Discussing Scripts of Blackness with Dr. Noémie Ndiaye

The Africanist Podcast

In this episode, Dr. Noémie Ndiaye (University of Chicago) discusses her recent monograph, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (University of Pennsylvania Press 2022). The book chronicles the representation of Blackness in early modern Europe (with a focus on England, France, and Spain) through theater and performance culture. In addition to unpacking the concepts of racial matrix and race paradigm, Dr. Ndiaye fleshes out how certain controversial techniques such as "black-up", "kinetic blackness", and "blackspeak (acoustic blackness)" permeated early modern European theater thus contributing to the rise a new racial paradigm.