Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race by Noémie Ndiaye (review)

Reviewed by: Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race by Noémie Ndiaye Maya Mathur Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race. By Noémie Ndiaye. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. Pp. 376. Hardcover $64.95. Ebook $64.95. Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race by Noémie Ndiaye is a groundbreaking investigation into three modes of racialization—cosmetic, acoustic, and kinetic—that were produced in the theaters of Spain, France, and England across two centuries. The book enriches existing studies of race and performance by departing from the conventional focus on a single nation and limited period and instead highlighting the correspondences between the racial paradigms produced in these countries. Ndiaye defines "scripts of blackness" as forms of racial impersonation that shaped "how Afro-diasporic characters looked, sounded, and moved in various performance settings" (16) and examines their impact on a range of performances, from religious processions and street dances to aristocratic ballets and court masques. These performances provide the backdrop for Ndiaye's analysis of representative plays that underline the relationship between theatrical techniques and cultural attitudes towards Blackness. While the book offers new readings of well-known dramatists including Shakespeare, Dryden, Lope de Vega, and Molière, among others, its strength lies in its ability to place these playwrights in conversation with lesser-known dramatists, performers, and performance techniques. Equally importantly, the book locates the titular "scripts of blackness" in the cities of Seville, Rouen, and London, all of which were centers of the transatlantic slave trade with significant Afro-diasporic populations. Focusing on these sites allows Ndiaye to demonstrate that racial scripts developed to counter the perceived threat of Afro-diasporic communities in Europe and non-white subjects in colonized nations. Investigating the sites of racecraft also reinforces Ndiaye's claim that premodern performance culture "did not passively reflect the intercolonial emergence of blackness as a racial category but actively fostered it" (10). At the same time, Ndiaye shows that racializing techniques were far from hegemonic by examining those instances when Afro-diasporic performers could assert their agency and challenge the dominant narrative. Ndiaye's comparative and transversal approach helps drive home the broader point that racial scripts [End Page 325] could be distinct to the places in which they were produced, part of a shared vocabulary that transcended national boundaries, and was wielded by both dominant and minoritized populations. The book makes a strong case for the exclusionary and commodifying nature of racial scripts in its opening chapter, which investigates "the prosthetic techniques of embodiment" (2), including masks and makeup that were used to convey masculine blackness in the theater. The chapter connects the aesthetic and political dimensions of racecraft by distinguishing between the exclusionary scripts embraced by England and France and the commodifying script that dominated Spanish performance. Ndiaye posits that English and French performances, influenced by medieval representations of the devil and national involvement in the slave trade, expressed a desire to exclude the Afro-diasporic populations living among them. She accordingly connects plays like Titus Andronicus (1594) and Othello (1604) to the Barbary Company (established in 1585) and London's Afro-diasporic population to argue that English scripts alternate between emphasizing the danger of including non-European characters and the impossibility of expelling them. She makes the related claim that French plays such as Le More cruel (1609–1614) and Les Portugaiz infortunez (1608), which were both associated with the city of Rouen, used black-up to portray Black Muslims and Sub-Saharan Africans and advocate for their exclusion from the nation and its overseas territories. Ndiaye posits that, unlike England and France, Spain's slave-based economy and large Afro-Iberian population meant that it could not rely on scripts of exclusion, and suggests that it chose to marginalize Afro-Iberians by comparing them to animals, foodstuffs, and luxury goods instead. Focusing on an extensive corpus of plays by Lope de Vega and Claramonte y Corroy, Ndiaye demonstrates that somatic blackness involved comparing Afro-Iberian characters to commodities, an approach that allowed the "conditional inclusion of the enslaved into the enslaving society in...