SOURCE: “Reading What Isn’t There: ‘Black’ Studies in Early Modern England,” in Stanford Humanities Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter, 1993, pp. 23-33.

In the following essay, Hall examines the figure of the black woman in order to show the “problematics of the historical study of race and gender.”

It is particularly difficult to “attend” to racial difference in early modern England.¹ Given the lessening but still widely held assumption, that “race” is not a viable category of analysis not only in the early modern period, but for literature in general, added to the distressing lack of data on people of color in England before the codification of the slave trade, it is not surprising that women of color constitute a largely “invisible” presence in the English Renaissance. In its very title, Elliot Tokson's The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550-1688, a standard work on the...