Gender and Race: the Re-shaping of the Self in 16th Century English Travel Reports

During the Early modern age the re-shaping of old paradigms of knowledge which were put in doubt by the discovery of the new world were part of a complex process of re-shaping and re-fashioning of the self in which questions of gender and race were deeply interconnected. In many English travel reports of this period the accurate description of the natives of the recently discovered world or of those lands which had been partly penetrated by the medieval European merchants – such as South Africa or the far Eastern countries – gave the travellers the opportunity both to debate the origin and race of peoples who were not contemplated in the writings of the Ancients, and to re-discuss the peculiarities and manners of those Europeans, like the English themselves, who lived in the periphery of Europe and had been considered by the Ancients as savages that once inhabited the margins of the Roman empire, the borders of the oikumene. Such accounts also made it possible to establish and consolidate new paradigms of knowledge which started to use the idea of race as a central organizing category for a scientific and ethnical classification of differences built on a hierarchical scale of values where often tropes of blackness became general devices for the representation of ethnically, culturally and religiously “other”. At the same time, the travel reports and the way in which they used colours in displaying relations of power, allowed the English to re-discuss and re-write their own origin and identity in order to strengthen and justify their political and ideological position within the new European colonial politics. In line with the debates within gender and postcolonial studies on English Renaissance, I will try to show how the interconnection of gender and race lies at the roots of both the re-construction of the notion of self and identity, which starts during the early modern period, and the re-modelling of old paradigms of knowledge by the re-fashioning of the British and English past