Mixed Race Moors

Kyle Grady
English
UC Irvine

Mixed Race Moors is the first monograph focused on mixed-race identity as construed and represented in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and culture and particularly in Shakespeare’s plays. It analyzes formulations of mixed African and European descent, building on foundational work in premodern critical race studies examining English notions of blackness, interracial relationships, and racial construction broadly. The project makes a series of interrelated arguments. First, that the early modern English frequently approached racial mixing in practical terms, treating it as a site where racial identity could be modulated at the level of the individual and at scale. Second, that these Elizabethan and Jacobean processes are foundational to British colonial practice, most notably in the settler colony that becomes the United States, where nuanced and strategic approaches to mixed identity engender more expedient racial demographics. Third, that the legacy of these instrumentalizing approaches persist into the modern-day, where mixed identity remains a site of racial construction. As this project argues, engaging this legacy not only helps sketch a longer history of black and white mixedness. Bi-directional analysis between the early modern past and subsequent history attends to the vicissitudes of racial constructs, which arise irrespective of traditionally conceived historical bounds.