Imtiaz Habib. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible.

Vitkus, Daniel

Imtiaz Habib. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. 415.

Emily Barrels. Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 452.

Imtiaz Habib's Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677 is, as its title indicates, a cultural history project based on a systematic survey of various written records that cite the presence of "Black" persons. Incorporating and expanding on the earlier work of scholars like Peter Fryer, F. O. Shyllon, James Walvin and Gretchen Gerzina, Habib goes further and deeper. Parish records, in particular, are "systematically combed" (83), and though Habib admits that his examination of the archives "is not the result of comprehensive and systematic searches of all available documentary databases" (272), he does cover a lot of ground.

These records include "royal and aristocratic households accounts, government proclamations and legal records, parish entries, medical notations, and personal accounts" (65). Habib begins in 1500, when political and economic ties connected England and Scotland to the slave-holding kingdoms of Portugal and Spain, before relations with Catholic Spain deteriorated in the 1540s and led eventually to war; he continues in the period of conflict, reconnaissance and plunder that brought English privateers and pirates like Hawkins and Drake into contact with commercial systems that were inhabited by people of color, including the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade. Throughout the book, he maintains that these records are the visible traces of a much larger Black presence that has been lost or intentionally hidden, in part because "the English trafficking in Africans between 1550 and 1650 was an activity in denial of itself as it were, and not only the subject of clear or deliberate recordation but also of documentary suppression" (69). By the last quarter of the seventeenth century, Habib claims, Black subjects become visible: he writes, "That eventual visibility is paradoxically the completion of the historical denuding of the early modern English black subject, who then appears fully processed as the legally mandated bare object of English colonial enslavement" (121).

Habib's search for "imprints of the invisible" is not limited to London records. He also shows that there was a significant Black presence outside London, primarily but not exclusively in the coastal counties, and he provides a final chapter that traces the signs of other people of color (primarily East Indian and American) in early modern England. Along the way, Habib points to some fascinating and moving cases--the black maidservants who accompanied the entourage of Katherine of Aragon when she arrived in England in 1501; the African mercenary Peter (Mogo) Negro, who fought with the English against the Scots and was knighted on the field of battle in 1547; Jacques Francis, a Black diver from Guinea was hired (also in 1547) to salvage tin and lead from a Venetian wreck off the English coast at Southampton; the 1586 baptism of "Elizabeth, a negro child, born white, the mother a negro" in the church of St. Botolph (96) and in 1597 the adult baptism and conversion to Protestantism of a Mary Phyllis, the daughter of Moroccans, at that same church (91); the death in the summer of 1588 of "A man blackamoor [who] laye in the street" (96); the physician Simon Forman's diagnosis of "Polonia the blackmor maid ... of 12 yeare old" (105); and the case of a prostitute named "Barbary Moore," who was called before the Bridewell court in 1598. Habib reminds us that in early modern England there were Black musicians, soldiers, prostitutes, and numerous servants and slaves working for artisans, merchants or resident foreigners.

Habib's documentation and discussion of this archival evidence is painstaking, and the book includes some statistical analysis of the archival record, with patterns of frequency and growth or decline indicated in various charts, along with a helpful 94-page "Chronological Index of Records of Black People, 1500-1677" located at the end of the text. Most of Habib's analysis of these records is perceptive and helpful, but at times the author's desire to recover traces of a Black presence leads to questionable conjecture. One notable example of this is the attribution of black identity to persons listed in parish records under the names "Blackman," "Blackmore" or "Blackemer," persons for whom there is no direct evidence of such an identity. Another semantic problem is exemplified by Habib's insistence that the "Black handsome wench" (157) who allegedly gave William Davenant syphilis is African and not simply dark-haired. Habib provides a detailed defense of these attributions, arguing that "it is more productive to err on the side of an aggressive inclusiveness than the other way around" (94). His assertion that "Documentary imperfection should be not a limit but a point of departure for scholarly investigation, particularly for topics with significant political repercussions such as the one under consideration" (126) is undoubtedly a principle based on good intentions, but one that will give pause to more cautious scholars, especially social historians.

