“As if she were his owne lawfull wife”: Marriage, Household, and the Queering of Race, 1550-1625, Aman Williams: 9th November

The Race and the Early Modern seminar is delighted to be welcoming Aman Williams on 9th November to discuss a paper titled: ‘“As if she were his owne lawfull wife”: Marriage, Household, and the Queering of Race, 1550-1625’. To participate, sign up via the link below. This is a work-in-progress session. The paper will be distributed in advance of the session.

Date and Time: Monday 9th November, 17:00 (BST)/12:oo (ET)

Sign up here: https://buytickets.at/centreforearlymodernstudies/2022021

Paper Abstract

This chapter examines Renaissance English travel literature published between 1550 and 1625 that documented nonbinary gender performances, male homoeroticism, and queer domesticity across Africa and the Americas. Focusing on the circulation of ethnographic accounts by writers like Leo Africanus, Samual Purchas, and others among English readers, I argue that these narratives mobilized European Christian doctrines of marriage to frame indigenous sexual and gender practices as abominable violations of natural law. By associating Native and African "sodomy" and "effeminacy" with a lack of proper governance and civility, English imperialists constructed a racist discourse that directly linked sexual deviance to the forfeiture of indigenous sovereignty. This ideological framework, which built on the infrastructure laid by the English Reformation, subsequently rationalized land dispossession, colonial expansion, and the enslavement of African and Native populations well before eighteenth-century commercialization. Ultimately, the chapter highlights how indigenous epistemologies of marriage and nonbinary social categories were weaponized to construct early modern racial hierarchies and present the transatlantic slave trade as legally and morally justifiable. 

Speaker Bio

Aman Williams is an American Studies PhD Candidate in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. In their dissertation, Unnatural Sex: How Race, Queerness, and Value Transformed in the Early Black Atlantic, they show how the gendered production of race and modernity in the English Atlantic world between 1550 and 1700 depended on Renaissance European constructions of Africans as effeminate sodomites and witches who violated natural law, worshipped the devil, and polluted others’ minds. Even more, Williams reveals, as these constructions were made to circulate among West Central Africans via the Catholic Church and Christian states, they also set the stage for the emergence of a queer Black radicalism that would further develop in early America and the broader Atlantic world. Their research has been supported by NYU’s Office of the Provost, the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.