Fictions of Race: Racecraft, Reproduction, and Whiteness in <i>Titus Andronicus</i>

Previous articleNext article FreeFictions of Race: Racecraft, Reproduction, and Whiteness in Titus AndronicusUrvashi ChakravartyUrvashi ChakravartyUniversity of Toronto Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWhat does it mean to speak of fictions in early modern England? What purpose can fiction serve? And to what ends is fiction pressed? By the seventeenth century, the idea of fiction as a literary genre was in place; but so too was the understanding of fiction as "invention as opposed to fact," without any openly negative connotation.1 This seeming neutrality, as I will demonstrate, is pertinent for our understandings of race, a term with a history of studied—and staged—objectivity. As I shall discuss, the process of race-making is also a structure of world-making; it is an assemblage and a scaffolding of power, a continuous process of invention that labors to depict itself as natural and naturalized. At the same time, the very notion of the fiction pulls us in different directions. In its most pejorative sense, a fiction can signify something not true, or fabricated, which centers around the sense of dissembling or deceiving.2 For Thomas Thomas, a fiction denotes a "lie, a cogge," as it does for Randle Cotgrave, who glosses the term as a "lie, fib, cog."3 Both lexicographers, then, suggest the sense of mendacity associated with fiction, but also, by using the word "cog," invoke the specter of cheating, or tricking.Yet early modern lexicographers also underscore fiction's association with "feigning" in a positive register, with "a thing imagined, fained," indeed an "inuention."4 In the sense of "fiction" as "invention" or the capacity of imagining, fiction not only becomes a valorized and valuable commodity, it also rehearses the possibilities of "invention" as both "fabrication" as well as "discovery" and resolution, as a capacity for inventiveness that imagines new possibilities and new terrain.5 In the context of literary production, fiction affords the scope for personal or collective imagining, for inscribing new worlds and inventing new futures. In the staging or sharing of literary works, such fictions become the collective imaginative property of their audiences and interlocutors, who are possessed with the capacity to invest in or to re-imagine them.Fictions, in other words, are generative. Yet I want to caution at the outset of this essay against too idealized a view of fiction's possibilities. For if fiction allows us the capacity of world-making, it necessarily tethers that speculative world to the interests that determine its authors'—and its mediators'—lives. Fictions can be and are re-made and re-imagined in their audiences' images, of course, and often to resistant or subversive ends. But they can also be wielded to mask as reparative or speculative the strategies they (quite literally) "invent." And as I shall suggest in this essay, one of those strategies—indeed, one of the most pressing and important strategies—pertains to race.For literary creation, I argue, is also central to the process of race-making: the different valences of fiction—as mendacity and invention, as a "trick" or pretense—are crucially conscripted in the service of early modern racial formation, so that the arena of fiction lends its strategies for the protean processes of race-making. In other words, I propose that it is not possible to think about early modern fictions, writ large, without attending to one of the most persistent and insidious fictions being rehearsed and reimagined at this (and every) moment, that of race; and I argue that those formulations and re-inventions of race in turn affect how we should perceive the work and aims of fiction writ large.It has long been a commonplace to suggest that race is itself a fiction. By speaking of race in the terms of fiction, critics generally suggest the following: that race is not "real"; that race is deliberately crafted, to specific effects; that race is strategic. As I discuss elsewhere, to say that race is a fiction is not to say that it is "untrue" or its effects unfelt.6 Rather, to suggest that race is a fiction is to underscore both the strategy and the craft(edness) of race. In this essay, I attend to fictions of race in early modern England in order to demonstrate firstly, how the crafting of race as a fiction is constructed and operates, and to what ends; and secondly, how the fiction of a legible, fixed, or stable mode of "race" is repeatedly iterated and rehearsed. In other words, I am suggesting, early modern race is a form of racecraft—to borrow the famous formulation of Fields and Fields—and what we discern in literary texts are the strategies that scaffold these fictions.7 As Fields and Fields argue:Distinct from race and racism, racecraft does not refer to groups or to ideas about groups' traits, however odd both may appear in close-up. It refers instead to mental terrain and to pervasive belief. Like physical terrain, racecraft exists objectively; it has topographical features that Americans regularly navigate, and we cannot readily stop traversing it. Unlike physical terrain, racecraft originates not in nature but in human action and imagination; it can exist in no other way. The action and imagining are collective yet individual, day-to-day yet historical, and consequential even though nested in mundane routine. The action and imagining emerge as part of moment-to-moment practicality, that is, thinking about and executing every purpose under the sun. Do not look for racecraft, therefore, only where it might be said to "belong." Finally, racecraft is not a euphemistic substitute