In November 2020, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, the New York Times film critics, published an article entitled “The Century's Greatest Actors,” in which they proclaimed, “We are in a golden age of acting—make that platinum.” Celebrating the fact that their list of the top twenty-five actors from the last twenty years “looked beyond Hollywood,” Dargis and Scott declared that while there are Oscar winners on their list, “there are also character actors and chameleons.” One of the “radical shape-shifting” actors on the list is Tilda Swinton, whom Dargis characterized in the following fashion:

This article argues that early modern literary and visual texts from Shakespeare's “Comedy of Errors” to Spenser's “Faerie Queene” repeatedly represent and render womanhood as a specifically and singularly white construction; in so doing, they establish the co-constitution of gender and race and their conscription by the contingencies of class. As this formation of white womanhood is in turn mobilized to underwrite the operations of violence and enslavement, white women themselves—and white womanhood as a politically and socially disciplined and disciplining category—emerge as not only the mediators but also the authors of these global and transhistorical processes.

This article uses writings of the French traveler François Bernier (d. 1688) on race as an inroad into the question of locating race in Mughal India. I explore Mughal discourses of alterity through an examination of Persian writings from various genres composed during the long seventeenth century. In contrast to Bernier, these writings do not offer concepts equivalent to that of race. However, by invoking narratives of descent from Noah's son Ham, ideas of climatic and physiognomic humoralism, and the attribution of physical qualities or character traits to social groups, these works engage in practices of racialization while also at times undermining them.

This article considers a corpus of images created between 1650 and 1750 within Italian Capuchin missions to Kongo and Angola. It demonstrates how these visual creations, though European in form, craftsmanship, and intended audience, were in fact penned by encounter and the products of cross-cultural interactions. Contrasting the Central African images with two well-known and oft-studied Franciscan visual projects from early colonial Mexico, the article further reflects on the stakes of making visible the mixings present, but often overlooked or silenced, in early modern images born from encounters between Europeans and the people they considered their Others.

This essay brings to light a hitherto unnoticed network of Afro-Romani connections in later seventeenth-century French and English drama, and it construes that network as conceptual and ethical genealogy for the bonds that exist today between Black studies and the fledgling field of critical Romani studies. By close reading Molière's “Les fourberies de Scapin” (1671) and its 1677 adaptation by Edward Ravenscroft, among other objects, through the lens of critical race theory, this essay shows how theatrical culture across the Channel reckoned with the similar positionings of enslaved Roma and sub-Saharan Africans within the logic of early modern white supremacy.