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Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. By KIM F. HALL. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + 320. $45.00 cloth; $17.95 paper.
Reviewed by CRYSTAL BARTOLOVICH
Kim Hall's powerful and important book Things of Darkness argues that the contemporary hierarchy of white over black in English language and social order can be traced to a pattern of color-coded power inequality established during the early period of European colonization and the slave trade. In order to expose the history and logic of the black/white binary, she examines several forms of its appearance in English Renaissance culture, tracking it through travel narrative, lyric poetry, drama, masque, prose romance, and the visual arts to argue that vestigial racism-in the modern sense-is lurking there. Specifically, she develops the thesis that "descriptions of dark and light, rather than being mere indications of Elizabethan beauty standards or markers of moral categories, became in the early modern period the conduit through which the English began to formulate the notions of 'self' and 'other' so well known in [current] AngloAmerican racial discourses" (2). The early modern English were expanding their sphere of influence, making their first attempts at slaving, at intensive trade with new markets, and at the establishment of colonial holdings in the "New World," where they encountered peoples, native and transported, who were darker-skinned than they. In the course of this encounter, the dark/light binary, already extant in Classical and Christian imagery inherited from medieval iconography, doctrine, and literature, began to accrete new connotations.
Hall further complicates the above argument by insisting that gender and race become imbricated in the early modern period such that "a crucial interrelationship between race and gender. . . is deeply embedded in language deployed in the development of the modern-that is to say, white, European, male-subject" (2). The exigencies of early modern English subject formation (under emergent colonialist and capitalist as well as patriarchal conditions) saw to it that "blackness" (and, therefore, "whiteness" as well) took on a gendered and racialized tinge in a discursive field that included-but far exceeded-specific discussion of the relations of African and European peoples at a time when the population of black peoples in early modern England itself seems to have...