This Seminar Session for the Renaissance Society of America 2026 Conference in San Francisco, CA is still seeking participants! This session is sponsored by ACMRS. 

This seminar explores how early modern literature and theater constructed race through
embodied practices and imperial ideologies. Focusing on contexts from Habsburg Iberia to
Jacobean England, the panel examines how poetic and dramatic texts deploy corporeal imagery,
spatial dynamics, and performance to produce racial difference and consolidate imperial power.
While postcolonial studies have often located the emergence of colonialism and racial ideology
in the 19th and 20th centuries in the context of the British Empire, this session contends that
tracing their roots to the 16th and 17th centuries is crucial for understanding how racialization
operated across earlier European imperial formations. By foregrounding the inter-imperial
entanglements of the early modern period, these papers offer new insight into how British and
Habsburg colonial projects developed in concert and in conflict.

Drawing on historical, theoretical, and affective methodologies, the papers investigate how
metaphors of blood, theatrical space, and sovereign embodiment operated as key mechanisms of
racialization.

Submit your abstract of 100-200 words by AUGUST 15th! 

So far, this seminar has the following papers: The first paper examines late 16th- and early 17th-century Iberian epic poetry,
showing how blood functioned as both a biological and cultural signifier in service of Habsburg
imperial ideology. The second turns to the English commercial stage, analyzing how The White
Devil constructs race through text, blackface performance, costuming, and the spatial politics of
playhouse architecture. The third paper reads Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra through the
concept of the “imperial second body,” revealing how sovereignty is imagined through the
incorporation of racialized others who are simultaneously central to and excluded from imperial
identity.

Together, these papers provide a comparative, transnational framework for understanding how
early modern literary forms encoded racialization not as incidental, but as foundational to
imperial thought. By moving beyond Atlantic or strictly textual approaches, the session brings
diverse linguistic, geographic, and methodological perspectives into conversation to illuminate
the racial logics underpinning early modern imperial imaginaries.