This book offers the first extended convergence between Black Studies and Early Modern Studies. Scholars of early modern Europe have traditionally insisted that the social category of race results from the legal, social, and scientific developments of other places and later periods. For its part, Black Studies scholarship is often concentrated on present-day political concerns. This volume reconceptualizes the time and geography of racial blackness, as well as the methods for assessing the impact of black Africans on early modernity, to transform both fields. Contributors stimulate productive and provocative conversations between these two seemingly disparate fields, enlisting the strategies, methodologies, and insights of Black Studies in the service of Early Modern Studies. This cross-pollination serves to revise current understandings about racial discourse and the contributions of black Africans in early modernity across the globe.

Cassander L. Smith is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama, USA. She is the author of Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (2016). Nicholas Jones is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Bucknell University, USA. His work has been published in the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies and the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. Miles Parks Grier is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York, USA. His work has been published in The William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Genders, and Politics and Culture.