WEW
Early Modern Race/Ethnic/Indigenous Studies
A (crowdsourced) Annotated Bibliography
Overview and updates
1. Racial formation in Early Modern England
2. Racial formation in Early Modern Europe
4. Early Modern Indigenous Studies
5a. *NEW* Bard in Borderlands Working Bibliography courtesy of Kathryn Santos. (Link only. Contact Professor Santos for editing access). Also listed in #4. #PCRS
6. Early Modern Whiteness Studies
7. Early Modern Visual Culture
8. Early Modern + Modern in Dialogue
10. Race and Appropriation *NEW CATEGORY*
11.Pedagogy *NEW CATEGORY* (started with resources recommended by Holly Dugan, Dorothy Kim and Reginald Wilburn from their Shakespeare Association of America workshop “Teaching the Premodern in a Time of White Supremacy.”) These are not annotated with permission.
12. Key Works in Critical Race Theory (CRT) *NEW CATEGORY*
Overview and Update
This bibliography was initially compiled by Hannah Ehrenberg (BC ‘13), a former English/Theater major at Barnard College, with input from Kim F. Hall (Barnard College) and Peter Erickson (Northwestern University) for the 2015 Shakespeare Association of America seminar “Early Modern Race / Ethnic / Diaspora Studies.” (This seminar was the basis for the first special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly devoted to early modern race studies) There was a great wave of scholarship in early modern race studies during the 90s; this bibliography assumes some familiarity with that work and focuses roughly on scholarship since 2000. If you are new to the field, there is a large body of work from the 80s-2000 that created the field and of which you should be aware.
The entries are divided into several sections (which are, of course, overlapping). Earlier visitors to the bibliography might notice some changes-in response to the SAA con
February 2021 UPDATE: Google’s “update” evidently messed around with the open permissions and KFH took ill for most of 2020 (and into 2021). Apologies to people who did not have immediate access.
KFH created a “race and appropriation category that subsumes the “
Using criterion outlined by Margo Hendricks at the Fall 2019 RaceBeforeRace symposium, KFH also started tagging certain entries as #PCRS. In short: "PCRS (premodern critical race studies) actively pursues not only the study of race in the premodern, not only the way in which periods helped to define, demarcate, tear apart, and bring together the study of race in the premodern era, but the way that outcome, the way those studies can effect a transformation of the academy and its relationship to our world. PCRS is about being a public humanist. It’s about being an activist."
1. Racial formation in Early Modern England
Adelman, Janet. "Her Father's Blood: Race, Conversion, and Nation in the Merchant of Venice." Representations, no. 81, 2003, pp. 4-30.
Abstract: “This essay argues that conversion in The Merchant of Venice serves as a nexus in which tensions between a universalizing Christianity and the nascent particularities of race and nation collide, and that these tensions become legible especially through the play's discourse of blood.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Azfar, Farid. "Leviathan and the Asiento: A Counter-History of the Racial Contract." New Literary History, vol. 52 no. 3, 2021, p. 431-467. doi:10.1353/nlh.2021.0021.
Akhimie, Patricia. “‘Bruised with Adversity’: Reading Race in The Comedy of Errors,” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, Race. Ed. Valerie Traub. Oxford UP, 2016, 186-96
“‘Bruised with Adversity’: Reading Race in The Comedy of Errors” examines the role of the body, and of the somatic mark in particular, in the social production of both individual subjects and racial groups. In The Comedy of Errors, two sets of twins experience the benefits as well as the pitfalls of mistaken identity, revealing the ease with which individuals may be grouped with others who merely share the same somatic markers, and the ease with which somatic markers may be stigmatized. @pakhimie #PCRS
----. “Racist Humor and Shakespearean Comedy,” S. Ed. Ayanna Thompson. Cambridge UP, 2021, 47-61 @pakhimie #PCRS
This essay examines the pervasive use of racist humor in Shakespeare’s comedies through stereotypical characters, exoticism, scapegoating, and ethnic slurs. While we may consider the ways in which Shakespeare’s comedies at times question or critique racist attitudes, ultimately the essay encourages readers to acknowledge and to wrestle with the racist language of the plays. The essay offers readers tools with which to identify and analyze racist humor in Shakespeare’s comedies, and to understand the role of racist humor in the social construction of race and the production of stigmatized groups. Keywords: Racist humor, comedies, racism, stereotype, ethnic slurs, exoticism, scapegoat, race
----. “Pinching Caliban: Race, Husbandry, and the Working Body in The Tempest,” Shakespeare/Sense. Ed. Simon Smith. Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2020
This essay examines racial discrimination in Shakespeare’s The Tempest in terms of sensory deprivation and sensory punishment through incarceration and neglect, painful abuses and unpleasant contacts. Such mistreatments effectively produce an abject group that can then be labeled monstrous, misshapen, and fundamentally other. @pakhimie #PCRS
---. “‘Qualities of Breeding’: Race, Class, and Conduct in The Merchant of Venice,” The Merchant of Venice: The State of Play. Ed. M. Lindsay Kaplan. Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2020.
