Race, Natality, and the Biopolitics of Early Modern Political Theology

This essay explores the nexus of race and natality in three of Shakespeare's plays: Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello. Depicted as a form of both corporeal and spiritual (re-)birth, natality also engages the vexed problem and possibility of redemption, which is frequently enacted and problematized in the plays discussed in this essay through the vector of circumcision. If natality registers as both generation and death, and circumcision denotes a form of both religious and racial incorporation as well as an indelible mark of difference, this essay seeks to expand our discussion of race in political theory from sanguineal to somatic and chromatic understandings. Following a primarily biopolitical framework, the essay demonstrates in its readings of these plays that even as the eugenic management of spectacular race comprises a critical concern, it also articulates a crucial prehistory of slavery. This essay thus seeks to affirm the importance of situating race at the center of readings of early modern political theology.