‘Rac’d all over their Bodies’

Abstract

Abstract This chapter argues that the English developed an identity as a bookish people in innumerable quotidian acts, including meditations on the tattoo in travel narrative and stage practices of blacking. Travel writers such as William Towerson and Aphra Behn translated the autochthonous tattoos of Africans into figurative clothing, thus sewing a marker of European social status into the skin. This figurative work both robbed Black Africans of authority as makers of signs and created the possibility that African skin, even without tattoos, could serve as a status marker. To illustrate the unfolding of this cultural work, the chapter discusses the mixed practice of the lost Oxford masque Mr. Moore’s Revels, which employs blackface and clothing as overlapping techniques for blacking up. This chapter concludes with an analysis of the distinct fates of convicts in Titus Andronicus and Henry V to suggest the potentially redeemable European identity that emerges in relation to an African body seen as tattooed with a permanent convict’s mark.