In The Merchant of Venice, the multiple meanings of “quality” triangulate a new mode of
social differentiation, locating racialism at the nexus of ideas about shared ability, shared nature, and shared belief or rank. The concept of relative “quality” is used to distinguish between groups on the basis of attributes that are inherent or inherited, and those that are learned, providing a reasoning for existing inequalities of access and opportunity. @pakhimie #PCRS
----. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference reveals the relationship between racial
discrimination and the struggle for upward social mobility in the early modern world. Reading Shakespeare's plays alongside contemporaneous conduct literature—how-to books on self-improvement—this book demonstrates the ways that the pursuit of personal improvement was accomplished by the simultaneous stigmatization of particular kinds of difference. @pakhimie #PCRS
-----. “Strange Episodes: Race in Stage History,” in “Shakespeare, Race and Performance,” ed. Ayanna Thompson, special issue Shakespeare Bulletin 27.3 (Fall 2009): 363-76
This article examines the textual history of the first recorded performance of Hamlet staged aboard a ship anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1607 and described in the surviving diary of Admiral William Keeling. An episode in Shakespearean stage history that remains largely unsubstantiated, the performance's longevity has relied upon the editors of the extant records who have repeatedly become engaged in the cross-racial casting of this ephemeral production. @pakhimie #PCRS
Amussen, Susan D. Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2007.
Caribbean Exchanges traces the way the English learned to be slaveowners, and the way that contributed to constructing racial identity for whites, and their consciousness of Black people. It also emphasizes the ways ideas and cultural practices moved from the Caribbean back to England. (@sdamussen)
Andrea, Bernadette. “Early Modern Women, Race, and Writing Revisited.” The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540–1700. Ed. Danielle Clarke, Sarah C. E. Ross, and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann. Oxford University Press, 2022. 703–16.
—. “‘A Noble Troop of Strangers’: Masques of Blackness in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.” Shakespeare and Immigration, edited by Ruben Espinosa and David Ruiter, Routledge, 2014, pp. 91–112.
Andrea argues that in Henry VIII constructions of race and gender intersect with each other and the topic of empire to construct English queens as simultaneously strange and English. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
This book examines English women’s cultural productions (diplomatic letters, prose romance, religious tracts, and stage plays) that informed “the era’s Anglo-Ottoman – and more broadly – Anglo-Islamic relations.”
Archer, John Michael. Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Old Worlds considers the English perception of other civilizations, in part covering racial identity formation. In each chapter, Archer considers an early modern English text in conjunction with travel narratives or other historical texts that share a focus on a particular area (in Africa, Asia, or Europe). By taking these two types of texts side by side, Archer explores how English perceptions of these other cultures shifted during the early modern period.
Arvas, Abdulhamit. "Early Modern Eunuchs and the Transing of Gender and Race." Journal
for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 19, no. 4, 2019, pp. 116-136, 304. Doi:
Arvas argues that portrayals of (racialized) Ottoman eunuchs on the early modern English stage “illustrate how gender and race are mutually constitutive in the making of normative bodies on a global scale” (abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Barbour, Richmond. “A Multinational Corporation: Foreign Labor in the London East India
Company.” A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, edited by Jyotsna G. Singh, Wiley Blackwell, 2009, pp. 129–48.
