ABSTRACT
Attempting to compose scholarly discourse on matters of race is rife with pitfalls and misconceptions regardless of the period in which one is writing. In our modern world, writings on race are often a tinderbox to which every reader offers a different potential spark. The amount of tension held within discourse of race is almost palpable, as every argument is met with resistance from every angle: religious, historical, sentimental, theoretical, personal, and academic are just some of the ways in which the public attacks any discourse on race. Part of this stems from the fact that to write about race is to write about inequality, genocide, rape, and other egregious acts to which no one seems willing to admit culpability. Writing about race in earlier periods, specically the Early Modern English period, encounters an entirely new collection of resistance from scholars and historians who dismiss and unnecessarily problematize discussions of race by claiming that race in the Early Modern period is impossible to discuss because (1) conceptions of racial difference were new to epistemology and were yet to be truly dened, and (2) it is impossible to produce scholarly discourse on race in the Early Modern period that is not clouded by modern conceptions of race that render the discourse irrelevant through its chronological disjunction. This resistance has led some scholars writing on race in the period to automatically recognize and accept the piles of confusing and contradictory discourse around the topic by placing “race” in scare quotes.1
