Introduction

Few words have the co-extant malleability and fixity of the word “queen.” Across its multi-sited uses, a connective thread of regal femininities emerges. Evoking everything from hierarchy, reverence, inheritance, and status to empire and conquest, “queen” can invoke delight and disdain in the same breath. Whether attributed through birthright or victory in battle or competition, a queen reigns – over what and whom comprises the core elements of queenship. The gendered label at once exists to identify those with power and authority in palaces, as well as those who perfect the art of feminine imitation and playful gendered excess. “Queen” is ripe for incisive exploration, as the word invites a range of responses and possibilities for engagement. Simply put, to queen or to be a queen can mean a remarkable number of things, including embodied forms of power, affective forces, and visual vocabularies. 

To illustrate, we will focus on queenship as visuality. To be a queen is to bear both the power and the vulnerability of being seen as something other or more than what one is. This was long the conventional case in the history of European monarchy in a way that it was not for kings. Kings’ identities were conferred by birth, by inheritability, and by divine assent. Queens’ identities were conferred by marriage and political alliance, secured by reproductive instrumentality to the entrenchment of regime. Kings were born. Queens were declared. Queens were forged on a field of images and spectacle so that they could be seen as queens, and, being seen, recognized.

A work by photographer Carrie Mae Weems, Mirror, Mirror (1987) focalizes the vexations of recognition by raising the racialization of queenship to the surface. And in its cooptation of contemporary mythmaking it draws on a deeper past in ways that speak to the aims of the essays in this special issue. We come to Weems’ image as a partial voyeur, our gaze entering the scene from over the shoulder of the woman in the foreground. She is shown from just under the crease of her arm to the top of her head, the thin light-colored strap of a slip, a little frayed, rests delicately on her shoulder; hair styled to reveal her neck as she turns her head to the right, affording us a glimpse of her profile and the downcast but inward focus of her eye. A gentle relief of vein and bone adorn the back of her hand, as it grips the edge of a dark wooden frame in front of her own body. Within the frame the countenance of a woman floats from behind a diaphanous veil, parted like a curtain to reveal the shadowed recess of an eye intent on the face of the woman whose profile we can see. The painted lips of the apparitional woman are slightly parted as if mid-speech. Words beneath this image of a mirage, inserted flush with the pictorial plane, give a narrative frame to this ensemble, but one that troubles comfortable storytelling.

LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR, THE BLACK WOMAN ASKED,
“MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO’S THE FINEST OF THEM ALL?”
THE MIRROR SAYS, “SNOW WHITE YOU BLACK BITCH,
AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT!!!”

Summoning Disney’s dialogue between the “slave in the magic mirror” and the evil Queen, the words make heard what white audiences silently claim they cannot see: the injustice – the unfairness – of fair. The struggles of recognition are revealed when the ghost of Snow White haunts the mirror held up by Weems’s protagonist – no evil queen – who strives to reassign the terms of beauty. Entangled tenses “looking… asked… says” locate our entrance into this paused scene, the moment as the mirror speaks, its words penetrating the consciousness of the woman who, turning from their venom, knows she will not be allowed to forget. And it is perhaps at this point that we, the encroaching viewer, realize what we may have missed: the sliver of forearm and embroidered sleeve beneath the false mirror’s frame. Continuous with the image inside it, they disclose the futility of keeping the world outside the reflected encounter with the self at bay. But it is not just the space of the present that intervenes; it is also the time of the past. Lurking beneath the surface of the lineage on which this work draws is the medieval sculpture from Naumburg Cathedral of Uta of Ballenstadt, the inspiration for Disney’s evil Queen. Vaunted in nineteenth-century Germany as the paradigm of feminine beauty, Uta was raised to the status of a Nazi icon in the following century, appearing even in the propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1940) “to illustrate the noble beauty of German culture imperiled by Jewish degeneracy.”¹ Yet Uta’s recasting as the villain in Disney’s rendition of the fairy tale does nothing to dismantle the hegemony of the ideal she embodied. To the contrary, it secured the terrain of womanhood as a field of combat between allied antagonists against racial difference. Who’s the fairest of them all.