Contextualizing the topic in the emergence of capitalism, Barbour argues that merchants in London created “vocabularies of race and station” to get foreign workers to assume the risks of global commercial enterprise without promise of substantial reward. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Bovilsky, Lara. Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. jwc
In Barbarous Play, Bovilsky opens with a tour de force demonstration that early modern racial theories are not as utterly different from modern ones as historicist Renaissance scholars have claimed. She compares a number of English Renaissance dramas in terms of how they represent different racial types such as moors, Italians, and Jews. Through these comparisons, she examines how racial difference in early modern England was understood both within English society and outside of it as well as how racial identity formation intersected with other types of identity formation (such as gender, nationality, and religion).
Britton, Dennis Austin. Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern Romance
(New York: Fordham UP, 2014).
This brilliant book examines conversion narratives in early modern literature.
Through an intensive study of baptismal theology, Britton argues that Protestantism ties race to religion and grace. Chapter one surveys the theology of baptism as it relates to race; chapter two examines Book II of The Faerie Queene (looking at the baptismal imagery around Ruddymane and canto xii); chapter three looks at how Harrington translated Orlando Furioso; chapters four and five focus on drama--Othello but also The Renegado and The Island Princess. @scottkoldenburg #PCRS
-----. “Flesh and Blood: Race and Religion in The Merchant of Venice,” in Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 108–22.
Britton explains that The Merchant of Venice engages with two early modern formulations of race – as defined by outward signs and behaviors and as a lineal category. Britton argues that Merchant merges these ideas of race to racialize religious identity as an inherited category that is manifested in external traits and behaviors.
----. “Re-"Turning" ‘Othello’: Transformative and Restorative Romance.” ELH, vol. 78, no. 1,
2011, pp. 27–50.
Britton intervenes in the conversation on Othello’s racial otherness by stressing the importance of the character’s religious belonging as a Christian. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Brookes, Kristen G. "Inhaling the Alien: Race and Tobacco in Early Modern England." Global
Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from
1550 to 1700. Ed. Barbara Sebek, Stephen Deng. Palgrave Macmillan, New York,
2008. 157-178.
Abstract: “In a surprising double reversal of the proverb “You Can’t Wash an Ethiop White,” the frontispiece to Richard Brathwait’s The smoaking age (1617) exclaims, “How much changed from white are these Englishmen transformed into Ethiopians” (figure 8.1).1 Countering the well-known proverb’s declaration that differences between kinds are natural and inalterable, Brathwait proclaims that racial transformation is indeed possible. In Brathwait’s engraving, the sign of racial difference is not visible on the surface of the body, but rather is located in the pipe that introduces tobacco into it and in the smoke that wafts out. This suggests, on one hand, that these are ephemeral transformations and that the smokers have become Ethiopians only in the sense that they are imitating an “Ethiopian” habit, demonstrated by the trade figure with whom they are juxtaposed: “A Black-more upon the Stall, with rolls of Tobacco Drinking his Petoune, according to the nature and guize of that Country.”2 Yet, on the other hand, the tobacco smoke’s highly visible entrance into the body, along with its even more striking exit from it, suggests that we are witnessing not simply the imitation of a foreign habit, but an incorporation of the alien into the English body.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Brown, David Sterling. “Code Black: Whiteness and Unmanliness in Hamlet,” Hamlet: The
State of Play, ed. Sonia Massai and Lucy Munro (London: The Arden Shakespeare,
2021)
Brown identifies in Hamlet a “triangulated relationship between whiteness, unmanliness and blackness” (103-04) in which blackness proves to be crucial for defining white masculinity and constructing it as positive. Brown observes that the Danes’ white masculinity is actually shown to be weak and corrupted and that these shortcomings in manliness are overlaid literal and figurative blackness. This blackening of unmanliness in white men shores up the idea of white masculinity as ideally manly. Brown replies in the affirmative to Peter Erickson’s “Can we Talk About Race in Hamlet?” and argues that his findings on the workings of race and gender within the play can also be used to engage with race in other texts.
