reproduced the homogeneity of Jones’s Africa, however, their emphasis on
“race” and “racism” prepared the ground for a more incisive interrogation of
those terms and for a direct confrontation of the uncertainties surrounding
the denotation and depiction of Moors.^36 In the mid- 1980 s, African-
Americanists began to question the meaningfulness of “race” as a “category in
the study of literature and the shaping of critical theory,” to expose the arbi-
trariness and instability of its articulation, and to unravel the discourses that
were giving it form.^37 Positing imperialism and colonialism as the political
cornerstones of the early modern English state, new historicists and cultural
materialists were simultaneously deconstructing the dichotomies of self and
other that enabled the inscription of state power, domestically as well as cross-
culturally.^38 And in efforts to bring gender into this new historical picture,
feminist critics exposed the crucial intersections of gender and race.^39 Early
postcolonial critiques built on these advances by recovering otherwise silenced
voices of resistance and hybrid subject formations that exposed the other’s
effect on the self.^40 As a result, by the 1990 s the exclusive association of the
Moor with blackness, and of blackness with the Moor, was broken apart and
conceptions of race, racialized subjects, and England’s early “racism” were
complicated by intersections with gender, religion, ethnicity, whiteness,
genre, and performance.
Nonetheless, through the end of the twentieth century, Africa remained
the preeminent geography of the Moor’s cultural definition. Indeed, when I
first conceptualized this project in the early 1990 s, my own intention was to
treat the staging of the Moor in terms of a broader staging of Africa—until I
realized that Moors were the only “African” subjects featured on the early
modern stage and that they were not necessarily connected to Africa, ethni-
cally or geographically.^41 Moreover, although England’s preoccupation with
the Moor preceded the colonial moment and exceeded the ideologies of op-
pression that came into force with colonialist and imperialist activities, as I
have argued elsewhere, the specter of New World slavery and its legacy of
racial prejudice continued to define the politics that early modern scholars
imposed backward onto representations of the Moor.^42 Even in Kim Hall’s
historically rigorous Things of Darkness( 1995 ), which locates a pervasive, gen-
der-based “poetics of color” within England’s domestic representations, the
starting point is a “ ‘self ’ and ‘other’ ” divide “so well known in Anglo-
American racial discourses.”^43 Acknowledging “Moor” as a “multivalent
designation,” Hall uses it nonetheless as a “general term for the ethnically,
culturally, and religiously ‘strange,’ ” a signpost of “the idea of African
12 introduction