What Things of Darkness Taught Me About the World
by Mira Assaf Kafantaris
“I believe in the world and I want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world and I want to be in that.” — Fred Moten
When Brandi Adams invited me to reflect on Things of Darkness, I pondered the moment I became aware of the epistemologies of whiteness that dictated how I saw and narrated the world. It happened more than a decade ago in a graduate seminar in one of my field’s flagship organizations, that moment when I realized I did not have the freedom to plot and make the world aesthetically, rhetorically, and materially.
In the early modern playwright’s John Fletcher’s The Island Princess (1621), I had read the dispossession of the Malay Muslim queen through religious conversion, forced sexual kinship, and military conquest enacted by the Portuguese colonizers as an ontology of racial violence. The director of the seminar, a pre-eminent historian of early modern Europe, dismissed my reading and insisted the play constituted a commentary on intra-European geopolitics. I immediately capitulated because I was vulnerable to the dispassionate will of white historical memory. On a philosophical level, I acquiesced because I did not possess the critical register to name the truth and pain of living in an alienating world “all the way to the end,” as Fred Moten phrases it, as a way of imagining an emancipatory one beyond the scope of my lived life.
In the years that followed, I turned to Things of Darkness as a process of clearing and creating space, which forged an alternative vocabulary for articulating and refiguring the world, making it anew. Gradually, I saw how Things of Darkness conjured in me a “freedom to narrate the world,” as Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark. What resounded most clearly with me and many others are Things of Darkness’s intricate associations between texts, epistemologies, commercial interests, and geopolitical contexts to show how the discourse of literary and aesthetic whiteness in poetic, dramatic, and visual media contributed to “an emergent ideology of white supremacy.”
In this multiple and varied nexus of commercial, political, and erotic configurations, Hall argues that gendered categories were also being produced alongside racial formations and capitalist extractions. As a collage of critical and affective meaning, Things of Darkness urged me — urges us — to read the foundations of a white, exclusionary, Eurocentric field of study differently. Hers is a method that disrupts, that challenges, that opens doors, functioning as an invitation to see knowledge, embodiment, and feelings from the margins as theory and praxis.
If time travel were possible, I’d tell my precarious self that the scenes of subjection — here I’m riffing on Saidiya Hartman — I detected in The Island Princess resonated with the questions Black and postcolonial intellectual thought have been asking for decades. I’d tell myself that there’s Kim Hall’s body of knowledge that would affirm my inquiries, my feelings, my instincts, my thoughts. Because Kim Hall tears down the hegemonic borders, the elitist snobbery, the ossified gates that keep Black feminist thought separated from early modern studies, she repositions our field at the center of care: care about Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC); care about social justice and collective emancipation; care about the future direction of our field and the humanities at large.
And why is care such a radical act in higher education, and in our field in particular? For Black, Indigenous, and People of Color scholars, to be an early modernist often is to withhold our history, our sense of geography, our temporalities, our being and moving in and within the world, our worlding. It is a one-way street to assimilation, to appeal to whiteness masquerading as neutral, as universal, as apolitical, to be always marked as an outsider trying to “fit in,” our positionalities always provisional.
The story with which I opened this reflection would not be the last time I felt a deep sense of alienation, of dispossession, of disavowal as I navigated my field as an Arab and immigrant woman. To illustrate my point, I wish to focus on Stephen Greenblatt’s famous reading of Holbein’s “The Ambassadors’’ in the opening pages of Renaissance Self-Fashioning — a book that was plastered on every bibliography of my graduate career.
The two subjects of the painting are “young, successful men” — these are the words Greenblatt uses — who epitomize the ideals of Renaissance humanism and the ever-present specter of mortality as represented by the slanted skull. To understand Renaissance texts, Greenblatt tells us, scholars ought to situate them within the cultural and historical contexts in which they are produced and exfoliate their positionality in relation to power structures. In this configuration, the skull is also a lens that magnifies the multiple layers, the masks, the labor of constructing the ideal of a noble white European man, of manipulating literary and social identities as experts in the art of the possible.
