We Acknowledge Ours: Celebrating Kim F. Hall and Things of Darkness at 25
by Brandi K. Adams
This collection of essays confirms and celebrates the foundational, wide-ranging scholarship of Kim F. Hall while honoring the twenty-fifth anniversary of her groundbreaking book Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Together, Vanessa I. Corredera, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Miles P. Grier, Mira Assaf Kafantaris, and Debapriya Sarkar have created a public-facing version of the academic Festschrift — writings that acknowledge and celebrate a scholar at a momentous time in her career.
Presented here is only a partial catalogue of the myriad ways that Hall’s research on the intersections of race, gender, travel, and economics has fundamentally altered the landscape of early modern literary studies. Things of Darkness reorients scholarly approaches to textual and visual materials created in early modern England and Europe in order to center people, rhetoric, and ideas that other scholars have previously relegated to the margins, willfully ignored, or entirely erased.
Hall’s work is rightly feted for its paradigm-breaking approaches to archival research, literary criticism, and details about economies that shaped racial formation and socio-political structures that defined early modern England and Europe which still persist today. The following essays highlight the ways in which Hall’s work will forever remain one of the geneses of premodern critical race studies (PCRS), research that skillfully combines Black Feminist philosophies, careful holistic approaches to literary and art historical archives, and terrifically erudite close readings.
Hall’s research exemplifies what Margo Hendricks has previously identified both as the work and mission of PCRS at RaceB4Race in 2019:
PCRS (premodern critical race studies) actively pursues not only the study of race in the premodern, not only the way in which periods helped to define, demarcate, tear apart, and bring together the study of race in the premodern era, but the way that outcome, the way those studies can effect a transformation of the academy and its relationship to our world. PCRS is about being a public humanist. It’s about being an activist.
This particular festschrift celebrates writing in two senses: it honors Hall’s meaningful contributions to early modern English literary history and criticism, and it details new work and critical discourses generated as the result of her initial theoretical approaches to early modern textual and visual material.
Along with other works at the intersections of premodern critical race studies and early modern literary history and criticism, Hall’s study has quietly revolutionized the field as it questioned long-held beliefs, namely that theories of race and race-making belonged to later centuries and that Blackness could not function beyond the metaphorical in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.
Furthermore, Hall’s work persistently reminds scholars that whiteness has always been a specific racial category, one that carries with it immense political and social power that has ultimately determined structures in historical discourse, rhetoric, and philosophy that were detrimental to entire nations of people. She and her work have challenged the positionality of whiteness in early modern studies, something that has been traditionally characterized by many white scholars as neutral and not worthy of interrogation.
“To claim that there is a ‘text of race’” Hall writes, “means at times to refuse to accept both the authority of the writers I work with and to resist the hegemony of white male knowledge in the academy.” Through her careful reading and interrogation of the period, Hall takes early modern writing that seemed comfortable and familiar for generations of scholars and demands that we collectively reexamine them through the double lenses of race and gender. She reveals to readers the anxieties about race and difference that early modern middle class or wealthy white men (and occasionally women) manifested in their paintings or in the texts of their romances, poems, and plays. Hall’s scholarly intervention permits the literary ‘Ethiope(s)’ of the past to become much more than metaphors that were previously ignored. With her insight, readers are able to see descriptors that represent early modern English travel, trade and that indicate the real, bodily existence of Black women in early England.
As one of the founders of PCRS, Hall’s research demonstrates that thinking about early modern English literature and the binaries inherent in chiaroscuro — the light-dark tonal contrasts that construct figures in paintings — were more than “polarity […] intimately associated with the religious dualisms of Good and Evil” as suggested by Albert Boime. This divide was also “part of a racial hierarchy in which blackness and black men serve to heighten the whiteness of Europeans.” By examining a range of material, from paintings to lyric poems to early instantiations of the novel, Hall has made it possible for current generations of scholars to examine the implications of her original thesis, in which she examined the history and cultural roles that blackness played in early modern England.
Hall’s work pays particular close attention to the ways in which white Europeans deliberately colonized and altered the economic, political, and social landscapes of many parts of the world. Hall’s research teaches readers that ‘blackness’ in the early modern was quite expansive as a political and racial category and could be used as a moniker for a variety of people including “dark-skinned Africans,” Indigenous Americans, and Indians as well as the Spanish, Irish, and Welsh as a way to emphasize the “linguistic and, ultimately ideological expansion” and supremacy of a white, English colonial project.
Hall consistently demonstrates that early modern England was a place in which its inhabitants looked for differences beyond the parochial — that along with religious, educational, and class differences, early English writers were interested in objects and people quite foreign to them. Her writing encourages readers to envision an early modern world that is complicated, one that doesn’t have particular answers. For Hall, the remnants from that world that people left behind should be examined by as diverse a group of scholars as possible in order to rediscover its complexities.
While originally conceived as a panel of ephemeral academic talks, these published pieces now more fully demonstrate the influence that Hall’s book has had on current scholarship by early- and mid-career scholars. A careful and nuanced reexamination of her work has ushered in a necessary era in early modern studies in which observations and theories about race will no longer be consigned to the margins of research agendas or ignored at the expense of other endeavors that have been deemed as more important. Instead, by actively engaging with Things of Darkness scholars may fully consider the ways that race has always operated in a variety of material including poetry, drama, romances, and paintings. Recently, the resurgence of interest in Hall’s wide-ranging work has extended to adaptation and appropriation studies, trans studies, ecocriticism, and book history.
For twenty-five years, Things of Darkness has been a brilliant resource for scholars and general readers interested in early histories of race. Once they engage with Hall’s approaches to early modern literature and history, all readers understand its revolutionary possibilities. This book and the scholar who wrote it provide a vital theoretical framework for reconfiguring early modern literary and visual texts in unfamiliar and exciting ways that liberate scholars to search for parts of the past that would have been conceived as imperceptible or impossible to know.
However, because of this groundbreaking book and the essays that celebrate it here, researchers have already begun to reconstruct a past that is inclusive and more welcoming to everyone interested in learning about early modern English literature. This is thanks to Hall’s imagining of a very possible world where students and scholars alike may bring every aspect of themselves to the archive and the classroom. Kim F. Hall’s scholarly legacy — the novel intellectual lines of thought and revolutionary approaches to various texts and other materials — that began in her book will continue on in the field and will catalyze further generations of scholars to “give students the critical tools for a more meaningful and complex dialogue on race, one that comprehends the intersection of categories without disregarding our differences and that moves beyond racial guilt — but not beyond justice.”
Read the Reflections on Things of Darkness at 25:
Vanessa Corredera — “Making ‘Things’ Through Darkness: Black/White Binarism in Popular Culture”
Ambereen Dadabhoy — “Required Reading: Kim F. Hall’s Things of Darkness at 25”
Miles P. Grier — “Kim F. Hall and the Mountain of Evidence”
Mira Assaf Kafantaris — “What Things of Darkness Taught Me About the World”
Debapriya Sakar — “Ecocriticism and the Geographies of Race”
Brandi K. Adams is an incoming Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University. Her research interests include the history of reading, history of the book, history of early modern theatre, premodern critical race theory, and modern editorial practices. She also writes about contemporary theatrical retellings of early modern drama and history. Her work is forthcoming in Shakespeare/Text, The Oxford Handbook to the History of the Book in Early Modern England, Shakespeare and the Future of Translation, and Arden of Faversham: A Critical Reader. You can find her on Twitter at @bkadams.