-----. “‘Hood Feminism’: Whiteness and Segregated (Premodern) Scholarly Discourse in the
Post-Postracial Era,” Literature Compass (2020): 1-15
https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12608
from abstract: “With an antiracist agenda that embraces the goals of Black feminism, Brown thinks through the continued disconnect between domestic criticism and premodern critical race studies, a disconnect that denotes a representative pattern. Specifically, Brown highlights how whiteness goes unexamined critically, a fact that is surprising since the domestic sphere is, and was, a formative space where processes of racialization occur, processes informing the centuries-old racism that persists in … a time where anti-blackness and related violence … is hypervisible. Encouraging readers to be(come) “accomplice feminists,” Brown calls for the decentering of whiteness and the desegregation of scholarly discourse and citational practices.”
-----. Teaching Guide: “‘Hood Feminism’: Whiteness and Segregated (Premodern) Scholarly
Discourse in the Post-Postracial Era,” Literature Compass (2020): 1-3
https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12611
See description above.
-----. “Things of Darkness: ‘The Blueprint of a Methodology’,” The Hare: An
Online Journal of Untimely Reviews in Early Modern Theater, Special Issue (Critical Race Studies) 5.1 (September 2020). https://thehareonline.com/article/things-darkness-%E2%80%9C-blueprint-methodology%E2%80%9D #PCRS
In this tribute to Kim Hall and her landmark Things of Darkness, Brown recounts how Hall and her book have already challenged and changed the world of early modern literary studies and what they are still teaching us about race and doing academic work. Brown argues for wide acceptance of Things of Darkness as an essential canonical work in the field.
-----. “The ‘Sonic Color Line’: Shakespeare and the Canonization of
Sexual Violence Against Black Men,” Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance
Studies, The Sundial, August 2019. https://link.medium.com/HwzIUqTLr7 @_theBrownprint_ #PCRS
Brown “propose[s] that Shakespearean drama, as well as the reception and criticism of it, reveals what is at stake when” white people and society listen to black men speak of their experiences of sexual violence. Citing examples in Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice, Brown writes that white listeners disregard the black male victim’s emotional pain and psychological injuries. Rather, these white listeners – whether Shakespearean characters, literary critics, or people and institutions beyond literature – tend to respond by imposing stereotypes on the speaker. (Description added by Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
-----. “Remixing the Family: Blackness and Domesticity in Titus Andronicus,” Titus
Andronicus: The State of Play, ed. Farah Karim-Cooper (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2019), 111-133. #PCRS
Brown argues that Aaron embodies a highly visible ‘free-floating blackness’ that makes possible alternatives to the traditional, endogamous model of family emphasized at the beginning of Titus Andronicus. Brown argues that Aaron is no simple villain, but the key vehicle for the play’s message that mixed families, chosen kinship relations, and other alternative models of family do exist.
-----. “‘Is Black so Base a Hue?’: Black Life Matters in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,”
Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies, ed. Cassander Smith, et al. (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 137-155
Abstract: “Brown analyzes Shakespeare’s tragedy, Titus Andronicus, in light of Black Lives Matter and connects modern and early modern race studies through a global, transhistorical phenomenon he calls ‘racist inertia.’ The chapter explores the concept of (racial) profiling and argues that Titus stages the deindividualizing effects of racism and, consequently, contributes to a discourse about race in the early modern period that still resonates today. Overall, “‘Is Black so Base a Hue?’” presents Titus as a symptomatic case of anti-black violence. In conclusion, Brown turns to Julie Taymor’s 1999 Titus film adaptation and considers the complementary timelessness and timeliness of her work and Shakespeare’s.”
-----. “(Early) Modern Literature: Crossing the Color-Line,” Radical Teacher No. 105
(Summer 2016): 69-77.
http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/radicalteacher/article/download/255/190
Brown discusses his experience creating and teaching a course “that aimed to shift the demographics of a traditional Shakespeare course by placing historically disparate texts and black and white authors in conversation with one another” (p. 70). Brown reports that reading early modern texts and modern texts by African American authors in tandem allowed students to gain insights and engage productively with the concept of race as it operated now and in the past.
Burton, Jonathan. Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579-1624. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2005.
Burton explores racial formation in early modern England through the lens of representations of Islam in English drama.
