RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern

Penn Press’s new series RaceB4Race publishes scholarship on the theorization, application, and transformation of critical race studies in early historical periods. Books in the series explore how race has been constructed and operates in literature, history, and culture spanning from antiquity to the eighteenth century, confronting and testing the underlying assumptions of conventional periodization and disciplinarity.

The inaugural volume in the series is out this season (see right): Urvashi Chakravarty’s Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England excavates the ideologies of slavery that took root in early modern England in the period that preceded the development of an organized trade in enslaved persons. Ayanna Thompson calls the book “a tour de force that effectively debunks many older chestnuts about England’s lack of knowledge about, and engagement with, slavery and forced labor.”

Forthcoming volumes include Noémie Ndiaye’s Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (Fall 2022), which dissects the stagecraft used in early modern theater to represent and racialize Africans and Afro- descendants across borders in early modern England, France, and Spain; and Emily Weissbourd’s Bad Blood: Staging Race Between Early Modern England and Spain (Spring 2023), which explores how the Iberian slave trade informs representations of race in early modern English and Spanish literature, and particular drama.

Series Editors:

Geraldine Heng, Perceval Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Texas at Austin

Ayanna Thompson, Regents Professor of English and Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Arizona State University