English Senior Lecturer Mira Kafantaris has been awarded a short-term residency with the Arizona Center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies for her book Royal Marriage, Foreign Queens and Constructions of Race in the Early Modern Period. Here, Kafantaris gives an overview of her project and tells about her hopes for the future. 

What is your project?

Royal Marriage, Foreign Queens and Constructions of Race in the Early Modern Period is the first full-length study of representations of monarchical unions through the optics of race in early modern literature. It argues that figurations of non-white, non-Christian ruling women, alongside theories of kinship and intermarriage, drive early modern racial formations. More specifically, “Royal Marriage” posits that the politics of racialization and the embodied threat of foreign ruling women are dynamically interrelated; they shape early moderns’ construction of their world, its boundaries, its past and its future. Despite matrimonial contracts that limited their participation in policymaking, foreign queens destabilized the fantasy of a white Protestant commonwealth by virtue of their proximity to power. From drama, to poetry, to court masques, to religious sermons, early modern texts speak of non-white, non-Christian queens as a direct threat to true Englishness. Royal Marriage tells the story of this national and international conversation about women, their interaction with power, and the transformation that happens as a result. My book animates a period grappling with the mobility of foreign queens as they move through borders, and with them moves language, material objects, and human subjects. And most urgently, it vivifies how their racialized bodies became loci of competing ideologies on which the success of a dynastic alliance, incorporation and succession hinged. 

When do you anticipate beginning the residency, and what do you hope to accomplish during it?

The flexibility of this residency makes it possible for me to divide it into shorter segments over the course of the award year. I plan to take my first trip in early January 2021, coinciding with “Race Before Race,” an ongoing conference series and professional network community organized by the Arizona Center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies. It is an event designed by and for scholars of color working on pre-modern critical race studies. My plan is to benefit from the mentorship and methodologies cascading in abundance at ACMRS, which will shape the narrative of the long arc of history and vast geographies that my project encapsulates. 

Where do you see this project going in the future?

My project’s overarching object is to show how race was integral to thoughts on royal marriage, which in turn contributed to theories of racial purity, ideologies and practices of righteous queenly conduct, and the regulation of sexuality. My hope is that Royal Marriage will open up new ways of thinking about this diplomatic ploy, which was reconceived in light of shifting boundaries and new global systems. 

What's next for you? What would you like to work on once this project is completed?

I have been working on the liberatory role of women in the American University of Beirut Theatre Initiative’s 2016 production of King Lear in ‘aammiya (colloquial Lebanese Arabic), which serves as the foundation of my next project, a series of articles on Lebanese appropriations of Shakespeare in the context of a long history of sectarianism, fraught nationhood, and civil war.