The Menil Archive Seminar Series - ' "Would you make a Negro of me?": Misogynoir and Ostracization of Black Women on the late Jacobean Stage and in Western European Art'

"Would you make a Negro of me?": Misogynoir and Ostracization of Black Women on the late Jacobean Stage and in Western European Art: Rebecca Adusei (King's College London)

This paper will look at the role of misogynoir on the early modern stage. As the seventeenth century progresses, we see fewer Black characterisations on stage; gone are the days of Christopher Marlowe’s Dido and William Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. Instead, we see Black women pushed to the theatrical peripheries. I posit this is due to the changing ways blackness was viewed in the English psyche. I put these changes down to the rise of the enslavement of trafficked Africans. I argue that this change happens from the middle of the 1610s, at a point at which England’s colonies in Virginia are expanding and English colonial projects in the Caribbean are developing. This paper will focus entirely on John Webester’s The White Devil (1612), whilst also examining portraiture and paintings of Black women in the early modern period. 

Rebecca Adusei is a PhD student at King's College, London. Her project locates and analyses depictions and characterisations of Sub-Saharan Africans in Early Modern literature and drama. Trained in Literary Studies, Rebecca's research has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Drawing together Literary Studies and History, she looks at Black individuals in the Early modern archives and scrutinises their characterisations in literature. Rebecca has spoken at the London Shakespeare Centre and the Shakespeare's Globe's Home and Early Modernity Conference. She was also one of the co-founders of the Reflecting on Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives online symposium that called for scholars from all disciplines to discuss the lives of Black people in early modern Britain. In 2021/2022, she was awarded the SRS Scholars of Colour Bursary for her work in Early Modern Studies.

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