Carrie Mae Weems’s work exemplifies what bell hooks would come to call the oppositional gaze, one that inspires the aims of this special issue.² While white feminist film theory – in its binary and exclusionary focus – accounts only for the active, phallocentric gaze and the passive subjection by the white female body, hooks describes how “critical black female spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation.”³ Not simply a reactive force, the oppositional gaze is a creative and constructive practice of critical looking, of looking “against the grain, ” in precisely the ways that Weems sets up, leveraging the idea of the mirror and the text of filmic narration to enact a disruption, a disenchantment that breaks the spell of a white supremacist mythography.³ hooks declares, “We do more than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions. As critical spectators, black women participate in a broad range of looking relations, contest, resist, revision, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels.”⁴ Vital to this constructive project is the enmeshment of past and present; to hooks, “[l]ooking and looking back, black women involve ourselves in a process whereby we see our history as counter-memory, using it as a way to know the present and invent the future.”⁵

Through critique and analysis and creative juxtaposition, the essays in this special issue take up the projects initiated by hooks’s and Weems’s own visual and textual essays, picking apart the threads of history’s entanglement with the present, laying them out for readers to see, and reweaving them to be viewed anew. As Fatima Mernissi argues in The Forgotten Queens of Islam, “women are disturbing as soon as they appear where they are not expected.”⁶ Racialized queens, we argue, disturb a European teleology of history, dynastic descent, and knowledge production. Our framework builds on a long tradition of Black feminism, transnational and postcolonial studies, and Critical Indigenous epistemologies that divests from white, heteronormative, and Eurocentric concepts of queenship, tied to hereditary claims and reproductive sexuality; subjugation of people; and dominion over land. Afterall, in their resounding Combahee River Collective statement, queer Black feminists stated their vision and values unequivocally: “we reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.”⁷ Can queenship ever be detached from dynamics of power and subjugation? To what extent can queenship be liberatory in a biocapitalist world? These are some of the questions we grapple with as we imagine new constellations of queendom as a promise of collective uplift, of “planetary humanism,” to quote Paul Gilroy,⁸ outside and beyond white settler colonial ontologies. 

We, the co-editors of this special issue, represent a range of disciplines, interdisciplines, and positionalities. Individually, each of us offers a distinct set of entry points for critically considering “queenship.” Our collective desire to situate race,  as an analytic and as a lens for grappling with queens, queendoms, and queenships compelled us to be unbound – geographically, temporally, and conceptually. In fact, what follows is intentionally transhistorical, while being acutely aware of our present moment. We thought of Meghan Markle, Queen Bey, Drag Race, Black Panther, and what we noted as a resurgent popular fascination with historical dramas set in centuries past. Our idea for this special issue preempted the debut of Bridgerton, an adaption of Julia Quinn’s novels set in Regency era London. Of note, the racially diverse show became the second-most watched original television series in Netflix history. Without question, there’s a formidable appetite for media, coverage, and scholarship focused on royalty and sovereignty.

We also knew that this special issue could not wrestle with “queen” without foregrounding race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and nation. “Race-ing Queens” demands attentiveness to indigeneity, nation-states, colonialism, patriarchy, imperialism, and white supremacy. We sought articles that pushed our own thinking. We strove to bring together a cadre of thinkers intervening methodologically and conceptually into how we approach the study of queen-ing. Race-ing queens adds a generative layer for excavating tensions, anxieties, and fissures in the figuration of queen. Contrary to the refinement and poise commonly associated with feminine regality, we dove into the messiness and complexities of pairing queen and race.

Furthermore, this special issue answers Kim F. Hall’s call in her foundational study, Things of Darkness (1995),not only to notice the production of race in the premodern period, but more importantly, to center transhistorical readings of racial formations as a method “to produce antiracist criticism and politically forceful pedagogy.”⁹ Indeed, this special issue is the brainchild of Hall, whose vision galvanized our resolve to theorize queenship from various political and cultural angles. As the essays in this issue attest, the intellectual possibilities that open up when we connect historical moments are myriad; most urgently, they allow us to put the past in conversation with the present in our classrooms and in our communities. This longue durée view of history reveals that the contemporary manifestations of gendered racism surrounding Black, Brown, and Muslim women in the public sphere are entangled in long histories that speak to the premodern past’s uneasy reception of racialized queens. The racist treatment of women in politics, including Minnesota House Representative Ilhan Omar in the United States, Member of Parliament Zarah Sultana in the United Kingdom, and former Deputy of the Assembly of Republic Joacine Katar Moreira in Portugal, permeates our political landscape and mark non-white women as an aberration, a glitch in the system, a departure from, a rupture in the white heteropatriarchal world order. 