Cahill, Patricia. “Nation Formation and the English History Plays.” A Companion to
Shakespeare’s Works, Volume 2: The Histories, edited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, 2007, pp. 70–93.
Cahill intervenes in the scholarship on history plays and the figuration of the nation “by looking at how fantasies of nationhood are bound up with certain formulations of race and class, two interrelated discourses that have been insufficiently examined in this critical literature” (p. 70). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Callaghan, Dympna. Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Based on the Elizabethan/Jacobean regulation that only white males could perform on stage, Callaghan examines how Shakespeare’s plays in performance represented gender and race. Most relevant to this seminar appear to be her chapters on Othello and The Tempest.
Carr, Morwenna. “Material / Blackness: Race and Its Material Reconstructions on the
Seventeenth-Century English Stage.” Early Theatre, vol. 20, no. 1, 2017, pp. 77–95.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12745/et.20.1.2848.
Carr “argues that the seventeenth-century English stage imagines blackness as fluid and transferable because of the materials used in its production. These cosmetics are imagined as being potentially moveable from one surface to another. The article considers the intersection between the materials used to recreate blackness and its semiotic values, focusing on the relationship between black bodies and female bodies. It argues that the materials used in the recreation of these bodies inform and are informed by the panoply of discourses surrounding them” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Carter, Matthew C. "Othello's White Sword: Stage Properties, Race, and Performance."
Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 38, no. 2, 2020, pp. 241-258.
From abstract: “...productions have frequently armed Othello with a scimitar, a sword employed by the armies of Saladin during the Crusades. In reality, the sword Othello uses throughout the play is a rapier, a quintessentially European weapon, which spoke to early modern notions of interiority and civilization. By arming Othello with the Mediterranean scimitar, productions actually make Othello seem more alien to Venice than Shakespeare's text suggests. In this article, I examine what Shakespeare communicates about the racialized world by arming Othello with the rapier, and, by extension, what productions lose when they do not do the same. Rather than casting Othello as an outsider, I argue that Shakespeare represents him as a model Venetian. The drama of the play occurs when Iago weaponizes racial prejudice to push Othello out of the limelight. Performance practices that seek to set Othello apart from the other Italians may accidentally be replicating, rather than challenging, Iago's prejudices.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Chakravarty, Urvashi. Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early
Modern England. U of Pennsylvania P, 2022.
---. "More Than Kin, Less Than Kind: Similitude, Strangeness, and Early
Modern English Homonationalisms." Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 67 no. 1, 2016, p.
14-29.
Abstract: “This essay mines the interstices between queer theory and early modern race studies to argue that current critical conversations in the field of queer studies around homohistory and homonationalism illuminate paradoxical shifts in the meanings of the early modern English family and Renaissance iterations of race. Drawing on the tension between sameness and alterity generated by discourses around the prefix “homo,” I examine the household’s “alien bodies” and their imbrication in blood-based ideas of race and family to ask how sameness can make us more attentive to the (so-called) “strange.” Kinship, I contend—as the proximate, the familial, and the lineal—situates the unkind, the unlike, and the alien at its very center. Looking at several key moments in Othello and Hamlet alongside Marlowe’s Edward II and Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, this essay argues that discourses of kinship and kindness register emergent racial formations rooted in the paradoxes of the familiar and the familial, the servant and the stranger, proximate alienation and racialized approximations.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Chapman, Matthieu. Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama. New York: Routledge, 2017.
From abstract: “Using contemporary Afro-pessimist theories to provide a foundation for structural analyses of race in the Early Modern Period, it engages the arguments for race as a fluid construction of human identity by addressing how race in Early Modern England functioned not only as a marker of human identity, but also as an a priori constituent of human subjectivity. Chapman argues that Blackness is the marker of social death that allows for constructions of human identity to become transmutable based on the impossibility of recognition and incorporation for Blackness into humanity. … By locating notions of Black inhumanity in England prior to chattel slavery, the book positions the Triangle Trade as a result of, rather than the cause of, Black inhumanity. It also challenges the common scholarly assumption that all varying types of human identity in Early Modern England were equally fluid by arguing that Blackness functioned as an immutable constant. Through the use of structural analysis, this volume works to simplify and demystify notions of race in Renaissance England by arguing that race is not only a marker of human identity, but a structural antagonism between those engaged in human civil society opposed to those who are socially dead.”
