Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (review)

In 1998, John Leguizamo's one-man show Freak played for several months off Broadway. The autobiographical performance described the multiracial neighborhood where the author/actor developed into someone who could, as the New York Times "Theater Guide" put it, "instantly summon a spectrum of ethnic identities, which are less variations on stereotypes than bone-deep appreciations of styles," and which show "that race is less a matter of skin color than a way of talking, walking, dancing, and just standing."¹ Performance, that is, can evoke racial identity, whether assumed, mimicked, or mocked in gesture, language, or posture. Presenting a stylized self for the stage, the actor can contribute to the meaning of the term race.

It was not always thus. In Ania Loomba's Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, a primer on current critical vectors of race in Shakespeare studies, we find that racially marginalized or minority figures seem to have been capable of only essential and ascribed, not theatrical and achieved, selves. Loomba's concerns are more broadly historical, social, and literary than theatrical. With a wide-angle lens, Loomba shows us that the category inevitably becomes entwined with other crucial axes of identity and culture. Inseparable from considerations of gender, Loomba argues, race must also be understood as a relation of nation, class, and creed or religious practice. Her central principle is this: "during the early modern period, gender and sexuality provided a language for expressing and developing ideas about religious, geographic, and ultimately racial difference" (31). In a way the book argues what Leguizamo performed: that "race" extends well beyond skin color.

The six-chapter book is approximately half historical or cultural background, half practical reading that applies factual data to analyses of four plays—Titus Andronicus, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Merchant of Venice. The book's conclusion offers a brief excursus on the "multiplicity of locations" and "the historical interconnections between different encounters" (167) that can be read into The Tempest. The first half of Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism contains extensive information that should generate critical reevaluations of relevant texts and intertexts. In the introduction, "Race and Colonialism in the Study of Shakespeare," Loomba presents the inseparability thesis: "Racial difference was imagined in terms of an inversion or distortion of 'normal' gender roles and sexual behaviour—Jewish men were said to menstruate, Muslim men to be sodomites, Egyptian women to stand up while urinating . . . " (7). Chapter 1's subheadings show the range of the book's interests: "Lineage,""Faith/Nation," "Gender and Sexuality," "Class," "Colour,""Racism without Race," and "Colonialism and Race." Loomba treats each topic with clarity and tact, acknowledging that the encounter with "the other" was never simple. In just the first few pages, she discusses: the theater as a gauge of "English imagining of outsiders" (8); the significance of representations of "Turks, or Africans, or Jews in England," despite the relatively negligible population of these groups there (10); "[c]olonial ambitions" and "anxieties about national identity" (13); the expulsion of Jews and Moors from Spain in 1492 as a gauge of imperial aspirations (16); clothing identification laws and their "attempt to create a homogeneous Christian nation" (17); and Christian Europe's efforts "to conquer and shape other people in their own image" as the birth of "modern racism" (17). From there, Loomba moves briefly to the implications of "the enactment of difference," including spectacles "of outsiders who willingly or forcibly mould themselves in the image of the dominant culture" (17, 18). Such representations testify, Loomba claims, that "modernity itself" was "profoundly shaped by encounters with outsiders, at home and abroad" (18).

Loomba conducts a multifaceted and finely differentiated survey of racial attitudes and outlooks in the early modern period. She tries to reveal complications and cross-currents in understanding. In chapter 2, "Religion, Colour, and Racial Difference," she surveys Renaissance theories of skin color, some of which had a theological grounding (54-55); mentions the problematics of conversion for "the correspondence between inner faith and outer...