ABSTRACT

From its earliest appearances on English stages, blackness represented the binary opposition of all constituent elements of English identity and subjectivity, appearing simultaneously as the abject of God, humanity, and community placing it within a position of absence. In addition to being a representation of abjection, early dramatists also positioned blackness as antagonistic to life, positioning it next to or existing within a position of death. This triangulation of blackness, metaphysical absence, and death continued from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries despite the fact that the narrative function and performative practices of black characters changed. Although notions of racialized identities were uid in this period, this chapter examines the ways in which blackness was continually represented in visual culture as a racialized subjectivity that was the abject to human presence. Beginning with the devils in medieval cycle plays and continuing through the Restoration, representations of blackness on stage, in written drama, and later in portraits reveals the ways in which blackness performed within an adversarial relationship with conceptions and constructions of humanity and subjectivity. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the dominant trends in the visual representations of blackness that occurred from the late medieval period through the Restoration to reveal the ways in which Blackness exists in an incomplete semiotic relationship that establishes blackness as a signier whose referent is immutable absence and social death. This representation of blackness as immutable absence positions black beings as incapable of human considerations for interactions within the semantic eld, thus excluding them from consideration as human subjects.