The collection of articles in this special issue resulted from our openness to and our collaborative investment in unpacking queenship with race as a central analytical imperative. We did not know where our Call For Papers would take us and if our colleagues would journey down a royal rabbit hole to publicly meditate on gender, race, sovereignty, progeny, borders, and power. Thankfully, our call summoned an assortment of thinkers and areas of interest that breathed life into our vision beyond what even we imagined. It is our hope that the essays in this issue provide critical and creative portals that not only disrupt Eurocentric notions of female sovereignty, but more urgently, develop a new cultural grammar of queenship that advances the politics, poetics, and aesthetics of radical global social justice. Like an open door, this issue is an invitation both to complicate the sway the concept of queenship holds over our understanding of gendered and racialized hierarchies of power and subordination; and to use its symbolic capital to forge new paradigms for enacting radical politics of deep solidarity, empathy, and care. 

Parsing the varied meanings of feminine regality, each of these articles takes us in a discrete direction of comprehending queenship, and more specifically what race-ing queens can mean. As historian Simon MacLean argues, “we cannot study queenship without also studying queens.”¹⁰ The authors give us numerous queens, queenships, and queendoms to ponder. More pointedly, they give us space to contemplate our enthrallment with queens. Engaging race as a primary category of analysis creates fertile ground for expounding on what constitutes varying figurations of queen across divergent times and places. With rigor and insightfulness, each author offers a point of departure for creating vocabularies for the relationships between queen-ing and processes of racialization and gendering.

From Afrofuturistic quare resistance to performative attempts at de-emphasizing whiteness, these articles offer queenship as a site for subversion, contestation, (de)racialization, ungendering, de(colonizing), resistance, reification, and disruption.¹¹ Queenship can be and has been a violent, murderous, carnivorous, and imperializing subject position – particularly for those racialized as non-white. Other possibilities for queenship have and do exist. Race-ing queens is one way to contend with these deviating histories, legacies, and possibilities for queenship offered by this special issue.

Aviva Neff takes us to nineteenth-century New Orleans – a particularly fascinating historical site for exploring race, gender, class, and sexual politics. Although New Orleans became a majority Black city by 1800, the meaning of Blackness reached far beyond the racial composition of the crescent city. As historian Jessica M. Johnson reminds us, “what blackness would mean grew out of encounters between constructions of gender, sex, and race that developed well before the nineteenth-century.”¹² Neff homes in on the life of brothel owner Lulu White, known as the “Diamond Queen of the Demi-Monde” and the “Queen of the Octoroons.” By closely examining the relationship between sexual desires and the de jure and de facto racial boundaries of the Jim Crow era, as well as the fetishization of specific articulations of racial Otherness, Neff points us towards the slipperiness, relationality, and fictiveness of White’s self-invented “queen” status to navigate both porous and rigid boundaries guarding the racial status quo for “mixed-raced” women in Jim Crow era New Orleans.

Virginia H. Cope and Tiyi M. Morris also ground us in New Orleans, but from a more contemporary perspective. Exploring the history of Black women as Queens of the Mardi Gras Indians, Cope and Morris uncover a lesser-known history of resistance anchored in ritual, performance, cultural preservation, and aesthetics. Through ritualized contests which occur during Mardi Gras Day, Black women channel an ancestral inheritance reflective of a history of cooperative resistance between Indigenous peoples and maroon communities in Louisiana. The Queens in this context defy anti-Black and sexist stereotypes and challenge the male-dominated “Chiefs” as the preeminent figures of the Mardi Gras parade. The centering of the Queens of the Mardi Gras Indian expands upon American Studies scholar George Lipsitz’s assertion that Mardi Gras Indians offer “a useful case study about the emancipatory potential of grass roots cultural creation.”¹³

Raced, gendered, and queered interpretations of queen also take centerstage in this special issue. Jennifer Higginbotham offers a rich analysis of Janelle Monáe’s 2013 song “Q.U.E.E.N.” as a reclamation of queenhood through Blackness and queerness. Using Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1605) as a juxtaposing text with which to transhistorically probe the stigmatization of Black women’s bodies in the construction of white womanhood, Higginbotham recasts Monáe’s articulation of queer Black femininity on “Q.U.E.E.N.” as a spectacular declaration of atemporal queenship. The article moves queendom from the realm of white regality to a world-making rendered possible through Black dystopic utterances and Afrofuturistic sensibilities. Queendom, for Monáe, is Black, queer, and otherwise Othered.

