Early Modern Women, Genre, and Colonialism

This entry takes a transnational and cross-genre or interdisciplinary approach to explore the role of women as persons who, because of their relative powerlessness in male-dominated societies, moved among the positions of colonizers, slavers, and settlers as well as those of colonized subjects, enslaved persons, and Indigenous persons. Building on recent work in postcolonial and anti-racist literary criticism, it argues that scholars of the early modern era can fruitfully expand generic notions of the literary and of women’s authorship and agency. It suggests that authorship can encompass multiple forms of women’s cultural production beyond writing and women’s voices even when those voices are written or ventriloquized by others, especially when those others themselves occupy a shifting or liminal position within the colonial enterprise. The entry takes as beacons for future research the lives and creative enterprises by and about four women who asserted themselves as cultural producers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on different continents: the Ethiopian Orthodox (Tewahedo) saint and theologian Walatta Petros; the Mogul princess and biographer Gulbadan Begum; the Spanish American criolla poet and dramatist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; and Aphra Behn, the Restoration English playwright and novelist. It ponders the differences that each woman’s rank or status made to her ability to create, alongside a discussion of each woman’s religious or racialized identity within her milieu. The entry concludes with a brief reflection on the continued consequences of colonialism for women scholars currently writing in the Global South.