turally pure self versus an easily demarcated and disenfranchised Other. And
if on the one hand the incorporation of Aaron exposes the dangers of writing
the colonial subject in, on the other it underscores the impossibility of writ-
ing the colonial subject out.
From the start, Aaron figures as a Moor without a country, his history in-
extricably entwined with that of the Goths. In Lust’s Dominion, the Spanish
Moor Eleazar will identify himself as a prince of Barbary, left “Captive to a
Spanish Tyrant” when Spain conquered his father’s empire ( 1. 2. 236 ). But in
Titusthere is no competing place or story of origins to explain the Moor’s
presence in a European culture that is ostensibly not his own—just as there is
no colonial backstory for Muly, a Moor in this play quietly inhabiting the
outskirts of Rome, interbreeding with, it seems, a Roman wife. Given the
early, still persuasive tenets of colonialist discourse analysis and the construc-
tion, evident especially in nineteenth-century French discourse, of Africa as a
“peculiar empty profile” filled in by the terms and desires of European colo-
nizers, we may be inclined to interpret that dramatic omission as a discrimi-
nating erasure of identity, acted out routinely, if not uniquely, on the colonial
Other, here the Moor.^49 Yet to imagine a suppressed past is to eclipse the pres-
ent expressed and modeled in this play: a cross-cultural “incorporation”
which, though it may begin with conquest, defeat, and domination (as it does
in Tamora’s case), unsettles the defining lines of both culture and power. In
Titus, Tamora is the only one to declare herself “incorporate,” but that term
may be as close as we can come in the play’s own vocabulary to describing
Aaron’s place within Gothic society—closer surely than the concepts of inte-
gration and assimilation which neither Peele nor Shakespeare uses and which
anachronistic histories of racial oppression have given form. For the starting
point of Aaron’s story is not an unstated precolonial, pre-Goth past but an ex-
plicit, open-ended “uniting” into the “one body” of Goths, with whom he is
literally and figuratively embedded.
It is, in fact, quite telling that in this play there is no fixed term to de-
scribe Aaron’s “incorporation,” only a similar but not entirely equivalent
model—and telling too that in early modern society there is no fixed vocab-
ulary to define such cultural intermixing. Because we come at cross-cultural
encounters (especially those involving African subjects) from a postcolonial
perspective, we have a political investment in distinguishing various positions
of domination and subordination precisely. But Titusapparently does not,
not even as it imagines the place and power of the Moor. What references
there are to Aaron’s established connection to the Goths’ past accords him a
“Incorporate in Rome” 81