Emphasis and Elision: Early Modern English Approaches to Racial Mixing and their Afterlives

Abstract:Early modern English approaches to racial mixing are marked by inconsistency. In this, they find affinity with the approaches of subsequent history, in which the topic of mixedness is subject to divergent, often conflicting, concerns, observations, and theories. In dominant discourse, the topic has historically been—and continues to be—regularly cleaved from historical precedent and present reality, many times in ways that augur otherwise improbable futures. Inconsistency thus offers perhaps the most consistent characteristic through which to chart the trajectory of approaches to racial mixing across time. While we might certainly sketch a broad historical path of dominant approaches to the topic, in practice, beliefs about mixedness regularly emerge and reemerge in ways that complicate and at times contravene what we might envision as the prevailing perspective or historical reality of a given moment.