ABSTRACT
The beginnings of human subjecthood, both political and racial, lie in the evolution of difference. Sameness is not visible, and the very act of differentiation is an instinct of epistemological seeing. To deal with the beginnings of black people in early modern England is therefore to deal with absences, with the non-visibility of a presence whose communitarian processing has to write the grammar of its sight in order to reveal the objects of its view. As the entropic exchange between the xenophilic and xenophobic impulses defaces the contours of the black subject's knowability, the latter haunts the limits of civic sight, a phenomenon present but not recognized. While the geographic identifier "Ethiopian" is onomastically typical in that it is geographically specific but not regionally precise—for More "Ethiopian" is a stand-in for African generally—it is one of the many such words that will be used to pejoratively designate black persons in England.
