Worlds Apart: Race in the Modern Period

(Hardback)

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Long before the physical advent of Blacks in Europe, Professor Dathorne asserts they featured over and over again in literature as marginalized Others, but rarely were real Blacks present. As English developed as a language, race came into the evolution of the signifiers, so that words like darkness, blackness, and so on became heavily charged with negative connotations. Using travel literature as well as figures on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage and material from later writers, Dathorne shows how negative elements surrounding Blackness were transferred to Native Americans, to Indians from India, to South Pacific islanders, and others. A provocative analysis for scholars, students, and researchers involved with Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, and race.

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Author Bio

O. R. DATHORNE is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. He directs the Association of Caribbean Studies and has been the editor of the Journal of Caribbean Studies for two decades. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Economics. He is the author of more than one hundred learned articles, short stories, poems, plays, and scholarly works, including The Black Mind, Dark Ancestor, In Europe's Image: The Need for American Multiculturalism, Imagining the World: Mythical Belief versus Reality in Global Encounters, and Asian Voyages: Two Thousand Years of Constructing the Other.