Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press, chpts 1, 2, 6.

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or: The Royal Slave. Norton.

SUMMARY

The emergence of a female print culture and the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade - events that occurred about the same time - were developments that brought each other, in Gayatri Spivak's term, to crisis. Early modern women's writing engaged with "blackness" in distinctive, gendered ways. For women writers, "struggling for a subject position from which to write" (as Kim Hall has remarked), "dark/light dichotomies become a key point of contest." As writers such as Mary Wroth, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Clinton, Elizabeth Cary and Aphra Behn wrestled with the problems of writing from a marginalized position and struggled to articulate a "womanhood" that was inseparable from whiteness, they provided an analysis of race that complicates analyses available in men's writing.

Building on the work of Kim Hall, Margo Hendricks, Dynmpna Callaghan and other commentators on early modern women, I hope to show that race is constantly at issue in the works of early modern women writers, even when it is not an explicit subject. I shall concentrate on women's negotiations of what Paul Gilroy has called "the Black Atlantic," the hybird culture that connects sub-Saharan Africa with the Americas and Britain. The texts we shall consider include Gilroy's "Black Atlantic," selections from a range of English women writers, and, more intensively, Aphra Behn's "Oroonoko, or: The Royal Slave." My hope is to explore the possibility of reading early modern English literature wthin a "world-system," in Wallerstein's formulation, and thus to challenge the notion that postcolonial methodologies can be unproblematically applied to Renaissance literature.