The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900

The essays collected here consider how conceptions of blood permeate discourses of human difference from 1500 to 1900 in England and continental Spain and in the Anglo- and Ibero-Americas. The authors explore how ideas about blood in science and literature have supported, at various points in history, fantasies of human embodiment and difference that serve to naturalize social hierarchies already in place. Situating the complex relationship between modern and pre-modern conceptions of race at the junction of early modern medicine, heredity, religion, and nation, The Cultural Politics of Blood challenges established accounts of the genealogy of modern racism.

Kimberly Anne Coles is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, USA. She is the author of Religion, Reform, and Women's Writing in Early Modern England (2008/2010) and has published articles in ELR, Modern Philology, and RES.

Ralph Bauer is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. His publications include The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: empire, travel, modernity (2003/2008).

Zita Nunes is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, USA. She is the author of Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature of the Americas (2008) and has published widely on African Diaspora literature and politics.

Carla L. Peterson is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Maryland, USA. Her books include Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (2011).

Foreword: Priscilla Wald
Introduction; Kimberly Anne Coles, Ralph Bauer, Carla L. Peterson, and Zita Nunes
PART I: RACE AND STOCK
1. Metamateriality and Blood Purity in Cervantes's Alcaná de Toledo; Rachel Burk
2. The Blood of Others: Breeding Plants, Animals, and White People in the Spanish Atlantic; Ruth Hill
3. 'Rude Uncivill Blood': the Pastoral Challenge to Hereditary Race in Fletcher and Milton; Jean Feerick
4. African Blood, Colonial Money, and Respectable Mulatto Heiresses Reforming Eighteenth-Century England; Lyndon Dominique
PART II: MORAL CONSTITUTION
5. 'His blood be upon us and upon our children': Medical Theology and the Demise of Jewish Somatic Inferiority in Early Modern England; M. Lindsay Kaplan
6. Sor Juana's Appetite: Body, Mind, and Vitality in 'First Dream'; Anna More
7. Blood and Character in Early African American Literature; Hannah Spahn
PART III: MEDICALIZING THE POLITICAL BODY
8. Flowing or pumping? The Blood of the Body Politic in Burton, Harvey, and Hobbes; Robert Appelbaum
9. Linnaeus and the Four Corners of the World; Staffan Müller Wille
10. 'Who Got Bloody?': The Cultural Meaning of Blood during the Civil War and Reconstruction; James Downs
11. Colonial Transfusions: Cuban Bodies and Spanish Loyalty in the Nineteenth Century; David Sartorius