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Milton’s Engagement of Early Modern White Supremacy

Jesse G. Swan

Whatever the reality be for some, many feel that "Milton" is the prototypical "white man" and "colonial master" (David Dabydeen, "On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today." Tibisiri: Caribbean Writers and Critics. Ed. Maggie Butcher. London: Dangaroo Press, 1989. Pp. 121-35). Such a feeling, I believe, derives from the conflation of "Milton" with "Milton Studies" as it also reifies essentialist ways of being, particularly with regards to race, and modernist historiography and method, especially as regards to the nature of language. A more constructionist way of being and postmodernist historiography and method, especially in relation to race and language, understands the relationship between "Milton" and "Milton Studies" differently and might seek to elaborate the history of the production of race as a mode of modern social relations, much like that of property or gender. Such an historiography, paradoxically, perhaps, is less anachronistic than modern, materialist historiography and method since it does not impose its constitutional features of the self onto everyone in the past; that is, a postmodern historiography does not see white people, propertied people, or even, necessarily, men always when it sees the past. Whiteness, like property and gender, has a history, and that history is integrally made up of and through language. Whiteness also involves choices, like religion involves choices: no one has to be white anymore than he has to be a Jesuit or a Ranter, regardless of what the white-identifying person, the Jesuit, or the Ranter may honestly believe about his essential self. In this intellectual context, then, I wish to consider the ways "Milton" may or may not have been a "white man."

To get at the proto-racist discourse of early modernity, that is, to get at how Milton may or may not have been a "white man," we need a method that simultaneously comprehends enlightenment modes of thinking and critiques them. Such we have in contemporary critical race studies and black feminist criticism. Central to both is the appreciation of how white supremacist modes of being generate modern racialist economies and that these white supremacist modes of being are what need to be made the object of exposition. Rather than conducting race studies "in terms of its consequences on the victim," Toni Morrison writes that we should enunciate "the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it. . . . the effect of racist inflection on the subject" (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. 11.), and bell hooks insists that "it is necessary for concerned folks, for righteous white people, to begin to fully explore the way white supremacy determines how they see the world" (Killing Rage Ending Racism. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. 188). In the area of early modern English literary studies, Kim F. Hall, especially in her book, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995), has done extensive work, though not specifically on Milton (for method, see especially her chapter on using the term "white supremacy": "Epilogue: On ‘‘Race,’’ Black Feminism, and White Supremacy," 254-68).

In considering Milton’’s canon and the history of Miltonic criticism, I have outlined the whitening effects of the criticism on the canon and biography as well as what I take to be the canon’’s own testimony to Milton’’s changing engagement with early modern white supremacist values. The movement I detect into self-conscious criticism can best be seen in Eikonoklastes, especially in some of the revisions introduced into the second edition, and so, for my twenty-minute paper, I present my reading of Milton’’s criticism in Eikonoklastes of royalist white supremacist racialism as expressed by the Eikon Basilike. I contextualize the discussion of the Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes with the contemporaneous early modern scientific debunking of popular explanations "Of the Blackness of Negroes," by Sir Thomas Browne (Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1646).

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