Thank you all for the responses so far. Theatrical examples are indeed
plentiful: scores of plays from the period feature characters in 'blackface' of
one sort or another, and in many of those plays other characters (non-Moor,
non-Turk, etc.) adopt at some point 'blackface' for purposes of disguise.
But while common on stage, cross-racial disguise still appears to be relatively
(if not entirely?) absent from prose romance, a genre in which disguises of all
other sorts abound. Disguise calls attention to the barrier that the disguise
crosses, and at times even suggests a measure of permeability. Renaissance
theater repeatedly deploys disguise and other modes of self-transformation
(e.g., conversion) to explore issues of racial and cultural identity, fluidity,
and hybridization; prose romance -- a genre in some ways about identity
formation -- doesn't. At least, I'm beginning to think it doesn't. Or at
least it's starting to seem a topic a graduate student might usefully explore?
Joseph Black
Department of English
University of Massachusetts Amherst
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