“Making the Beast with two Backs” – Interracial Relationships in Early Modern England

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2018-02-15 19:51Z by Steven

“Making the Beast with two Backs” – Interracial Relationships in Early Modern England

Literature Compass
Volume 12, Issue 1, January 2015
Pages 22–37
DOI: 10.1111/lic3.12200

Miranda Kaufmann, Senior Research Fellow
Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study
University of London

Shakespeare’s tragedy of Othello and Desdemona has long attracted critics to consider the issues of interracial relationships and miscegenation in early modern England. More recently, other black characters have been found in Renaissance literature and an African presence in 16th and 17th century England has been demonstrated from archival sources. This article gives an overview of these developments and their implications for the study of interracial relationships in early modern literature. Evidence from the archives is brought to bear on different aspects of relationships both between black men and white women and between black women and white men. This new information about interracial marriages, as well as sexual intercourse or “fornication”, prostitution and the resulting mixed race children must be incorporated into the discussion of interracial relationships in Renaissance literature.

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Between Hoax and Hope: Miscegenation and Nineteenth-Century Interracial Romance

Posted in Articles, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2010-08-27 19:40Z by Steven

Between Hoax and Hope: Miscegenation and Nineteenth-Century Interracial Romance

Literature Compass
Volume 3, Issue 4 (July 2006)
pages 648–657
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00345.x

Katharine Nicholson Ings, Associate Professor of English
Manchester College, North Manchester, Indiana

This essay surveys recent scholarship on interracial romance during the nineteenth century using the hoax Miscegenation pamphlet of 1863 as a lens. An anonymous and ironic piece of writing that promoted race-mixing from a deceptively Republican perspective, Miscegenation coined the titular term, newly situating interracial relationships within a Latinate, pseudo-scientific framework. It also encouraged romance between white women and black men, an endorsement that was designed to enrage its white male readership but in fact gave hope to some white women who were unable to articulate their interracial desire publicly. Using this double focus, I explore how nineteenth-century authors of interracial romance borrowed the language of science, such as “hybridity” and “crossing”; how they employed the concept of “blood-mixing” as both sexual and medicinal (via transfusions); and I read the Miscegenation pamphlet as a kind of scientific romance fiction itself.

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