Dear University of Arizona English Department,

I propose a course on race in the Renaissance.

I wish to teach students how to think more clearly about how damaging racism is when it is inflicted. Importantly for the goal of teaching critical thinking, I wish to teach students to understand how pernicious racist thinking is—that racism travels and travails the groups involved—whether this be the oppressor or the weaker. I start with binary notions of black and white, depending on the work of the writer and cultural philosopher Toni Morrison. This sets the stage for a discussion of race in the contemporary era in the United States.

To make connections between British Renaissance and American literature is a big task. I propose to do it by focusing on one writer, the courtier and Irish colonial officer, Edmund Spenser. (the text is The Faerie Queen, published 1590 according to the Gregorian calendar) My thesis is that during the reign of the female king called Queen Elizabeth !, anxiety surrounding female authority so taxed the British imagination that her colonial officials invented a notion of race to account for difference—importantly, difference that made some subjects “legal persons” while others were considered unfit for citizenship. An already existent belief in gender as a notion of division of men and women comes into play as a counterpart to the newly emergent notion of blackness and otherness. Where Morrison sees otherness and blackness as one thing, in binary relation to an in-group notion of whiteness, I see Spenser’s world as one where the notion of otherness is a story told about the Irish and New World Indians. Blackness is the crucial invention in this era of the British conquest of Ireland—where Irish are not legally authorized before the law, and Black people are considered slaves—to be put to work until they died.

My original work is to see how an idea of Blackness as new racial thinking emerged during the reign of Elizabeth I, and was continued into the reign of her heir, James I, in the new American colonies, when American slavery found its start.

My inquiry in this proposed class is to lead students in a consideration of how ethnicity becomes defined as a sense of racial difference (native Irish) and racial difference in turn justified oppression and evacuation of human status to New World indigenes, and imported chattel Black slaves. Projecting outward from their own nation a sense of lesser value in the eyes of their God, the British inaugurated the racism that is based on fear—the fear of Blackness, otherness, the foreigner—as alien and dangerous. For one recent example of this kind of thinking impacting real people, I reference Obama’s race speech detailing how his white grandmother pulled the window-shades to their home upon seeing a young black man in the street, and the way this made Obama feel scared of rejection in his child mind—is a recent example of how

danger associated with “wild” people travels from devaluation of natively degenerated people (Indigenes, Irish) to imported people (Black African slaves).

In the context of the institutions of Universities, it is important to consider the economic conditions of building and endowing these institutions. For example, Harvard University money comes in part from investments in the Triangle Trade (slaves sold for rum and sugar between the South, the North, Britain, and Jamaica); likewise, Duke University money comes directly from tobacco planting (slave labor). As a land-grant institution with a mission to teach all students, and in particular, students from the state of Arizona, we must consider our response to otherness and blackness as a heritage we grapple with through solutions like being an “equal opportunity, affirmative action employer” with no Asian Americans in the English Department. I’d be the only Asian American instructor in the department. Curiously, I’d be teaching a class on canonical British lit, American colonial history, and our history of U.S. educational institutions. This situation is curious because Asian Americans are the invisible minority, totally opposite from visible minorities like Black Americans and Chicano/a Americans.

This is a class on Race and Ethnic Studies, with a framework on canon literature to teach students that the two can meet without trying to make Caliban postcolonial, or Othello African American. My point is that studying white people is sufficient to teach students about race. As many students in this department are white, such a position opens student thinking to a horizon of discernment on racial topics that brings home what critical race studies (e.g. Morrison) have been saying all along, that race includes Whiteness, too.

This is not a course on gender or sexuality. I teach about a “Virgin Queen” and she is exceptional as a woman. I primarily teach about important white men in this course. I find this necessary and sufficient to get at the gender sexuality and race questions that students may have heard cannot be answered in teaching about “dead white men.”

With every strand of pun intended, I differ.

Thank you!Elaine Yee

Reading List:

Edmund SpenserThe Faerie Queene; 1590/1596Letter to Raleigh (Sir Walter Raleigh, for whom Raleigh North Carolina is named); 1590

A View of the Present State of Ireland (propaganda pamphlet); 1596

ShakespeareSonnet 137; 1609

Toni MorrisonPlaying in the Dark (compilation of a series of lectures she gave at Harvard University); 1992

Cheryl Harris“Whiteness as Property” (legal brief published by Harvard Law Review); 1993