At First Blush: Race, Rouge, and the Transnational Performance of Turning Red

The Renaissance was pivotal in expanding, legislating, and transforming the meanings of the blush, as well as in construing it as a marker of racial difference. Tracking the blush across national and conceptual borders offers new perspectives on race-making in the early modern world, where an obsession with the dermal visibility of the blush indexed the construction of whiteness. Yet, by analyzing the use of cosmetic rouge and blushing Black Africans and Afro-diasporic people on stage, this essay also contends that the act of turning red could destabilize race-based hierarchies, even as the blush remains an embodied testament of racial trauma.