Black Lives in the English Archives makes a very important contribution to our understanding of cross-cultural encounters and of "Black" presences in England. Habib demonstrates that this presence existed as early as the reign of Henry VII, that it persisted and grew throughout the early modern period, that it can be traced throughout England and Scotland (and found not only in ports like London or Bristol), and that it was much more substantial and prevalent than earlier scholars have realized. Though he may stretch a bit too far in his search for evidence, there is no doubt that, thanks to his study, we must now revise and rethink our understanding of how people of color were integrated within an increasingly porous and diverse English society. This has a number of exciting implications: it changes our understanding of slavery as an institution and as a legal category, within the borders of Britain and abroad; it enriches our picture of diversity within English society and of the assimilation or demonization that accompanied the Black presence; it helps to historicize the phenomenon of cultural and ethnic mixture in the early modern period, giving us a whole range of examples of mobility, adaptability, etc.; and finally, it asks its readers to consider, in new ways, the nature and limitations of the archival record itself.

Habib's study reveals that the history of actual Moors, Blacks and Africans living in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England was repressed but not completely erased. His recovery of these lost presences, living in servitude or bondage within London and beyond, does not involve the representation of Blacks in theatrical texts like Shakespeare's Othello, though Habib does refer to printed narratives like those collected and printed in Hakluyt and Purchas. In her study, Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello, Emily Bartels focuses on the figure of "the Moor" in the drama, and she explores the complex signification of that figure in four plays--George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar (ca. 1588-89), Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (ca. 1593-94), Thomas Dekker's Lust's Dominion (1599-1600), and Shakespeare's Othello (1604). Bartels' book moves back and forth between the four chapters that offer close readings of these plays and the three other chapters that examine non-dramatic writings: Hakluyt's Navigations, Queen Elizabeth's letters ordering the deportation of "blackamoors" from England, and Pory's translation of Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa. An "Introduction" and "Conclusion" help to frame the project.

Like Habib, Bartels argues that scholars have misrepresented "Moors" and "Blackamoors"--that they have defined them reductively--but her reassessment looks less to the English archives and more to the symbolic status of "the Moor" as a character or figure who is present within English culture and writing, not as a notation in a parish record, but as a persona or representation. For Bartels, "the Moor is first and foremost a figure of uncodified and uncodifiable diversity" who "uniquely represents the intersection of European and non-European cultures" (5). Bartels insists that the Moor is not merely a demonized or exoticized outsider; rather, Bartels claims that "the Moor serves as a site where competing, always provisional axes of identity come dynamically into play, disrupting our ability ... to assign the Moor a color, religion, ethnicity, or any homogenizing trait" (7). She makes this case with reference to various historical contexts that pertain to these plays and to Moors, but a great deal of the book is made up of densely argued readings of the plays, readings in which Moorish characters (Muly Mahamet, Aaron, Eleazar, and Othello) are analyzed.

Bartels' study has been carefully researched and, had she had the chance, I am sure that she would have made good use of Habib's findings. She references nearly all of the relevant scholarship, and in this regard her book is an extremely useful resource. Speaking of the Moor supplements previous studies of the representation of the Moor in English Renaissance literature (including the work of Michael Neill, Kim Hall, Eldred Jones, Elliot Tokson, Anthony Barthelemy, Virginia Mason Vaughan and many others). Bartels shows how, in the plays and in other early modern narratives and documents, the figure of the Moor functioned as both a symptom of and an incitement for English culture's emerging engagement with a multicultural economy in the Mediterranean, in the Atlantic, and beyond.

