tion, glossing over the fact that not all Moors were Africans and not all
Africans, Moors.
The association of Moors with Africa remained a critical starting point in
the decades after Jones, yet with an important difference: evolving concep-
tions of what and how Africa signified no longer hinged on its strangeness or
novelty but rather on its connection to American history and the acts and the
ideologies of oppression which that history ushered in. Edward Said’s revolu-
tionary Orientalism( 1978 ) had by then exposed the imperialist underpinnings
of exoticizing cultural discourses.^31 Scholars after Said saw in England’s depic-
tion of African subjects a politically self-serving racial prejudice, which helped
propel and which could help explain the emergence of New World slavery in
the early modern period and the persistence of a racism against blacks in the
centuries after. In The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama,
1550 – 1688 ( 1982 ), for example, Elliot Tokson correlates the response of English
playwrights to “a black African who was a stranger to their land and their con-
sciousness” with the actions of English entrepreneurs who “were beginning to
exploit that same black man as the most suitable material for slave labor.”^32
He sets “tawny” Moors therefore indistinguishably beside Ethiopians, Negros,
and other Africans as representatives of a “black” race, subject to an “anti-
black” sentiment that helped catalyze the development of the Atlantic slave
trade.^33 In Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English
Drama from Shakespeare to Southern( 1987 ), it is the assumption that “blacks
are different and that the black on their faces, when not thought to signify the
Moors’ kinship to the devil, reveals...their separation from the community”
that Anthony Barthelemy examines in order to understand and underscore
the racism of his own era.^34 He distinguishes “Moor” from “Negro” and
“African” only at the level of language, as the term English writers may have
preferred “because it helped to distinguish in a more precise way something
supposed to be essential about blacks”—something implicitly alien and neg-
ative, if not altogether evil.^35 This emphasis on “blacks” was clearly useful in
introducing racial politics into the critical picture, since initially blackness was
race. But the interpretative frame simultaneously obscured the complicating
particulars. Atlantic slavery, after all, would not significantly define England’s
relation to Africa until well into the seventeenth century. And although in the
sixteenth century Moors were being drawn into a discriminatory discourse on
blackness along with the “Negros” from Africa’s western (“slave”) coast, Moors
were never New World slaves.
If the conception of “blacks” put in place by Tokson and Barthelemy
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