for racism. It is a kind of fingerprint evidence that racism has been on the scene.8According to Fields and Fields, therefore, racecraft comprises a kind of fiction, one that operates in the realms of "mental terrain" and "imagination," yet generates its felt effects in the quotidian arenas of "mundane routine." To be clear, racecraft, as Ayanna Thompson reminds us, is not a stable or fixed process in itself. Rather, "Constructions of race are inconsistent and opportunistic; that is one of the hallmarks of race-making and racecraft."9 What I hope to demonstrate is that the multiple strategies of fiction are themselves complicit in the frameworks they construct—amongst them, perhaps most importantly, that of race.In order to explore this phenomenon, I turn to Titus Andronicus, a text which often falls within the remit of "race plays" and which, as the introduction to this volume reminds us, is also deeply concerned with the devastating effect of "'mere' fictions."10 In this essay, I both examine the way in which race is explicitly constructed and demonstrate how the text precisely plays with the fictionality of race. For Titus Andronicus prompts us to ask who the wielders of fictions are, what or whom a given fiction serves, and how fiction—something ostensibly "not real"—works to challenge or consolidate systems of power and inequity. Recalling that race is also a fiction, I propose, warns us against too rosy a view of the possibilities of fiction, and alerts us to the way in which even the most promising possibilities of imagination and invention are still deeply imbricated not only in the systems of their production but also in the perpetuation of existing systems of inequity. In other words, the danger of fiction may not only be that it recreates the structures it purports to challenge, but that it also and at the same time attempts to elide the very real structures of power it perpetuates.It is perhaps relevant, then, to recall that there is another meaning of "fiction" that we need to consider, in its sense as "The action of fashioning or imitating."11 This is particularly pertinent, perhaps, for Titus Andronicus, a work in which we see the structure of race-making in part through imitation. In one of the most famous (and infamous) moments in the play, Aaron, confronted with his mixed-race black offspring, both acknowledges his son and proposes a daring and disconcerting racial fiction: that his son be substituted for the mixed-race but white-presenting son of his countryman Muliteus. In her foundational examination of the frameworks of whiteness in the play, exemplified in large part by the hyper-whiteness of the Goths, Francesca Royster places pressure on the question of why the substituted child must pass as white.12 The fictions created and challenged in the problem of Aaron's child are manifold: fictions around the legibility of epidermal race, or indeed of epidermal race at all; fictions about the integrity of racial genealogies; and fictions around a kind of racial consanguinity. Yet I also want to underscore that we do not see the outcome of this racial fiction; this racial fiction remains, in other words, a constant and potentially irreconcilable threat. And as I shall discuss, it also gestures to the way in which whiteness subscribes to its own hyper-fictionality as a racialized construction.When the nurse enters in Act 4, Scene 2 with Tamora's baby, she refers to it as a "devil," infamously introducing Aaron's newborn child as:A joyless, dismal, black and sorrowful issue.Here is the babe, as loathsome as a toadAmongst the fair-faced breeders of our clime.The empress sends it thee, thy stamp, thy seal,And bids thee christen it with thy dagger's point.(4.2.68–72)The nurse's description of the child of course traffics in an explicit form of anti-black sentiment, but it also reveals the different somatic logics at work here. What the nurse emphasizes is the difficulty of accounting for Tamora's black issue amongst "fair-faced breeders." This scene underscores how "consanguineal communities are founded on a fiction," as the familial association of the child with his brothers is underwritten by the unseen factor of blood and potentially undercut by the legible register of epidermal difference, but I also want to attend to the child's description as "thy stamp, thy seal."13 Both of these objects, the stamp and the seal, suggest "means of inscription denoting possession," but they are also fictions unto themselves, standing in for the person they denote and (at least in theory) assuming a metaphorical reproducibility.14 In the nurse's formulation, the child's epidermal register—his blackness, as opposed to his "fair-faced" compatriots—is both a property and a kind of essential feature. Yet even as she refers to the "fair-faced breeders of our clime," she already suggestively implies that there are those who may only be fair of face.This possibility is quickly realized in Aaron's decision to replace his own son with Muly's (or Muliteus's) child:Not far one Muly lives, my countryman:His wife but yesternight was brought to bed;His child is like to her, fair as you are.Go pack with him and give the mother gold,And tell them both the circumstance of all,And how by this their child shall be advancedAnd be received for the emperor's heir,And substituted in the place of mine(4.2.154–61)Aaron's plan to substitute his biracial, black child for Muly's biracial, white one is a "literal" fiction—swapping one child for another—yet its dynastic effects are actually the same either way: neither child is truly the emperor's. Yet in plotting to place a white child who is "really" black not only in Roman society but in the lineage of the emperor, Aaron