This post is part of Reflecting on Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives: An Online Symposium, organised and edited by Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell. The blog series is introduced here. The blog series was launched on Friday 19 Mary 2023 at the London Metropolitan Archives to tie in with their new ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition.

Rebecca Adusei

Rebecca Adusei is a PhD student at King’s College, London. Her project locates and analyses depictions and characterisations of Sub-Saharan Africans in Early Modern literature and drama. Trained in Literary Studies, Rebecca’s research has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Drawing together Literary Studies and History, she looks at Black individuals in the early modern archives and scrutinises their characterisations in literature. Rebecca runs a book blog on Instagram where she sometimes discusses the Early Modern period. She has previously conducted tours for KCL’s Visible Skin Project. She has spoken at the London Shakespeare Centre and the Shakespeare’s Globe’s Home and Early Modernity Conference. In 2021/2022, she was awarded the SRS Scholars of Colour Bursary for her work in Early Modern Studies.

Studying the Black Presence in early modern texts and contextually has been the bedrock of my research for the last six years. It all started in a Shakespeare lecture back when I was an undergraduate student. We were studying Titus Andronicus and discussing the character, Aaron. I came to the lecture bristling with ideas. I was especially taken with the language that was used in the tragedy. I found the epithet ‘Moor’ quite interesting; it struck me that Aaron’s race became an intrinsic part of his characterisation and how others in the text sought to weaponize his race and demonize him for it. An example of this is when Marcus dubs him a ‘black ill-favoured fly’.[1] Whilst I did not have the vocabulary to eloquently articulate my ideas, I was aware what these examples were evidence of: anti-Black racism. However, whilst we discussed Aaron in the lecture and the subsequent seminar, I was shocked that no one picked up on these ideas, that led me to question whether I was wrong in my examinations. This all changed in 2018 when I read Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible.  

Reading Habib’s work made me feel vindicated and valid. In the opening sections of Black Lives Habib writes that ‘scholars have been unable to regard historical blacks in the reigns of Elizabeth and her immediate successors as anything more than stray figures in an “anecdotal” landscape, too accidental and solitary to be even a historical statistic.’[2] I was one of these scholars. The lack of critical engagement and discussion of the Black Presence contextually in early modern England and in early modern texts in my undergraduate class made me second guess my own beliefs. It made me question what I saw right in front of my eyes: blatant examples of anti-Black racism. However, reading Black Lives gave me the vocabulary, strength and confidence I so desperately needed to pursue this important work. Countering the long established idea in early modern discourse that there were no Black people in early modern England, Habib also shows that ‘[…] obscure, truncated and largely inaccessible documentary records, which are only now becoming fully available, paint a very different picture about the size, continuity and historical seriousness of the black presence in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, well before English black populations become known through the transatlantic slave trade.’[3]

Published in 1989, in her Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black bell hooks eloquently highlights the systematic silencing of Black women. In the early pages of her seminal text, hooks explains that ‘in the world of the southern black community I grew up in, “back talk” and “talking back” meant speaking as an equal to an authority figure.’[4] Whilst hooks is not writing from an early modern discourse standpoint, her point is very much related to the way academia has historically viewed Black women in early modern literature. That is not to say that no work had been done on Black women’s representation. As in 1995, Kim F. Hall published her groundbreaking Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. In Hall’s text we see one of the first examples of true, robust critical engagement with the Black, female presence in early modern texts. However, prior to this, when looking at Black women many academics fixated on Lucy Negro, the rumoured individual who was Shakespeare’s ‘Dark lady’. But as Joyce Green MacDonald astutely argues:

Appropriating the historical Lucy Negro to the legend of Shakespeare, the national poet, by identifying her as the Dark Lady is an early example of the erasure of Black women and how their stories, their bodies, their sexualities come to figure in the narratives that white society constructs and imposes on them.[5]

To use hooks’ phrase, ‘talking back’ then becomes an essential part of scholarship when examining Black women in early modern texts. But I wholeheartedly believe this can only be truly achieved by adopting an interdisciplinary approach. I hope by adopting an interdisciplinary approach in my thesis and peering into the lives of real Black women, that I will counter the well-established tradition of erasing Black women that has gone on for far too long and that this work will be part of the movement that will finally give Black women in the early modern period a voice.

Habib discusses the representations of Black people in early modern texts, noting that ‘even when they are visible, as in the popular representations of the English public theatres – such as in the plays of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare – their historical reality fades under the deformative force of cultural metaphor and becomes exotic fiction.’[6] In his analysis Habib is highlighting that the representations of Black people on the early modern stage are just that, representations. Falsities, commodified, packaged and sold to the audience to bolster the theatre industry and promote anti-Black feelings; because of this fact, looking solely at theatrical representations of Black people, academia does not gain a true idea of what it was like to be a Black person in early modern English society. For this reason, an interdisciplinary approach must be taken.

Six years on, Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible has given me a vocabulary, confidence and ability to ‘talk back’ to power to uncover how Black people, specifically Black women, were treated in early modern England. The accessible, clear and well-researched data presented in his book has given me, and the wider early modern studies field, a framework with which we can work from. For this, we owe Habib a debt that can never be repaid as, because of him, we are ever closer to understanding what it was like to be a person of colour in early modern England.

Click here to see all the posts in this series.

[1] William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. by Eugene M. Waith (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), III.2.66, p.144.

[2] Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), p.1.

[3] Habib, Black Lives, p.1.

[4]  bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), p.5.

[5] Joyce Green MacDonald, ‘The Legend of Lucy Negro’, in The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories ed.by Janell Hobson (Routledge, Oxon & New York: 2021), pp.66-74, (p.66).

[6]  Habib, Black Lives, p.7.