In her essay, Ximena Gómez complicates the rise of the Spanish singer Rosalía as Ivy Queen’s presumptive heir over the Reggaetón musical genre by examining her mobilization of Marian imagery. Across numerous media platforms, Rosalía has repackaged a figure of Christian exaltation – the Queen of Heaven herself – in ways that reactivate a history of colonial violence. While the Virgin Mary was (and remains) an important part of religious veneration in Andalucía, she was also a “key player” in colonial campaigns launched from that region, as Gómez outlines. Yet over time, indigenous populations of Latin America, as well as Latinx communities appropriated and transformed Marian imagery and devotion as a vehicle for self-definition. These elements in particular are reappropriated by Rosalía to appeal to audiences in the Americas. In Gómez’s words, Rosalía’s work presents a “recolonization and re-whitening of a figure that Latinxs have worked hard to Indigenize toward decolonial ends.” Placing a critical lens over the pop singer’s practice, this essay identifies the challenges involved in the constructive project of oppositional spectatorship as the “generative results of colonization” whose “connections to the colonizer leave them vulnerable to exploitation.”  

The racializing systems imposed by colonial enterprises form one of the contexts for Emily Kuffner’s examination of the poetic language weaponized against Marie Louise of Orleans after her marriage to Charles II of Spain. For centuries, the norms of European monarchy required a foreign queen to assimilate into the regnal domain of her husband, within which women were tokens of diplomatic exchange. Marie Louise was no different, and public ceremony and imagery naturalized her. Yet, as Kuffner shows, her belonging was contingent and “depended in large part on her fecundity.” When Marie Louise did not become pregnant, satirical poetry attacked her. It is the language of these attacks that Kuffner examines, language that derived from and must be understood within the broader context of Spain’s racializing discourses and institutions, which attempted to secure homogeny and hegemony through the purgation of religious “others,” and the designation of increasingly biologized subaltern populations who were made subject to stratification and imperial domination. Drawing from the concepts of “blood purity” and “raza” (which in the preceding period moved from meaning a “stain” in white wool to a taint imperiling the integrity of one’s lineage), poetic invective against Marie Louise, couched in such ideologies, impugn her as a stealth agent deploying her body to threaten the futurity of Charles’s regime.

Along the same transhistorical lines, Zainab Cheema’s essay examines two early modern archives of race-making side by side: the Spanish and the English. Cheema analyzes the fascination with Catherine of Aragon as a “border-crossing queen,” who was claimed as an exemplary figure by Spain and England. By comparing Catherine’s dramatization in both Calderón’s La Cisma de Inglaterra and Shakespeare and Fletcher’s King Henry VIII (All is True), Cheema points to the multiple ways race was figured in two different European geographies. Moreover, Cheema reflects on our present moment’s mythification of this queen in the public imagination, particularly in the TV Series, The Spanish Princess. In this contemporary retelling of one of Henry VIII’s most famous wives, Cheema, like Stephanie Russo and Yasmine Hachimi, situates her racialized queen within the concerns of our times. She convincingly demonstrates how Starz‘s Catherine of Aragon is “reimagined as an icon of #MeToo.” Where royal women were once seen as occupying the sites of religious, cultural, and political conflicts over opposing national identities, in our collective imaginary, racialized queens become beacons for racial justice, gender equality, indigenous rights, and climate action.

What systems of sovereignty and power arise when we look at queenship from the margins? This is one of the many questions that the essays in this issue carefully consider. For instance, in her analysis of the historical musical Six, Stephanie Russo delves into the racialization of Henry VIII’s wives. She suggests that Six‘s imagining of an inclusive past is deliberate, and her essay invites us to notice color-conscious theatrical practices. Rooted in social justice and ethics of care, color-conscious casting thoughtfully considers the race of actors in their embodiment of the characters they play. To this end, Russo skillfully welds her encyclopedic historical knowledge of Tudor queenship with a deep awareness of the concerns of our historical juncture and its importance as a lens through which to consider historical fictions.¹⁴