underscores the fiction of racial "legibility": the idea that race can be read epidermally or somatically. The danger that Muly's child presents is that blackness is already present in Roman society, perhaps at the highest levels, in ways unable to be discerned. And although Aaron's son is allowed to live at the end of the play, we hear no more about Muly's child: the spectral, white-presenting black child remains an unresolved reminder of the ways in which the fictions of race may prove resistant to their reception as fact.The status of Aaron's child unfolds another kind of fiction which operates in Titus Andronicus, and which interacts closely with the frameworks of race-making so central to the play: the particular and vexed place of slavery. What does it mean to think of Aaron as an enslaved person, or not—and more importantly, what do our investments in one interpretation over another tell us about our own fictions around race and slavery? The ideologies of slavery in early modern England, I argue elsewhere, are as deeply rooted as they are consistently denied; yet Aaron is often not viewed as enslaved.15 I remain persuaded that to view Aaron as enslaved is central to our understanding of race in the play; my interest is in exploring why this interpretive tension remains. Situating Aaron within a global economy of enslavement and traffic in enslaved peoples is instructive; for as Noémie Ndiaye has demonstrated, attending to the Spanish economy in chattel slavery allows us to gloss Aaron's enslaved status.16 Indeed, we might also think of Aaron as a type of Roman slave, as Misha Teramura has explored.17 These two forms of slavery, I have argued, are intimately intertwined; indeed, it is the depiction of Roman slavery in the classroom that precisely inculcates the habits of mind that authorize Atlantic slavery.18 Why, then, is there often uncertainty around Aaron's status as an enslaved person, and what does it say about our own expectations of what slavery means, how power operates and manifests, and how the nexus of race and slavery reveals itself?19 Aaron's resistance to specific codes of conduct and his refusal to perform subservience, for instance, may seem to pose challenges to an understanding of his enslaved status; but as I will suggest, these very behaviors participate in structures of stereotype and scriptedness that are deeply implicated in forms of race-making.There is, of course, also a racial fiction being enacted on the stage itself, in the materials of both blackness and, it is suggested, "whiteface."20 The fiction of perceiving Aaron on stage means reading the materials of the theatre that demarcate him as such. As Ian Smith and other scholars have crucially argued, the technologies of race on the early modern stage consisted in not only makeup but cloth.21 What Smith calls "chromatic materiality" activated a framework of chromatic association which in turn, I suggest, might also undertake a form of "racecraft," the imprint of racism that rehearses the habits of mind in the quotidian contexts of—for instance—the killing of a fly in Act 3, Scene 2 (Folio).22 This fly, Marcus suggests, is "a black ill-favoured fly, / Like to the empress' Moor. Therefore I killed him" (3.2.67–68). The violence demonstrated toward the fly, and its description as "ill-favoured," is an instance—and a relatively explicit one—of what Fields and Fields refer to as the kind of "fingerprint evidence" of racism which characterizes racecraft. The explanation in the next line ("Like to the empress' Moor. Therefore I killed him") in turn works to explain the racecraft. What we see here, in other words, is both the workings of racecraft—what I have been referring to as the mode in which fictions of race resonate in this play—and an explanation of how that fiction is created and what work it is intended to achieve.The material techniques of racial impersonation also, of course, register and rehearse modes of racial fictions themselves: suggesting that "race" is epidermal, registered materially or prosthetically, whilst allowing the other kinds of race work that these texts undertake to go unremarked. In other words, they contribute to the very naturalization of whiteness as "unconstructed,"23 a point to which I will return. The theatrical materials of race, of course, train their viewers in a semiotics of race: they teach their viewers how to parse the fictions they explicitly present, to see the "fiction" of a black person on stage and encode and adopt it.24 But these fictions of race also simultaneously construct their—and our—understanding of the workings of not just race, but fiction, too. The purpose of these theatrical fictions consists in the modes and methods of reading for race on the body (but only on particular kinds of bodies); as epidermal or somatic; as legible; as materially marked. What remains unmarked—except in very specific ways—is, of course, whiteness. My point here is not just that the techniques of racial impersonation, the racial fictions which are staged in the early modern theatre, create modes of parsing fiction and construct an understanding of "race." It is that these fictions, through their very staging and staginess, make the claim that whiteness is not, in quite the same way, a fiction. For the unmarked nature of whiteness both renders it "beyond" fiction—it is so naturalized as to seem "real"—and a "hyper-fiction": its very unmarked nature is the product of the most careful and most sophisticated fictions.25I want to turn to two brief instances of this phenomenon in Titus Andronicus. The first is in the description, which I have already discussed, of Aaron and Tamora's son as "thy stamp, thy seal." The sense