But what Greenblatt does not take into account is that the slanted-skull as a lens or optic metaphor advances a teleology of scientific distance — an anthropological, even godlike approach. It implies mobility and consent, a world with absolute agency and freedom of movement — a freedom to shift one’s gaze, and by doing so, shift the world they inhabit as a result. It is a world that can be magnified, adjusted, adapted, narrativized. It is one that I, an Arab woman, cannot inhabit. Because what Greenblatt weaves is a fantasy of colonial exploitation, where the viewer absorbs multiple perspectives and extracts knowledge and abundant resources from them.
In a forthcoming essay for New Literary History, Margo Hendricks calls Greenblatt’s violent epistemes a “vision of white subjectivity” that “ensures that the spectatorial gaze is always white-centered.” How am I, a migrant woman from the Global South, expected to read this narrative construct of whiteness, of absolute personhood? Do I accept it, passively, gratefully, as a conduit for enlightenment? What do I do with this formula of access, mobility, and agency that occludes my materiality, my embodiment, as borders close in my face? To what extent would whiteness engulf me in its vision of universal citizenry as my Arabness pointed to global terror?
Where Greenblatt sees in the visual field of Renaissance self-fashioning a metaphor for personal advancement, ownership, wealth accumulation, and demarcation through imperialist borders, Kim Hall teaches us to excavate the grammars of capture, extraction, displacement. What Kim Hall offers us is an outraged refusal to study Black and other marginalized lives, who continue to be excluded from the domain of personhood, through a lens — objective, distant, scientific. In Holbein’s “Ambassadors,” I, a racialized subject, see the tools of empire, of worlding and worldmaking, of sundials, quadrants, damask clothes, and other materials traded in the theatre of empire; celestial and terrestrial globes to dictate a hegemonic Eurocentric time; swords and books as tools of conquest and capitulation. In Greenblatt’s telling, “The Ambassadors” emblematizes hyper-extraction — extraction of knowledge, of land, of labor, of meaning, of capital, of sovereignty, of consent.
Luckily, we have Things of Darkness, which exemplifies the highest form of ethical work that we can do as academics, because it models for us the process of critical amalgamation, memory and memorialization, and creative practice, the braiding together of violent archives and violating epistemologies with the voices of those who were never meant to be remembered in our field of study, for those who love the world “till the end” even if this world did not love them back.
At its heart, Things of Darkness is a labor of legibility and profound moral clarity. Kim Hall makes legible the human and environmental costs of European expansion. Perhaps most urgently, Things of Darkness speaks to our moment of reckoning with the ghosts of slavery, with the after-effects of coloniality, with the endurance of racial capitalism’s hold over the bodies, labor, and culture of Black communities. It is the book that taught me how to ask better questions, to look for race, racialization, and racism in places I did not think of, like cartography and time, sounds and smells, myth and religion, accents and languages. As an institution-builder, Kim Hall paved the way for a different future that we inhabit now, where feminist, queer, disability, postcolonial, indigenous, and critical race fields flourish next to and in conversation with each other.
I wish to end with a meditation on the planetary, on the ancestral kinship that catalyzed Kim Hall’s visionary universe of thought and filled it to the brim with revolutionary possibility. My thoughts drift to Vera Hall, Kim Hall’s mother; particularly, how our celebration of Things of Darkness is also an homage to Vera Hall’s ministry as a lifelong educator and quilter, whose beautiful quilts tell the story of Black people’s past and ongoing quest for emancipation.
In the same way Things of Darkness rewrites history, Vera Hall’s assemblages of ancestral stories, cut fabric, and suturing hands amass, remix, and reassemble an intimate form of being with, in, and of the world. It is a world where new meaning and new methods can emerge and linger. The poet and critic Fred Moten dreams of “another world.” I saw visions of this other world in the words of Kim Hall. As it were, the title of one of Kim’s early articles asks: “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” In Kim Hall’s pathbreaking universe of thought, we are all invited to dinner — invited to be freed by a radical imaginary, by a dream of a just world, by the desire for freedom.
Mira Assaf Kafantaris is an incoming Assistant Professor of English at Butler University. She is completing her first manuscript, titled Royal Marriage, Foreign Queens, and Racial Formations in the Early Modern Period. Her public-facing work has appeared in The Millions, Overland Journal, The Rambling, The Conversation, Medium-Equity, and The Platform. She is on Twitter @MiraAssafk.
