Talking Dirty: Queer Performance, Racialized Spectacle, and Disruptive Speech in Early Modern English Discourses on Race and Empire

Anita Raychawdhuri
English
UC Santa Barbara

My dissertation examines depictions of non-normative sexuality in early modern drama (1550-1700) that complicate and undermine the consolidation of proto-imperialist Englishness around white identity. Though the formalized “nation-state” is a later concept, in the early modern period Britain began to crystalize as a unified country. To position Britain as a world power, the English elite fashioned a narrative of their national identity through whiteness, an ideal that combined culture, race, and language to attempt to differentiate the English from both those they were colonizing as well as the unruly local underclass and abjected populations that threatened their delineation of Englishness. Scholars of queer and critical race theory including Roderick Ferguson, Audre Lorde, and Jasbir Puar, have each articulated the necessity of scrutinizing queerness in its intersections with race and national identity; yet, these intersections remain under-examined in early modern studies. My work re-examines well-known plays such as Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606), and John Lyly’s Gallathea (1588), mapping the ways in which their various layers of queerness and racialized spectacles undergird yet also disrupt English racial and political identity at a foundational moment in the evolution of English Imperialism.