In the chapter on Alcazar, Bartels points to England's engagement with "Barbary" or North Africa as the context for a play that "presses its spectators to look beyond the bounds of race, religion, and nation, to see a Mediterranean 'world' improvised from the unpredictable intersections of Europeans and non-Europeans, of Moors, Arabians, Turks, Portuguese, Spanish, Italians, and at least one Englishman [i.e. Captain Stukeley]" (43-44). The chapter that follows includes a comparison of the New World and African narratives in Hakluyt and concludes that Africa "figures as a place of passage," not signifying in its own right so much as it does as part of a larger "network of exchange" (52). The next section turns to Titus Andronicus, revealing a tension in the play between efforts to sustain a pure, homogenous Roman identity, and the play's representation of a more inclusive, multicultural Rome that has a place for both Goths and Moors. The play, claims Barrels, models "a cross-cultural incorporation" (81), in spite of the vicious demonization and expulsion of the villainous Moor, Aaron.

The chapter on the Elizabethan orders (promulgated in 1596 and 1601) for the deportation of"blackamoors" is the place where Habib and Bartels's books overlap most obviously. Bartels cites Habib's earlier study, Shakespeare and Race, and she agrees that Elizabeth's letters participate in the "writing out of 'blacks'" and the "writing in of a color-based race and racism" (101). But here, and throughout Speaking of the Moor, Bartels stresses the inclusion, embeddedness and incorporation of the Moor in English society. Bartels seeks to qualify (but not to dismiss) the charge of racism by complicating the figure of the Moor and positioning that figure as not only an object of white fear, power, or contempt, but as an agent within a culture or a text that does not simply or exclusively rely on a radical black-white or self-other polarization. That Aaron gains power at the Roman court, that Eleazar nearly comes to rule as the Spanish king of Spain, and that Othello's elopement and marriage to Desdemona is supported by the Venetians (as is his leadership of the Venetian military expedition to Cyprus)--Bartels goes to great lengths to argue that these events make the Moorish characters more than mere villains. For Barrels, these Moors appear, in spite of their violent deeds, as complex figures who, in some sense, belong within their societies and embody its exchanges and diversities. In the chapter on John Pory's 1600 translation of the History of Africa by al-Hasan ibn Mohammed al-Wezaz al-Fasi (also known by his Christian name, Leo Africanus), Bartels describes an author, a text, and an Elizabethan rendition of that text that bespeak a transcultural identity. In that book, with its complex account of the variety of cultures in Africa, "there is no Moor," says Bartels, if by "the Moor" we imply "a singular, essentialized ethnic subject who can stand for all Moors" (153). Referring to Pory's History of Africa, Bartels idealizes the textual geography of North Africa in particular--"a place where 'strangers' from inside and outside the continent's borders intermingle and intermix, where colors and categories of identity are invariably in flux, and where histories of linguistic, religious, and cultural change complicate the differentiation of peoples" (141). She also puts forward a historical argument about the late Elizabethan moment of the texts she analyzes, claiming that they signify a "brief but crucial moment" (19) occurring after the onset of English global expansion through enterprise and adventure and before the establishment of slavery and New World colonies that would bring new forms of slavery and racism. These new historical conditions, she argues, would color the figure of the Moor differently, so that it could no longer bear the more complex and less demonized identity that she says it does in the four plays she analyzes. After Othello, the stage Moor may no longer be "figured as the motivating agent of cultural change and exchange" (193). In that regard, Bartels invokes the same overarching historical narrative as Habib, one that sees a more unstable and therefore more benign set of identities for the Elizabethan Moor (or for pre-1677 "Blacks") as a fragile precursor to the unambiguous, color-based racism that would come with the legal and commercial establishment of English colonial slavery in the New World and Africa. Both of these studies contribute significantly to our understanding of that prehistory: they reveal to us how the invisibility of the Elizabethan "blackamoor" (for Habib) and the stage Moor's "darkness that seems undeniably visible" (Bartels 80) differ from the clearly defined slavery that would be fully illuminated by the Atlantic trade of the eighteenth century.

Reviewed by Daniel Vitkus, Florida State University