Choreographies of Race and Gender: Dance, Travel, and Ritual in Early Modern English Literature, 1558-1668

FAIN: HB-289526-23

Elisa Jaimee Oh
Howard University (Washington, DC 20059-0001)

Research and writing to complete a book analyzing race and gender hierarchies through representations of dance and movement in the sixteenth and seventeenth century English literature.

Choreographies of Race and Gender: Dance, Travel, and Ritual in Early Modern English Literature 1558-1668 illuminates the formation of racial and gendered hierarchies through patterns of physical movement through space, including dance, geographical travel, and secular and religious rituals. Critical attention to embodied movement in literary texts such as William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Macbeth, Ben Jonson’s court masques, and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus as well as travel narratives like John Smith’s account of Pocahontas reveals dynamic paradigms that create and perpetuate ideas of human difference. This book project will contribute to the Humanities a kinesic analysis of early modern English ideologies of colonial encounters, enslavement, witchcraft, upward mobility, liturgical reform, and gendered conduct. Beyond literature, the interpretive focus on motion will interest interdisciplinary scholars and students of dance, colonialism, race, gender, and performance.