Racial Apocalypse

"Racial Apocalypse is an original exploration of how concepts of race emerged in early modern Spain and England through the belief that Christ would establish an eternal kingdom. Villagrana illustrates how a form of white supremacy emerges as Spanish and English Christians struggled to understand how indigenous peoples and Black Africans might be incorporated into the kingdom of God. This book will importantly add to our understanding of how religious doctrine informs racial formation and racism." -- Dennis Austin Britton, University of New Hampshire

"Racial Apocalypse is an original exploration of how concepts of race emerged in early modern Spain and England through the belief that Christ would establish an eternal kingdom. Villagrana illustrates how a form of white supremacy emerges as Spanish and English Christians struggled to understand how indigenous peoples and Black Africans might be incorporated into the kingdom of God. This book will importantly add to our understanding of how religious doctrine informs racial formation and racism."

Dennis Austin Britton, University of New Hampshire

"Villagrana brings English and Spanish colonial and apocalyptic narratives—rationalizing rhetoric about providential preference and racial hierarchy—into conversation, revising in the process our view of race in the premodern era and advancing premodern critical race studies in crucial ways."

Patricia Akhimie, Rutgers University, Newark

"This book is an important addition to critical conversations about race in the early modern era. Not only does it provide a compelling comparative reading of processes of racialization involving Spanish, British, American Indigenous and Black African cultures, the book debunks popular notions that racialized thinking of the era primarily came out of fears and anxieties about European encounters with foreign cultures. Villagrana makes a strong case that race also was predicated on a sense of hope, of optimism as England, in particular, understood racialization as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. The book provides wonderfully nuanced readings of the ways in which religion, appearing most often in terms of apocalyptic discourse, was bound up with racial formations and vice versa."

Cassander L. Smith, University of Alabama