The whitewashing of British history and the particular appeal of the Tudor period are themes that Yasmine Hachimi’s essay also tackles. The racialization of early modern royal women in William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s King Henry VIII (All is True) figures once more, where Hachimi argues that colorism marks Anne Boleyn as distinct from an English whiteness—that is, not white enough—through color-coded racialization. Hachimi draws on historical documents written about Anne Boleyn by her contemporaries. This, in turn, shapes an ongoing fascination with the Tudors in popular culture and scholarship. Furthermore, Hachimi’s essay connects these themes to the present in its discussion of the racist backlash that the casting of the Afro-British actor, Jodie Turner-Smith, to play the historical English queen, Anne Boleyn, has catalyzed. In the name of preserving historical accuracy, the resistance to “believe” such a performance of queenship by an actor of color is quite telling, Hachimi suggests. This resistance articulates a deep-seated investment in the past as a white past only, where non-white people are silenced, their embodiment and subjectivity erased. This fantasy, of course, has been debunked by Imtiaz Habib in his important and unique study, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677 (2008), which provided an abundance of archival evidence and historical records of the presence of Black people in early modern England. Therefore, as Hachimi contends, reassessing the archival evidence of Anne’s racialization alongside popular depictions of her queenship enables us to approach such historical figures and their cultural contexts in more nuanced ways.

As we pondered the cultural phenomenon that can be called “The Royal Turn,” particularly the ways in which the meaning of the word “queen” has been appropriated and recreated to signify collective feminist resistance, reciprocity, and racial pride, we encountered the ever-present manifestation of white queenhood as the epitome of charitable female rule. It is no coincidence that Queen Elizabeth I’s portraiture, including the Armada (ca. 1588) and Ditchley (ca. 1592) portraits, mobilized the symbology of whiteness and global imperial domains to legitimize her monarchy as an unmarried, heirless Virgin Queen. In this respect, the toppling of Queen Victoria’s statues across the world in recent years communicated a wholesale rejection of Britain’s long history of genocidal expansion under the guise of a maternal figure lovingly presiding over her helpless subjects. Despite these salutary acts of resistance, the ideal of white queenhood persists. 

To be sure, we wish to emphasize that the iconography of white queenhood is intimately connected to the extractive, dehumanizing project of settler colonialism. When the former first lady, Melania Trump, pleaded on behalf of refugee children, she mobilized the trope of the mediatrix queen as a paragon of virtue and morality. In its dramatization of historical royalty, the prestige television drama, The Crown, depicted in its fourth season Princess Diana’s embodiment of the ideals of white womanhood – fair, demure, and procreative. Diametrically opposed to this racialized ideal stood Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal rule as Britain’s first female prime minister, particularly her gutting of social welfare and unflinching support of apartheid in South Africa. Triangulating this tableau, Queen Elizabeth II was staged as the middle ground between these two extremes of white womanhood: a humane, peaceful sovereign who condemns Thatcher’s support of racial segregation and sympathizes with her abject subjects in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. She remains the purveyor of a white social ideal, an emblem of white womanhood, that is fueled by brutal anti-Blackness and Islamophobia. 

In the final analysis, it is our core belief that a conversation about feminine power and empowerment without radical solidarities with global feminist movements and traditions of indigenous sovereignty reproduces neocolonial agendas of extraction and exploitation. For the same white European tradition that coerced Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba‘s (1583-1663) peoples into devastating systems of unfreedoms lives on in “the afterlife of slavery,” as the theorist Saidiya Hartman teaches us.¹⁵ In the same vein, the same military imperialism that overthrew Queen Lili’uokalani of Hawai’i (1838–1917) and annexed indigenous lands to the United States in 1893 persists in the dispossession of vulnerable and marginalized women and girls of the Global South.¹⁶ The same settler colonialism that uprooted the Haitian queen Marie-Louise Christophe (1778–1851) and her daughters is reincarnated in the displacement of climate refugees.¹⁷ The list goes on and on. Ultimately, our analysis of queenship as a project of liberation and elevation is inseparable from our aspirations for global social justice. In this imagining, queenship symbolizes emancipation and community, where racial capitalism gets dismantled, and with it the criminalization of migration; housing and food insecurities; anti-trans legislation; mass incarceration and police brutality; and anthropogenic climate change. Queens dream and rise together.

WORKS CITED:

Benson, LeGrace. “A Queen in Diaspora: The Sorrowful Exile of Queen Marie-Louise Christophe (1778, Ouanaminth, Haiti–March 11, 1851, Pisa, Italy),” Journal of Haitian Studies 20, no. 2 (2014): 90–101.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/24340368.

Coffman, Tom. Nation Within: The Story of America’s Annexation of the Nation of Hawai’i. Kane’ohe, Hawai’i: EpiCenter, 1998.

Ducat, Vivian. Hawai’i’s Last Queen, (Videorecording, 53 minutes), PBS: The American Experience, 1997.

