Hmm. Like the question of what precisely defines Una's "faith" as it expresses itself outwardly in an infinitely varied (and debated and distrusted and curiously attributed) world of signs, ambiguous signifiers and images, so "race" is frustratingly complex, esp if "surface markings" are to be discounted...
That fact that Una is also a type for the lady clothed by the sun helps explain her superlative whiteness. So why isn't she yellow as well? Because whiteness is a more apt symbolic value (?).
Spenser does play on color in the name "Duessa", which was a common name in the middle ages in Ireland (including, I think, the name of a daughter of legendary king of the west, Brian Boru) and means "little black one" in Irish (cf. Spanish "negrita"), from Irish dubh, "black" + diminutive ending. [cf. work by celticist Roland Smith in this regard in PMLA on "Una and Duessa"].
Curiously, "Una," which is still a common name today, sounds like an Irish term for "green", uaine, which may be a far-fetched pun except for various criticism noting Una's green-sickness for RCK. This then complicates her symbolic whiteness (and infallibility) by emphasizing her corporality as prone to earthly desire.
So far the word that hasn't come up here in regard to Spenser and race is "degeneration", which is key to the View, at least. Re the same in FQ, has anybody written about how the name Malecasta copies the contemporary Spanish judicial term for a mixed-racial identity? In Hamilton et al. we find other glosses on the name ("evil spell" etc), but not that one.
Finally, a plug for the recent article by Brendan Kane and Malcolm Smuts on "social lineage racism" (vs outward appearance) as the early modern norm, in "The politics of race in England, Scotland and Ireland" in Malcolm Smuts (ed.) The Oxford Handbook to the Age of Shakespeare.
Apologies for the rambling. Regards, --Tom
Thomas Herron
Department of English
East Carolina University
(252) 328-6413
Writer/Director, Centering Spenser: A Digital Resource for Kilcolman Castle
http://core.ecu.edu/umc/Munster/
From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Kim Coles <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2018 8:14 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Faerie Queene and Race: Book 1We are not talking about surface markings of the skin at all. Spenser's colonial project was directed against other white Europeans—religious others. Much scholarship still holds that the terminology of the body that rationalizes difference is void of any material meaning. Robert Bartlett states this position so clearly that it is oft-quoted: “while the language of race [in pre-modern sources]—gens, natio, ‘blood,’ ‘stock,’ etc.—is biological,” he writes, “its . . . reality was almost entirely cultural.” But David Nirenberg observes that it is meaningless to say that “although a premodern ideology was expressed in biological terms, it was not racial because the differences it reinforced were not really biological[.] This could be said of any racial ideology.”
Ben Robinson has written persuasively of how both the religious polemic and poetry of early modern England, including the Faerie Queene, represents Catholics “among the outcasts and infidels” in order to expose them as “Turks in disguise.” I might revise this claim: rather, at least in Spenser’s poem, Catholics and infidels are imagined in the same terms—as all sharing the same somatic weakness that forbids the light of true religion and forecloses the possibility of Christian communion. But the source of these ideas, in both medical and Christian philosophy, is complicated, and needs to be exfoliated over time.
The point of the conversation is to entertain these ideas, not to necessarily accept them. If one accepts Spenser's implication in the English colonial project, it seems unreasonable to imagine that race cannot possibly be an element of his psyche or of his work. Certainly the reading of exterior surface markings as a set of inward moral characteristics is a feature of modern racial logic. But reading the body for its moral (humoral) constitution is a feature of early modern racial logic—a central principle of contemporary medical theory that was invoked in support of numerous social arrangements in the early modern period.
On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 12:11 AM, Elisabeth Chaghafi <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Aren't "black" / "white" the wrong adjectives in this context anyway? As far as I'm aware, references to skin-colour in sixteenth-century texts almost exclusively talk about "dark" or "fair" complexion or skin. And they're probably more closely associated with beauty ideals than with race.
About the Faerie knights, I think the poem at several points implies that there is a difference, but presumably it's not a visible one, otherwise knights couldn't grow up thinking they're Faerie and later discover they are actually human...Elisabeth
On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 2:31 AM, Martin Mueller <[log in to unmask]u> wrote:
When did "white" become a term through which people describe their own ethnic/racial identity or that of others? Iago clearly sees Othello as "black", but did he think of himself as "white"? I have all the TCP texts on my computer and wrote a little Python script that looks for all occurrences where the adjective 'white' is followed by 'man', 'woman', 'child', 'person', 'people'. There does not appear to be a single occurrence of such a bigram in 5,200 texts before 1610.
Assuming that my search was accurate and complete--not a totally safe assumption--the lexical evidence should make you skeptical about claiming a 'racialized' component in the meaning of 'white' in the Faerie Queene or any other text of that period. Which is not to say that there was no racism in that world--there clearly was. Italian has the lovely word 'tintura' as a technical term for the tonal colouring of a work (the opening of Verdi's Simone Boccanegra is a stupendous example). So we might think of the 'tintura' of a word and of ways in which it changes over time. 'White' is a heavily racialized word in our world, but I doubt whether it was racialized at all in Spenser's world.
To question a racializing tintura of 'white' in the 16th century is not to question the fact that Spenser more than once " associate[s] sexual excess and perversion with foreign locals, religions, and peoples." He certainly did. Whether he did so more often or in different ways than others is an open question. There is a long history of such behaviour going all the way back to Herodotus (who probably was a more tolerant person than Spenser). Una's spectacular whiteness is adequately accounted for by the opposition of night and day. Think of Milton's sonnet about his "late espoused saint" with its play on 'white', 'light', and 'night'.
On 7/17/18, 5:20 PM, "Sidney-Spenser Discussion List on behalf of Kathryn Walls" <[log in to unmask] on behalf of [log in to unmask]> wrote:
If I may interject once more: Una's whiteness is completely obscured by her "blacke stole". This associates her with the bride in the Song of Songs, who is "blacke . . . but comely". In his sermon on the Song of Songs, Beza identifies the bride's blackness and mourning with sin and guilt, with which even the elect are infected. Her comeliness (which is her whiteness in Spenser) he identifies with the innocence bestowed upon the elect by Christ (Spenser's white lamb), the divine innocence which covers our sinfulness from the sight of a loving God. See Master Bezaes sermons vpon the three chapters pf the canticle of canticles, trans. John Harmar (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1587). Beza anticpates Spenser in representing both blackness and beauty as garments.
-----Original Message-----
From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [mailto:SIDNEY-SPENSER@JISCMAIL.AC.UK ] On Behalf Of Dennis Britton
Sent: Wednesday, 18 July 2018 9:53 a.m.
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Faerie Queene and Race: Book 1
A lively discussion has begun on Twitter. Kim posted what I think is an important question that I believe would be useful to consider here:
Beginning with Melissa Sanchez's assertions that Spenser more than once "associate[s] sexual excess and perversion with foreign locals, religions, and peoples," Kim asked, "It seems worth asking from the start the extent to which the moral encoding of figures in the FQ is embodied and racialized--and particularly important if we are to begin understanding the embodied terms of Spenser's religious allegory. How do we understand, then, the spectacular whiteness of Una? She rides "Upon a lowly Asse more white than snow, / Yet she much whiter," and tows "in line a milke white lamb" (I.i.4).
Does Una have a racial identity? Do the race (and gender) of allegorical figures matter?
Also, don't forget to join the conversation on Twitter! #TeamFQandRace
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