This collection of original essays explores the origins of contemporary notions of race in the oceanic interculture of the Atlantic world in the early modern period. In doing so, it breaks down institutional boundaries between 'American' and 'British' literature in this early period, as well as between 'history' and 'literature'. Individual essays address the ways in which categories of 'race' - black brown, red and white, African American and Afro-Caribbean, Spanish and Jewish, English and Celtic, native American and Northern European, creole and mestizo - were constructed or adapted by early modern writers. The collection brings together a top collection of historians and literary critics specializing in early modern Britain and early America.

"I found all the essays in this very diverse collection to be at once historical, anecdotal, and a real pleasure to read. I found these essays to be pioneering in their efforts to demonstrate that we must have studies that do more than compare the constructions of race across time and geography. These essays show that we must be attentive to the ways the very exchanges and amiable and inimical encounters across the Atlantic were and remain fundamental to our contemporary devisings of race in Anglicized and Americanized cultures. Anyone interested in how the local can and does transmogrify into more troubling universalist truths will find this diverse collection an excellent piece of argumentative evidence." - Arthur L. Little, Jr., Associate Professor of English, UCLA, author of Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice

Autorentext
PHILIP BEIDLER is Professor of English at the University of Alabama and has written books on early American Culture and the literature of the Vietnam War.

GARY TAYLOR is professor of English and Director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. He's widely published and is one of the leading figures of the cutting edge early modern cultural studies.

Inhalt
Introduction; G.Taylor & P.Beidler A Mirror Across the Water: Mimetic Racism and Cultural Survival; B.Fuchs Angells in America; K.O.Kupperman Prehistoric Diasporas: Colonial Theories of the Origins of Native American Peoples; G.Sayre Michelangelo and the Curse of Ham: From a Typology of Jew-Hatred to a Genealogy of Racism; B.Braude "Extravagant Viciousness": Slavery and Gluttony in the Works of Thomas Tryon; K.Hall "Working Like a Dog": African Labor and Racking: The Human-Animal Divide in Early Modern England; F.Royster Fresh Produce; J.Roach "Men to Monsters": Civility, Barbarism, and "Race" in Early Modern Ireland; D.J. Baker Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan and Other Famous Early American Mahometans; P.Beidler