Working transnationally and across disciplines, this book makes a compelling argument for how foundationally theater participated in early modern racecraft. Its chapters discuss three types of performed blackness: visual black-up, acoustic blackspeak, and kinetic black dance. Such performances repeatedly activated the titular “scripts of blackness” that served Spanish, French, and English ideological needs as those societies contended with their colonialist ambitions, color-based slavery, and the presence of non-white Afro-diasporic peoples in the body politic and social realm. Theatrical practices operated materially and rhetorically to shape cultural perceptions of Afro-diasporic peoples.
The first two chapters on black-up identify scripts that hum throughout subsequent chapters: the diabolical script inherited from medieval stage devils, and the commodity script. Chapter 2 elaborates on female expressions of these, redressing the erasure of blacked-up female characters who have been occluded from archives, the critical tradition, and, in the case of France, the early modern stage itself. The diabolical script dominated French and English stages and reflected growing colonialist concerns about integrating Afro-diasporic subjects and the moral implications of slavery. In England, the script was inflected into female succubae figures. With their seduction of involuntary or vulnerable victims, succubae inverted white male colonial practices of sexually assaulting and enslaving Afro-diasporic women and girls. In France, the repression of this trauma led to the representation of Afro-diasporic men only, typically in ballets, as willing Petrarchan slaves to love, pledging allegiance to white female spectators.
The objectifying commodity script better served seventeenth-century Spain, where the color-based slave trade had existed since the fifteenth century. The animal commodity script excluded Afro-diasporic peoples from humankind and authorized the denial of their human rights. It implied stunted intellect and the need for taming and domestication. The food commodity script suggested the use of Afro-diasporic bodies and labor as available, pleasurable to consume, and necessary to the body politic. The more positive luxury script recognized a small number of individuals as exceptional, as if color-based slavery were a meritocracy. One notable manifestation of all three appeared in the desirable (cue the luxury script) brown-skinned mulata, whose mixed heritage threatened Spanish racial and social hierarchies (cue the food and animal scripts to firmly ally her with blackness).
Chapter 3 grapples with a particularly elusive aspect of the archive: acoustic blackness. As artificial as black-up, blackspeak involved European vernaculars articulated with accents, and “Africanese,” which integrated African or pseudo-African words and habits of speech. These forms activated scripts of ethnic conjuration, animalization, degeneration, and infantilization. They could exist independently from black-up and/or black dances, or in conjunction with them as mutually reinforcing or to blacken the seemingly neutral second form. Blackspeak flourished in Spain. In France, blackspeaking characters are temporary visitors, and English evidence is scant but potent.
The fourth chapter uniquely identifies reparative potential in black dances. While black dancing functioned parodically, too, Afro-diasporic peoples historically used dance to strategically reclaim physical, geographic, and social mobility in the face of slavery's forced mobilities and immobilities. White aristocrats co-opted this emboldening aspect to publicly speak their own truths to power. Identifying the rhetorical work of underacknowledged dance sequences in canonical works offers compelling new readings. Molière's Le malade imaginaire contains dances between the first and second acts. The scripts of animalization and of the Petrarchan slave to love allegorically portray the white bourgeois protagonist's daughter as an Afro-diasporic woman and ape disenfranchised from self-ownership when disallowed her own choice of suitor. Queen Anne likewise appropriates that animality script against the misogynist Jacobean court through dances in black-up within Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness.
Of notable utility are an appendix with a chronological chart of English, French, and Spanish plays/ballets containing characters coded as black, and a vocabulary not dependent on terms that have become shorthand for present-day racial formations. Very occasionally, the reader out of field could use some clarifying information on the contours of a genre (e.g., French ballet), or a stronger sense of the actors involved in a performance tradition. A deeper engagement with animal and food studies will further fill out claims about the period's imagined human-animal/plant continua. This study lays the groundwork for similar interrogations of Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian theater. In bringing into conversation a range of materials—anonymous or no longer extant plays and ballets; works by both lesser-known playwrights and dominant authors like Jonson, Molière, Shakespeare, and de Vega—amidst a rich supporting backdrop of archival materials and cultural discourses, the path breaking Scripts of Blackness entreats more comparative work in early modern critical race studies.