Gilroy, Paul, Tony Sandset, Sindre Bangstad & Gard Ringen Høibjerg. “A diagnosis of contemporary forms of racism, race and nationalism: a conversation with Professor Paul Gilroy,” Cultural Studies, 33:2 (2019):173–197.

Habib, Imtiaz. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. 115–31.

Johnson, E. Patrick. “From Black Quare Studies or Almost Everything I know about Queer Studies I learned from My Grandmother.” Callaloo 23, 1 (Winter 2000): 120–21.

Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Black New Orleans Is the Center of the World,” Journal of African American History, 3, 104 (Fall 2018), 647.

Jung, Jacqueline. “France, Germany, and the Historiography of Gothic Sculpture,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, 2nd edition, edited by Conrad Rudolph. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019. 513–46.

Lipsitz, George. “Mardi Gras Indians: Carnival and Counter-Narrative in Black New Orleans,” Cultural Critique 10 (Autumn 1998), 101.

MacLean, Simon. Ottonian Queenship, London: Oxford University Press, 2017, 3.

Mernissi, Fatima. The Forgotten Queens of Islam. Translated by Mary Jo Lakeland. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

McGregor, Davianna Pomaika’i. “Statehood: Catalyst of the Twentieth-Century Kanaka ‘Ōiwi Cultural Renaissance and Sovereignty Movement.” Journal of Asian American Studies 13, no. 3 (2010): 311–326.

Osorio, Jonathan Kamakawiwo’ole. Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002.

Saidiya Hartman. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007.

Silva, Noenoe K. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, ed. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017.

Thompson, Ayanna. Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance. New York: Routledge, 2006.

___ Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 

1. Jacqueline Jung, “France, Germany, and the Historiography of Gothic Sculpture,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, 2nd edition, edited by Conrad Rudolph (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019), 513–46, 535. [↩]
2. bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 115–31. [↩]
3. hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” 126. [↩] [↩]
4. hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” 128. [↩]
5. hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” 131. [↩]
6. Fatima Mernissi, The Forgotten Queens of Islam, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 4. [↩]
7. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 17. [↩]
8. “Not the humanism of white supremacy, not the humanism of the liberals and the Cold War, but a humanism made to the measure of the world” in Paul Gilroy, Tony Sandset, Sindre Bangstad, and Gard Ringen Høibjerg, “A diagnosis of contemporary forms of racism, race and nationalism: a conversation with Professor Paul Gilroy,” Cultural Studies, 33:2 (2019): 173–197. [↩]
9. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 255. [↩]
10. Simon MacLean, Ottonian Queenship (London: Oxford University Press, 2017), 3. [↩]
11. E. Patrick Johnson, “From Black Quare Studies or Almost Everything I know about Queer Studies I learned from My Grandmother,” Callaloo 23, 1 (Winter 2000): 120–21. [↩]
12. Jessica Marie Johnson, “Black New Orleans Is the Center of the World,” Journal of African American History, 3, 104 (Fall 2018): 647. [↩]
13. George Lipsitz, “Mardi Gras Indians: Carnival and Counter-Narrative in Black New Orleans,” Cultural Critique 10 (Autumn 1998), 101. [↩]
14. See also Ayanna Thompson’s voluminous work on color-blind and color-conscious casting, including her edited collection, Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (New York: Routledge, 2006) and Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). [↩]
15. “If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of Black America, it is not because an antiquarian obsession with bygone days, or the burden of a too long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery – skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery” in Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 6. [↩]
16. See the work of critical Indigenous scholars, including Davianna Pomaika’i McGregor, “Statehood: Catalyst of the Twentieth-Century Kanaka ‘Ōiwi Cultural Renaissance and Sovereignty Movement.” Journal of Asian American Studies 13, no. 3 (2010): 311–326; esp. 319 doi:10.1353/jaas.2010.0011; Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 160–1; Vivian Ducat’s Hawai’i’s Last Queen, (Videorecording, 53 minutes), PBS: The American Experience, 1997; also see Tom Coffman’s Nation Within: The Story of America’s Annexation of the Nation of Hawai’i (Kane’ohe, Hawai’i: EpiCenter, 1998). For a detailed analysis of constitutional disempowerment, see Jonathan Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio, Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002). [↩]
17. See LeGrace Benson, “A Queen in Diaspora: The Sorrowful Exile of Queen Marie-Louise Christophe (1778, Ouanaminth, Haiti–March 11, 1851, Pisa, Italy),” Journal of Haitian Studies 20, no. 2 (2014): 90–101. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24340368. [↩]