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      The discourse of difference : the representation of black African characters in English renaissance drama

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      Date
      1997-09-01
      Author
      Mazimhaka, Jolly Rwanyonga
      Type
      Thesis
      Degree Level
      Doctoral
      Metadata
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      Abstract
      The view of black Africans that emerges from Renaissance drama is shaped entirely by stereotypes, and is overwhelmingly negative. There is a general reluctance in the scholarly community to challenge the stereotype as a major organising principle in shaping negative images of African dramatic characters. My argument is that the stereotype is a powerful tool in the hands of self-interested parties, and must be recognised as capable of maiming and distorting the experiences of those it sets out to construct, as the one-sided, eurocentric representations of African characters in Renaissance drama reveal. Chapter One reviews the history of European attitudes to black skin colour, focusing briefly on England's public displays of other nations, cultures, and people, on the visual art tradition, and mainly on English Renaissance travel literature which, I believe, was the largest single influence on dramatists' imaginations. The chapter establishes that English anti-black polemics and the stereotyping of black Africans was heightened during the Renaissance, mainly because constructions of otherness were a large part of England's national self-fashioning. Chapter Two explores traditional meanings of blackness as well as the aesthetic and moral aspects of otherness, and attempts to show how the stereotypical assumptions and value judgments encoded in the rhetoric of blackness are allegorically manipulated to suit the needs of Christian England while Africa suffers erasure. Chapters Three and Four foreground the idea that the physical presence of black African characters on the stage becomes a sign of an entire set of actual and imagined differences by which England constructs her view of Africans as prime, visible signifiers of cultural difference. Chapter Four goes a step further and looks at those dramatic texts in which seemingly fixed categories are revealed as unstable, especially when overlaps in race, gender, and social rank come into play. The representation of black African characters on the English Renaissance stage thus reveals a definite correlation between the dominant culture's fears and anxieties over the perceived threat posed by the black African other, its insistence on a self-representation as a distinctly superior culture, and its subsequent and systematic production of Africa and Africans as indelibly other. For the dominant culture to be able to define, produce, and maintain itself as superior, it must, of necessity, strive to keep the other in a position of chronic inferiority, hence the persistent appeal to stereotypes.
      Degree
      Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
      Department
      English
      Program
      English
      Committee
      Slights, William
      Copyright Date
      September 1997
      URI
      http://hdl.handle.net/10388/etd-10202004-235957
      Subject
      race awareness in literature
      prejudices in literature
      17th century
      16th century
      1500-1600
      Jacobean
      Elizabethan
      early modern
      history and criticism
      racism
      blacks in literature
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      • Graduate Theses and Dissertations
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