Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In addressing the conference theme, “Transcultural Humanities in a Global World,” this paper revisits Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker’s influential collection Women, ‘Race’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period (1993), which, with Kim Hall’s Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (1995) and Joyce Green MacDonald’s Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (2002), laid the foundation for considering “race” as an indispensable category of analysis when recovering early modern women’s writing. However, barring some recent assessments, such as Ania Loomba and Melissa Sanchez’s Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies (2016), this intersectional approach has not been consistent as the field has moved past its initial “recovery” stage. To interrogate and extend these efforts, I adduce Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry (1613) as my case study, as its context and content enables a complex consideration of race and religion, along with geohumoralism, enslavement, exoticism, colonialism, colorism, and other facets of early modern racial formation, in relation to gender.