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Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance By Jean E. Feerick Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010
Reviewer: Patricia Akhimie
Jean Feerick's Strangers in Blood offers a valuable contribution to the study of race in the early modern period. Feerick asserts that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries race was understood pri- marily in terms of ''blood,'' or ''rank,'' a system of differentiation that is at once social and somatic, and which served first and fore- most to distinguish an elite English subject from a lowly one rather than to distinguish between Englishness and otherness. In the tele- ology that Feerick outlines, more familiar modern racial ideologies erupt and eventually displace the race-as-blood model. Feerick thus traces the unraveling of blood, understood as connected with the internal and external signs of rank, lineage as well as land, civil comportment as well as bodily fluids. Over the course of the book she examines ''textual moments'' in which authors of plays, poems, political tracts, promotional literature, and natural histories offer narratives that ''modify, revise and adjust the period's dominant account of blood'' (21). One of Feerick's most powerful assertions is that these authors effect a critique of social hierarchy by ques- tioning, implicitly or explicitly, the trustworthiness of blood as a sign of difference and thus participating in ''the remaking of a sub- stance that was intimately connected both to their place within a social hierarchy (i.e., as elite, middling, or base men) and to their sense of themselves as English'' (21).
Feerick's Introduction is agile and active. She moves quickly, stating her aims boldly, then demonstrating the value of her correc- tive with efficient treatments of three plays ''identified by modern critics to be most implicated in the 'race thinking' of early modern England''-Othello, Titus Andronicus, and The Tempest-in order to show how ''differences of color emerge . . . in dialectical relation to social rank'' (5). Next, Feerick clearly and concisely explains the...