I could be wrong but I think the allusion on this thread to black skin but
European features means my allusion to Aphra Behn--in other words late
17th century. She is very specific that she means the west coast of
Africa, not northern Moorish nor yet the somewhat more Euro-featured or
southern Nilotic or whatever Ethiopians or Sudanese. She confuses the name
of the port of departure for many slave ships for a real "nation," and her
claims to have been in Guiana and *seen* this enslaved prince may be
fiction, but she does not, I think, mean Moors. She says Oroonoko's skin
is jet black and his nose "Roman." Maybe she had seen some of those other
Africans, but she is quite clear about the geography of the slave trade,
even if she mixes up some names. Oroonoko's wife, by the way, is also
black *but* beautiful. My favorite misunderstanding of race remains that
in Wolfram's *Parzifal*, in which a black and a white parent produce a
child of great charm who is piebald--or, as the book has it, a "magpie."
As the mother-in-law of a paleoanthropologist, by the way, I can't help
mentioning that the whole race thing is so finally sad because we are all,
says both the fossil and dna evidence, descended from a tiny group of
Africans, probably in what is now Ethiopia or maybe a bit further south.
Yes, I do know we live now and not back then, but still . . . the first
Europeans were almost certainly black. Anne P.
> In a message dated 11/27/2003 9:44:57 AM Pacific Standard Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
> Recent scholarship, by which I mean mainly books by Nabil Matar,
> has shown that at least those in London had in fact much more exposure to
> the various hues of African skin color than many have previously
> suspected.
> Thank you for telling me about Matar.
>
> I wonder if the earlier reference to a 16th century writer praising
> the
> black skin and European features...mentioned on this email strand...might
> not
> be a reference to the features of a Moor, as opposed to what we might
> think of
> as an "African?" That is...the North African mixture of Arab and African
> genetics.
>
> I wonder if an Englishman of the 16th century might have made a
> distinction between Moors and Africans? Would a 16th century Englishman
> have thought
> of modern North Africans as "black?"
>
> I checked out Matar's books online...and I intend to read deeper.
> Recently, my African-American (isn't is time we came up with a more
> graceful term?)
> students were very excited to learn about Moorish Spain.
>
> Does anyone here know of contemporary, realistic depictions of Moors?
> My students would be interested to see them. Were Moors really "black" as
> we
> picture the term...by which I mean, were they "black" in the way my
> American
> students would picture them?
>
> MRS
>
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