ABSTRACT
Whiteness is currently enjoying a certain vogue, particularly in American studies. Invigorated by Toni Morrison’s call in Playing in the Dark to ‘discover, through a close look at literary “blackness,” the nature even the cause-of literary “whiteness” ’ (Morrison 1992:9), scholars have been examining the ways in which an Africanist presence in the texts of American culture has been used to create white subjects. Likewise, some post-colonial theorists suggest how gender relations and cultural interactions dominated by the West are shaped by the need both to establish white hegemony and to deflect attention from whiteness as a source of power. However, despite liberal borrowing from other theoretical schools and periods, the study of whiteness per se has generally not been part of early modern scholarship.1 On the one hand, there are logical reasons for this: the study of race has only
belatedly reached the period and most work on whiteness in other arenas has pointed out that the most salient quality of white-ness is that it tends to be rendered invisible through being ‘naturalized in dominant ideologies’ (Mercer 1991:206). On the other hand, since neither ‘race’ nor white supremacy are dominant ideologies at this time, whiteness should in fact be more visible and open to analysis than it has been in early modern scholarship.2 While not much is known about the presence of certain ethnic and religious minorities in England, one can say with some certainty and (only slightly facetiously) that England was inhabited by a large population that came to be seen as ‘white’ and yet we have not uncovered ways of discussing this as a factor in English identity formation. Even as scholars examine the social, political and imaginative construction of whiteness, whiteness still becomes normative so long as we assume that its viability as a racial signifier is self-evident. More bluntly, they do not address the more basic question: why is whiteness the mark of racial privilege at all?
