ing to terms with the historical and literary figure of the Moor, each genera-
tion of critics, from Eldred Jones on, has framed that interrogation along lim-
ited axes of difference, necessary in their own moments but needing review
and revision in ours.
Initially, the Moor came into scholarly discussion as an “African,” not co-
incidentally in the era of the civil rights movement, when “Africa” was pro-
viding an empowering collective base for black power and pride. In
attempting to prove that “Othello’s countrymen” and “the Elizabethan idea of
Africa” were important subjects for literary study, Jones was the first to chal-
lenge an otherwise whitewashed Elizabethan world picture—one which had
yet to acknowledge the extent and significance of England’s interactions in
Barbary and West Africa. Though still in 1978 G. K. Hunter was basing his
assessments of “colour prejudice” on the assumption that England had little
firsthand knowledge of Moors, Jones’s work went a long way in showing that
England’s imaginative engagement with figures such as Othello actually de-
rived from historical encounters.^26 Interestingly, Jones’s critical agenda of in-
troducing the subject of Africa into a scholarly discourse to which it had been
strange is reflected in his critical narrative. For within his work, it is Africa’s
“strangeness,” its sensationalism, exoticism, and “novelty,” to the English that
becomes its “most interesting aspect.”^27 While this emphasis on the different-
ness of Africa to Renaissance England served to restore the historical edge,
and edginess, of the subject, it nonetheless obscured the differences within
Africa: in Jones, Moors become indistinct within a general category of
“Africans,” with figures such as Othello labeled at once a Moor, “black Moor,”
and “Negro.”^28 To be sure, by the early modern period Africa had been
mapped, literally and figuratively, as a continent. But as texts such as The His-
tory and Description of Africamake clear, “Africa” indicated neither a single
nor an homogenous place. Nor was “Moor” synonymous with “African.”
None of Shakespeare’s Moors bears that denotation: “African” appears only
once, and only in The Tempest( 1611 ), where Sebastian criticizes Alonso for
“los[ing]” his daughter “to an African” (Temp. 2. 1. 123 ).^29 Jones acknowledges
the distinction between western and northern peoples, which is key within
early modern representations (he has, in fact, gone on to become the chair-
man of the Sierra Leonean Writers Series, a project established in 2001 with
the specific mission of drawing attention to the writers of and writings on
Sierra Leone and introducing these into West Africa’s academic curricula).^30
Still, in establishing the importance of “Africa” both to the historical moment
and to the studies of it, he merges Moors into a generalized African popula-
10 introduction