UC San Diego

This dissertation explores “racial capitalism” as it relates to late-medieval and early modern English literature and literary culture, especially drama, in order to reframe the stories we tell about human difference as we seek to reconstruct our contested pasts. This dissertation uses methodologies employed in critical race theory (CRT) and critical white studies (CWS) to re-examine the long history of Western race thinking and racialization alongside the development of emergent capitalism. It examines “whiteness” in English drama as a racial category not solely defined by skin color. The purchase this dissertation gets from focusing on “race” is in an illumination of systemic racism—in the premodern past and today. The first chapter illuminates systemic racism by examining England’s history as the earliest “nation” to expel its Jewish population (in 1290). This chapter analyzes Anglo-Jewish history, which has been marginalized in the field of English history, to study England’s role in the forefront of antisemitic thought and practice. By close reading a fifteenth-century drama, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, this dissertation shows the relationship between antisemitic thought and mercantilism. The second and third chapters illuminate the development of capitalism and systemic racism by examining the invention of “whiteness” and “Christian identity” on and off stage. Throughout these chapters, the English theater is an important site in the development of racial capitalism—Elizabethan theatrical companies like the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe were one of the earliest forms of the joint-stock company—and an important site of cultural production. This dissertation examines how racial constructs work together to produce and reproduce processes of exclusion, systems of signification, and social hierarchies to argue that the invention of the “white race” is rooted in racial and class-based threats to the established social order.