Getting “Uppity” with Milton; or Because My Mom Politely Asked: “Was Milton Racist?”

This article serves as a wake-up call for more early modern critics to pursue a new cultural mode of literary criticism in Milton studies. In examining select racialized moments in Milton’s works, the author acknowledges the present moment as an acceptable time for responsibly and forthrightly interpreting race and blackness as a metalanguage and intertext of marginalizing Otherness throughout the canon of one of English literature’s most revered poets. The author contends that unorthodox receptions of Milton by black authors such as Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison can help to theorize race in Milton’s writings.