In the course of an essay on multiculturalism, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., decries some Afrocentrist preoccupation with Egypt for its “unexpressed belief that deep continuities supervene on skin color. Beyond the heartfelt claim that Cleopatra was ‘black’ is the lurking conviction that if you traveled back in time and dropped the needle on a James Brown album, Cleo would instantly break out into the camel walk. The belief that we cherish is not so much a proposition about melanin and physiognomy; it's the proposition that, through the mists of history, Cleopatra was a sister.”

In Gates' negative example, the physical phenomenon of skin color is made to stand for a whole set of cultural and racial affiliations; color, race, and culture are in fact collapsed into the single same thing. Bodies – specifically the raced female body of the misappropriated Cleopatra – are used to stabilize cultural meanings which in fact continue to be formulated and reformulated within the shifting conditions of the African diaspora.

And yet, as a feminist reader of sixteenth and seventeenth-century texts who also reads for race, I know both that race and culture have been seen as strongly inhering in skin color, and that ideas about race were seen as underwriting larger theses about cultural identity. One early modern expression of this relationship can be observed in the 1578 anecdote reported by George Best about “an Ethiopian as blacke as a cole” who married an Englishwoman and fathered a child born in England “in all respects as blacke as the father was.”