Agents without Empire : Mobility and Race-Making in Sixteenth-Century France / Antónia Szabari.
2024
HT1507 .S93 2024
Linked e-resources
Linked Resource
Online Access
Concurrent users
Unlimited
Authorized users
Authorized users
Access notes
DRM-Free
Document Delivery Supplied
Can lend chapters, not whole books
Details
Title
Agents without Empire : Mobility and Race-Making in Sixteenth-Century France / Antónia Szabari.
Author
Szabari, Antónia, author.
ISBN
9781531506698
1531506690
1531506690
Published
New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2024]
Copyright
©2024
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (288 p.) : 23 b/w illustrations
Other Standard Identifiers
10.1515/9781531506698 doi
Call Number
HT1507 .S93 2024
Dewey Decimal Classification
305.8009
Summary
It is well known that Renaissance culture gave an empowering role to the individual and thereby to agency. But how does race factor into this culture of empowerment? Canonical French authors like Rabelais and Montaigne have been celebrated for their flexible worldviews and interest in the difference of non-French cultures both inside and outside of Europe. As a result, this period in French cultural history has come to be valued as an exceptional era of cultural opening toward others. Agents without Empire shows that such a celebration is, at the very least, problematic. Szabari argues that before the rise of the French colonial empire, medieval categories of race based on the redemption story were recast through accounts of the Ottoman Empire that were made accessible, in a sudden and unprecedented manner, to agents of the French crown. Spying performed by Frenchmen in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century permeated French culture in large part because those who spied also worked as knowledge producers, propagandists, and artists. The practice changed what it meant to be cultured and elite by creating new avenues of race- and gender-specific consumption for French and European men that affected all areas of sophisticated culture including literature, politics, prints, dressing, personal hygiene, and leisure.Agents without Empire explores race making in this period of European history in the context of diplomatic reposts, travel accounts, natural history, propaganda, religious literature, poetry, theater, fiction, and cheap print. It intervenes in conversations in whiteness studies, race theory, theories of agency and matter, and the history of diplomacy and spying to offer a new account of race making in early modern Europe.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 28. Mrz 2024).
Linked Resources
Online Access
Record Appears in
Online Resources > Ebooks
All Resources
All Resources
Table of Contents
Frontmatter
Contents
Preface
Introduction: French Agents in the Ottoman Empire
1 Big Appetite and Rabelais's Multiracial Empires
2 Bird-Man 2, Female Androgyne, and Other Speculative Transformations
3 Snake Women of the East: Staging Freedom and Invisible Unfreedoms
4 Nicolas de Nicolay's Empire of Ink
5 Distancology and Universalizing French Masculinity
Coda: Race and Self-Discovery
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Contents
Preface
Introduction: French Agents in the Ottoman Empire
1 Big Appetite and Rabelais's Multiracial Empires
2 Bird-Man 2, Female Androgyne, and Other Speculative Transformations
3 Snake Women of the East: Staging Freedom and Invisible Unfreedoms
4 Nicolas de Nicolay's Empire of Ink
5 Distancology and Universalizing French Masculinity
Coda: Race and Self-Discovery
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index