Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England.

Kim F. Hall. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.319 pp. $42.50 (cl), ISBN: 0-8014-3117-4; $17.95 (pap), ISBN: 0-8014-8249-6.

In this fascinating study of the tropology of race and gender in early modern England, Kim Hall demystifies the aestheticizing - and the "critical effacement" (1) - of race that has marked traditional commentary. (A well-known example that she cites is Lysander's rejection in A Midsummer Night's Dream of Hermia as "Ethiop" and "tawny Tartar.") This perspective yields startling and fruitful results: perhaps most striking is the rereading of the familiar, traditionally moralized "fair"/"dark" binary in the English Petrarchan lyric (e.g., in Sidney's Astrophel and Stella) as participating in the discourse of race.

Acknowledging that actual numbers of blacks in England during this period were not numerous, Hall argues that the "significance of blackness as a troping of race far exceeds the[ir] actual presence" (14). She thus takes the largely successful strategy of not limiting her attention to texts like Othello that are "about" blackness, but directing it to those texts which deal with race in embedded or fragmentary ways.

While firmly grounded in the work of contemporary theorists of race such as K. Anthony Appiah, Etienne Balibar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Patricia Williams, the strength of this book lies in its unwavering focus on the historical specificity of "race" in the early modern period. Thus it is entirely fitting that the study begins with the analysis of Renaissance travel narratives - by Leo Africanus, Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchase - that served as the originary textual site of colonialism where the European discourse on race (and its close interrelation with gender) was first worked out.

Another strength of this work is its density - the range and the kind of materials treated. In addition to the texts already mentioned and drama including Jonson's Masque of Blackness, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Webster's The Devil's Law-Case, and Richard Brome's less familiar The English Moore, the book examines the response of women writers (primarily Mary Wroth's in her romance Urania) to the male discourse of colonialism and adventurism, as well as the representation of African slaves and servants in visual culture such as artifacts and portraits. Particularly of interest is the analysis of portraiture, where adoring black attendants were deployed to represent the power and prerogative of the white male colonist, or the beauty of the white female aristocrat. In the latter instance, however, the woman and the attendant are subtly linked and hence identified as objects.

The appendix containing "Poems of Blackness," some of which are only available in their original, seventeenth-century editions, will prove a useful pedagogical resource for those wishing to supplement "race-blind" anthologies of the English Renaissance lyric. Hall's activist concern with pedagogy is also evident in her impassioned reflection, in the epilogue, on her position as a black feminist writing and teaching in a largely white academy; not content to leave her study in the purely historical and academic registers, she situates it in the contemporary politics of race and gender.

In placing race within the discursive network not only of gender, but of class, nationalism, and colonialism/imperialism, this book, together with Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker's collection, Women, "Race" and Writing, marks the beginning of a sustained, historically and theoretically aware interrogation of the significance of race in the early modern period.

MIHOKO SUZUKI University of Miami