students and scholars of early modern literary and cultural studies. The speaker noted that while completing their dissertation on early modern women writers and gender, they weren’t directed to this book by any of their advisors, and when they finally consulted it for another project post-Ph.D, they were surprised by how relevant it was to their study.
They had discovered the vast intellectual ambit of Hall’s work, which ranges from early modern drama and lyric, to travel literature, to early modern women’s writing and romance, to material culture and art history. The scope of the book signals how thoroughly race, race thinking, and racial formation saturated the period. Moreover, for this speaker and any reader of Things of Darkness what becomes immediately clear is that we can have no understanding of any of the discrete topics and areas of the premodern without thinking through race. It is everywhere.
The epiphanic moment for the speaker and for many scholars of the premodern who are beginning to take seriously how race works in our field is how relevant this book is “beyond race.” Such moments are, of course, triggered by a prior notion that race operates in a way that is not relevant to other kinds of social and cultural formations. In this way, studies of race are marginalized or “ghettoized,” only consulted when explicitly talking about non-whiteness because for most white people and white scholars the racial power and positionality of whiteness remains unacknowledged.
What Kim Hall patiently and capaciously exposes for us throughout this meticulous study is, in fact, the complete opposite: that race is embedded in the quotidian and commonplace, that it makes itself known in conventional and customary registers that can make its insidious operations invisible. This manifests most clearly in Hall’s introduction where she opens with a comic moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Lysander spurning his former lover Hermia by calling her an “Ethiope” and a “Tartar.” Rejecting the common scholarly practice of writing away or whitewashing the racial slurs, Hall puts them under the microscope to find that this language, so prevalent in Shakespearean comedy, is what secures the eventual patriarchally-sanctioned marriages in which these plots culminate.
For Hall, these racialized moments expose how “tropes of blackness” underscore and legitimize appropriate gender norms and performance, thereby emphasizing “the ways in which gender concerns are crucially embedded in discourses of race.” Indeed, anxieties about gender and race, yoked together as Hall demonstrates them to be, animate texts as disparate as the erotic lyric and the mercantile travel account, the Shakespearean comedy and the portraiture of the nobility.
I first encountered Kim Hall’s Things of Darkness when I was conducting research for my dissertation. Initially, I had planned to work on the history plays, but after having my own epiphanic moment while teaching a course on forms of “othering” in Renaissance drama, I realized that I needed to pursue how and why the “others” populating early modern drama generated so much anxiety. The prevailing consensus of the race scholarship at the time was that race in the early modern period didn’t mean what race means now. However, what I felt when reading these plays was a sense of what race means now, because of the forms of dehumanization and marginalization that I was registering in my own readings.
Enter Things of Darkness: in addition to teaching me how pervasive and pernicious the discourse of race was in the early modern period and remains in our own moment, the book validated my own instincts about what was and wasn’t a reference to race or a moment of racial significance. What Things of Darkness underscored for me was that my readings of race, based on my understanding and recognition of racecraft, “a kind of fingerprint evidence that racism has been on the scene,” were valid, accurate, and historically grounded. Hall seemed to be speaking to the experience of so many scholars of color who were gaslighted by our field when we were told that race didn’t exist in the period, because she detailed exactly how it did and why it mattered.
Despite its revolutionary thesis and Hall’s scrupulous excursus of her argument, it took until 2020 for Things of Darkness to be mainstreamed in our field. This sea change in acceptance, moving premodern critical race studies from the margins to the center, was led by Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color. These scholars’ research, teaching, and activism centered the critical relations of power inherent in the operations of race and racism in the premodern. Moreover, this scholarship centered the work of scholars of color which interrogated the field’s overwhelmingly white racial epistemologies and taxonomies of race.
Hall ends Things of Darkness by issuing the following charge: “Teaching Shakespeare is a good place to begin disrupting the language of white supremacy, both because Shakespeare figures so prominently in high school and college curricula and because questions of race are so easily raised — and so easily dismissed — in connection with Shakespeare’s language.” She highlights how critical examinations must be attuned to the deliberate economies of race in which Shakespeare’s language eagerly traffics.
Hall repeats this call to action over twenty years later in the introduction to the special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly that she coedited with Peter Erickson in 2016. In “‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race,” Hall and Erickson agitate for a mode of early modern critical race studies that is activist in its orientation and that attends to the needs of those most materially disadvantaged by the power of race and race-making in our fields and our contemporary moment:
We can refuse a scholarship that passes, that continues to identify with the confining assumptions of early modern scholarship, and that speaks only the language of our dominant culture. Instead, we can move to a new phase where we set our own questions and choose methods that embrace strangeness, that refuse an artificial border between past and present, and that listen to the voices of people of color.
This special issue seemed to inaugurate this new “race conscious” moment in which we find ourselves in early modern English studies. It has now become more routine to see multiple race panels at our conferences, to have book editors soliciting books about race in the premodern, to have job announcements seeking candidates with expertise in critical race studies, and to have programming by elite institutions like the Folger Shakespeare Library create an online series, Critical Race Conversations, invested in featuring the groundbreaking work of scholars of color in this field.
We owe a lot of this tremendous movement and momentum to Kim F. Hall and her groundbreaking work, and so it is fitting that we celebrate, honor, and acknowledge the important scholarly genealogy that brought us to this moment. In addition to her tremendous scholarly output that includes revolutionary articles on teaching race in Shakespeare (“Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness”) and the imperial commodification undergirding The Merchant of Venice (“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”), Hall has created an online community around #ShakeRace, a hashtag that does double duty by centering race in Shakespeare studies and shaking up race studies by insisting on a premodern genealogy.
The popularity of this hashtag on Twitter highlights the kind of inclusive politics that inform Hall’s scholarship, which is rooted in the liberatory politics of Black Feminism. #ShakeRace invites critical participation and investigation into the premodern that celebrates the diversity of the period and interrogates the way the period and Shakespeare are marshaled to advance and support white supremacy.
Beyond a viral social media hashtag, Kim Hall has been instrumental in building a community for scholars of color in early modern literary studies. She is a generous mentor, advisor, and friend. She understands that creating community is how we change the culture and those of us who have the honor of knowing her personally or through her work know just how much she has contributed to making our experiences in this field and academia better. The #ShakeRace symphony didn’t start with the “new scholarly song.” Hall has been composing and conducting us to this moment through her incisive, capacious, and tireless research and advocacy for over thirty years.
Ambereen Dadabhoy is an Associate Professor of Literature at Harvey Mudd College. Her research focuses on cross-cultural encounters in the early modern Mediterranean and race and religion in early modern English drama. She investigates the various discourses that construct and reinforce human difference and in how they are mobilized in the global imperial projects that characterize much of the early modern period. Ambereen’s work also seeks to bridge the past to the present to illustrate how early modern racial and religious discourses and their prejudices manifest in our own contemporary moment. Currently, she is working on a project that explores the early modern anti-blackness from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. She has published two articles on teaching premodern race, “Skin in the Game: Teaching Race in Early Modern Literature” (2020) and “Barbarian Moors: Documenting Racial Formation in Early Modern England” (2021).
