Fictions of Race: Racecraft, Reproduction, and Whiteness in Titus Andronicus

Abstract

W hat 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. 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. ForThomas Thomas, afiction denotes a “lie, a cogge,” as it does forRandleCotgrave,who glosses the term as a “lie, fib, cog.” Both lexicographers, then, suggest the sense of mendacity associatedwithfiction, but also, by using theword “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.” In the sense of “fiction” as “invention” or the capacity of imagining, fiction not only becomes a valorized and valuable