This project examines how early modern writers mobilize race as a vehicle for investigating far-reaching epistemological questions about the limits and parameters of human knowledge. While dominant trends in early modern race studies have focused on racial knowledges or particular identifications or formulations of human difference, I break new ground by demonstrating how racial constructions, ideologies, and practices provide important frameworks for debating what it means “to know” or “not know” during the period. The rapid growth of the slave trade, England’s colonial expansion into new continents, and the rise of scientific empiricism encouraged new epistemological paradigms and paths of transmission during the mid- to late seventeenth century: I argue that race emerges as a valuable and distinct tool for addressing the different kinds of knowledge problems--such as debates about universal norms and the organization of knowledge into discrete disciplines--that develop out of England’s participation in a transcultural, global network. Exploring the significant, though often unacknowledged, role that race plays in epistemological inquiry, I trace confluences between human otherness and knowledge production across diverse genres, reading stageplays such as William Shakespeare’s Othello and William Berkeley’s The Lost Lady, Petrarchan lyric, anatomical dissections, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. I argue that these texts demonstrate the ways that English authors marshal human variation as an instrument for probing the limits and possibilities of observation, empiricism, and evidentiary proof--laying the epistemological groundwork for the eventual racialization of science.

Last modified

• 01/29/2019

Creator

• Meghan Daly Costa

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2GN1S

Subject

• English

Keyword

• epistemology
• history of science
• race
• literature and science
• colonialism

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright