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Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England by Kim F. Hall. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xiii + 319. $42.50, cloth; $17.95, paper.
Kim Hall begins Things of Darkness with the claim that critics and readers have refused to acknowledge that the black/white or dark/light binarism so prevalent in early modern English literature is racialized. Hall aims to complement Winthrop Jordan's survey of the negative meanings of blackness in contrast to whiteness and light which opens his White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, and wishes to extend his argument by demonstrating how "gender concerns are crucially embedded in discourses of race" (2). Unlike earlier work which surveyed Africans in Renaissance drama (Eldred Jones, 1965; Elliot H. Tokson, 1982), Hall is interested in what I have elsewhere termed "rhetorical miscegnation" in "linked oppositions, especially of black and white" so widespread in Petrarch.an lyric, Renaissance drama and romance (Shakespeare Reproduced, ed. Howard and O'Connor, 1987: 144). Hall's is the first book-length study of blackness, colonialism and the construction of race in early modern England and follows in the footsteps of work done in the eighties, mostly on Shakespeare's Othello (Karen Newman, 1987; Martin Orkin, 1987; Ania Loomba, 1989). Though Hall considers some materials that have been mined before, including George Best's account of the origins of blackness in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, the proverb "to wash the...