Yunah Kae

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Distinguishing Race: Performing Knowledge in Early Modern Comedy

I am currently working on my first monograph, tentatively titled, Distinguishing Race: Performing Knowledge in Early Modern Comedy. My project traces how developments in comic conventions on the early modern English stage reflect and produce a logic of race. By examining pastoral romantic comedies, city comedies, satirical plays, and tragicomedies in the 16th and 17th centuries, I argue that playwrights advance a comic racial form which structurally precludes the ignorant from ever discerning the sanctioned tenets of knowledge within their play-world. Distinguishing Race thus offers a model to think through how early modern English comedies re-negotiate what it means to ‘know,’ and further, how they interrogate a racialization of knowledge itself.