Seeing Race Before Race – Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World

Noémie Ndiaye is assistant professor of Renaissance and Early Modern English Literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race and Racecraft: Early Modern Repertoires of Blackness. Lia Markey is director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library. She is the author of Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence and coeditor of The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492-1750.

• Foreword- by Ayanna Thompson and Daniel GreeneIntroduction- by Lia Markey and Noémie NdiayePart 1: FIGURINGEssay 1. Manuscripts and Printed Books: Book History and Race. By Brandi K. Adams and Carissa M. Harris.Essay 2. Fashioning Racial Materiality in Nicolas de Nicolay’s Representations of Jews. By M. Lindsay Kaplan and Dana E. Katz.Note From the Field 1. “Touching each book”: Demystifying Special Collections in Community. By Analú María López.Exhibition Catalog: “Seeing Race Before Race.” Part 1: Figuring. Entries 1-14. Part 2: MAPPINGEssay 3. Geographies of Race: Constructions of Constantinople/Istanbul in the Western European Imaginary. By Roland Betancourt and Ambereen Dadabhoy.Essay 4. Race, Empire, and Cartography. By Ricardo Padrón and Risa Puleo.Note From the Field 2. Displaying Black Art in the Medieval Galleries at The Met Museum. By Andrea Myers Achi.Exhibition Catalog: “Seeing Race Before Race.” Part 2: Mapping. Entries 15-26. Part 3: PERFORMINGEssay 5. Back Bending Labor, Savage Dances, Pious Stances: Race in Motion between Africa and the Americas. By Elena FitzPatrick Sifford and Cécile Fromont.Note From the Field 3. Bringing Premodern Critical Race Consciousness to Shakespeare’s Globe. By Farah Karim-Cooper. Exhibition Catalog: “Seeing Race Before Race.” Part 3: Performing. Entries 27-42. Interview. On Early Modern Critical Race Studies and Critical Indigenous Studies. By Kim F. Hall, Scott Manning Stevens, and L. Lehua Yim.GlossaryBibliography AcknowledgmentsList of ContributorsIndex

"A seminal and ground-breaking volume, Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World will prove to be of immense interest to students of Art History, Philosophy, and Race Relations. While also available for students, academia, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subjects covered, Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World is an exceptionally impressive and unreservedly recommended addition to professional, community, college, and university library Art History and Philosophy Criticism collections, and supplemental Cultural History curriculum studies lists."