of the "stamp" and "seal" indexes Aaron's visible racial register, legible in the body of the child. But it also invokes the sense of property: the child announces itself as Aaron's. Yet Aaron both allows and complicates this easy association, repeatedly underscoring the child's full parentage:He is your brother, that blood that first to from that where you is and to is your by the my be in his emphasizes here that the child is more his and should the of the will that should not the is of whilst that the child is like the for being / the that may see it / to the In Act 4, Scene Aaron's is that his child is in a that the empress and her as to think this his mother has a child by the your / that will with / The and of thy Aaron's here about capacity to capacity that is also associated with his a of his It may seem perhaps, to suggest that we might to gloss this word in terms of our understandings of yet Aaron's itself here to invoke that As early modern texts their investments in a form of as in the important formulation of to is the of his and his it is also a form of as white property that reveals itself in other in his in his and in his of with this no And in suggesting that Aaron's child is his that is, a form of black and even in an to and to these workings of white as Ndiaye the workings of in both Roman and early modern slavery the child within the of the and Aaron to this the child as and to By that the child is his the not only him within early modern as Ndiaye it also even as it the of whiteness as In the context of it to the technologies of itself become a and devastating fiction: the fiction that the was the property of although Aaron in Act 4, Scene 2 that in and that / To be a and a must his to Aaron's for his it is often is in the play; and it is precisely this that is against him in Act Scene as to his son as of to the that may see it that is, and precisely the that Aaron's with his does so in a that the most forms of in the of in and the long history of in Titus it is the the are being and the mother is I want to suggest that Titus the that might become the particular of violence and and to argue that the a fiction around race, and property effects be realized only in the of of course, what to the child's is Aaron's to the has Aaron to and if it which / child shall live and I will see it Aaron's of his that explicitly as to its in for the of his The that Aaron is as an but is in a for the of his I must of and of black of to hear yet this shall be in my to my child shall is for on thy I say thy child shall Aaron to the of the play, also the yet I think / within the of my I not The are but they are also too readily of racialized Aaron's the about their are the fictions, in the context of the play, or are we to view them as The that Aaron's are by in order to his and that these fictions in themselves a particular register of race-making in the play, both the processes of racial and the of fiction to their And they are a that reveals how the fictions of race are As Aaron this his more explicitly toward the structures of racecraft in which they are I have a as one a that I cannot do here have been as a of as indeed they and they also a both the of violence and associated with Aaron and, by the very of his their potentially But Aaron's also reminds the of the kinds of racial fictions in which the has not least in the of the of "a What Aaron's here I suggest, is not only a on the work of racecraft in the of the fly, but also the insidious and of fiction more It is perhaps no that although Aaron's Aaron invokes the killing of a fly and you with my is Andronicus, I have suggested, not only unfolds how the fictions of race it also reveals the by which fictions construct in turn, fiction is complicit in the processes of race-making and its structures of power and I this essay by that we must remain to the interests of and I want to end by on a of the racial its of whiteness in over In I to the and of white in and although the hyper-whiteness of has received important I want to by how the valorized of also the work and the of white in to the is a Roman the kind who is two and the her that she has not she with Aaron, she does not to in for her in with her And to that Aaron make your of his / and Tamora's whiteness both by her conduct and Aaron's and that "The my shall have of for these have him / to be so being with but the kind of this is quite different from the that in remains a a of what here, in the very of or is a of white by Tamora's even as she in its against the imaginative of or that in itself to and white at the end of the play, is in the very of as Titus that she has and her to and racecraft, in the formulation of Fields and Fields, a kind of "fingerprint the of the or that In the register of perhaps being by a in point is not to the violence or the devastating effect of and on Rather, it is to suggest that the itself prompts us to think about the way in which white in the work of whiteness. Titus the danger of to which are it also underscores the way in which white can also be the and of the most devastating racial And it us that the hyper-fictionality of and the strategies of race, can both be by and their that the fictions of race must in the interest of white am to and as well as to the for their very for fiction fiction Thomas Thomas, Randle Cotgrave, of the and Cotgrave, invention I I introduction to Fictions of and in England its of the of fiction and their in Fields and Fields, The of in Fields and Fields, Ayanna the of for and in The to and Ayanna Thompson and introduction to this fiction Francesca Whiteness and in Titus In the valences of in the underscore the

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