Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip-Hop

When and why did 'white people' start calling themselves 'white'? When and why did 'white slavery' become a paradox, and then a euphemism for prostitution? To answer such questions, Taylor begins with the auction of a 'white' slave in the first African American novel, William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), and contrasts Brown's basic assumptions about race, slavery, and sexuality with treatment of those issues in scenes of slave marketing in English Renaissance drama. From accounts of Columbus and other early European voyagers to popular English plays two centuries later, Taylor traces a paradigm shift in attitudes toward white men, and analyzes the emergence of new models of sexuality and pornography in an 'imperial backwash' that affected whites as much as blacks. Moving between the English Renaissance and the 'American Renaissance' of the 1850s, this original and provocative book recovers the lost interracial history of the birth of whiteness.

Author: G. Taylor
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 01/31/2005
Pages: 497
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.95lbs
Size: 9.66h x 6.36w x 1.56d
ISBN: 9781403960719

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 02/15/2005 pg. 148
Black Issues Book Review 05/01/2006 pg. 27

About the Author
GARY TAYLOR is director of the Hudson Strode Renaissance Center at the University of Alabama and is a major figure in early modern literature criticism and cultural studies. His previous books include Castration (Routledge) and Oxford is publishing his new edition of the works of Middleton. He is one of the series editors of the Signs of Race series.