difference.”^44 For the first wave of critics who, like Hall, exposed the com-
plexity of “race,” “blackness” was not simply (and not a simple) provenance
of the Moor, but an alien status resulting from colonialism was.
This opening up of conceptions of race ultimately prompted changes in
the segregated world picture that, among other things, assigned Africa a sta-
ble and unified shape and laid the ground for a second wave of interrogations,
ongoing now, that are looking again at England’s cross-cultural relations. In
turning to religion (Islam, especially), scholars such as Ania Loomba brought
into view a new set of cultural sites and subjects, with India, the Ottoman
East, and the Mediterranean supplementing Africa and the New World as
pivot points for emergent constructions of race.^45 The result has been a major
shift in critical orientation from the national to the transnational, the cultural
to the multicultural, the local to the global. Where before the organizing cor-
nerstones of our interpretations of cross-cultural contact were self-authorizing
nationsmapping their boundaries against “other” cultures, now we think in
terms of “worlds,” charted more loosely across bodies of waters and bound-
aries of nation-states, configured dynamically as transnational and interna-
tional economies, and defined by mixed and ethnically intermixed populations.
For Anglo-Americanists, the centerpiece of global politics has been a variously
circumscribed transatlantic network; for early modernists, it is the Mediter-
ranean.^46 This renovated geopolitics has fostered unusually malleable concep-
tions of race and ethnicity. Within its frames, Gil Harris, for example, has
drawn our attention to “new, protean forms of identity and affiliation” that
were evolving with a globally oriented mercantilism and instantiated vividly
by the figure of the Jew, a “transnational stranger” of “undecideable” country,
poised between the foreign and the domestic.^47 Mary Floyd-Wilson has used
geohumoral theory to ally England’s “northern” people with their southern
neighbors in Africa, arguing against the terms and tenability of an English
fantasy of racial superiority.^48 Daniel Vitkus has established “turning,” and es-
pecially “turning Turk,” as important signs and symptoms of the cultural and
ideological flexibility essential to Mediterranean exchange.^49
Scholars such as Michael Neill have begun to place Moors lucratively
within this Mediterranean world picture and to understand the multicultural
edges of their identity.^50 Yet while approaches to the Moor are no longer lim-
ited to and by the legacy of Africa, they are constrained by elisions of Moors
with other subjects—especially with Turks, who have dominated studies of
the Mediterranean just as they once dominated its early modern histories.^51
Turks have, in fact, become the primary model for Mediterranean identities,
introduction 13