----. "The Appearance of Blacks on the Early Modern Stage: "Love's Labour's Lost's" African
Connections to Court." Early Theatre, vol. 17, no. 2, 2014, pp. 77-94.
Abstract: “While scholarship is certain that white actors did appear in blackface on the Elizabethan stages, this paper argues for the additional possibility of actual moors and blacks appearing on stage in early modern London. Examining the positive social, political, and economic implications of using in performance these bodies perceived as exotic, I argue for the appearance of blacks in Love's Labour's Lost as a display of courtly power in its 1597—8 showing for Elizabeth I. Building on this precedent, Queen Annas staging of herself as black in the 1605 Masque of Blackness, I argue, worked to assert the new Jacobean court's power.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. “‘Away, You Ethiop!’: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Denial of Black Affect—A Song to Underscore the Burning of Police Stations.” Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, ACMRS Press, 2022, https://asu.pressbooks.pub/race-and-affect/.
Chapman reflects on Lysander’s hurling of a racist slur at Hermia and the way this moment has gone unremarked and addresses “questions about the capacity of black flesh, even imagined black flesh, to resonate with human affect, and to ponder the limits of human imagination in relation to desire, violence, and blackness.” Chapman enjoins Afro-pessimism and affect theory to “offer a reading of this text and this moment that positions A Midsummer Night’s Dream within a continuum of anti-black imagery that establishes blackness as beyond the bounds of affective resonance with civil society” (n.p.). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Coles, Kimberly Anne. “Moral Constitution: Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam and the
Color of Blood.” Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies, edited by Ania
Loomba and Melissa E. Sanchez, Routledge, 2016.
Coles writes that early modern discourses concerning race were informed by older understandings of blood as a humor and a determinant of rank. Reading Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam in light of this point, Coles argues that the play presents race as a classed category of moral and physical particularity. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Coodin, Sara. “Conversion Interrupted: Shame and the Demarcation of Jewish Women’s Difference in The Merchant of Venice.” Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, ACMRS Press, 2022, https://asu.pressbooks.pub/race-and-affect/.
Coodin discusses the role of shame in early modern racial formation. She argues that in The Merchant of Venice Jessica’s self-loathing serves to demarcate racial difference and other her even as her convertibility seems to erase such difference. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Corredera, Vanessa I. “Complex Complexions: The Facial Signification of the Black Other in Lust’s Dominion.” Shakespeare and the Power of the Face. ed. James Knapp. (Surrey: Asgate, 2015): 93-114. #PCRS
This article turns to the discourse of early modern physiognomy in order to
contextualize the shifting between fluid and indelible conceptualizations of racial difference in Lust’s Dominion. Lust’s Dominion thus challenges conceptualizations of early modern race that characterize it as understood in only fluid, shifting ways.
Dadabhoy, Ambereen. “Barbarian Moors: Documenting Racial Formation in Early Modern England,” in Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 30–46. #PCRS
Abstract: “Linking the royal Tudor archive to the Tudor/Stuart stage, this article discloses the ways the stage constructs race in the service of nation and empire. From Elizabeth I’s proclamations calling for the expulsion of ‘blackamoors’ to George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, English conceptions of blackness expose the multifaceted nature of racial formation in the early modern period. The construction of race in early modern England is intimately linked to nascent and emergent English imperial ambitions and dependent upon trade, traffic, and enslavement, particularly in Africa. While previous scholarship on The Battle of Alcazar has focused on the Mediterranean milieu and the seemingly elastic racial signification of the identity marker, Moor, this study shifts both the geographical and racial focus to argue that the Atlantic and Africa are significant sites of imperial interest for the English and that blackness is being discursively produced in order to signal race.”
------. “Imagining Islamicate Worlds: Race and Affect in the Contact Zone.” Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, ACMRS Press, 2022, https://asu.pressbooks.pub/race-and-affect/chapter/1-imagining-islamicate-worlds-race-and-affect-in-the-contact-zone/. #PCRS
Dadabhoy emphasizes the defining role of race in early modern English constructions of white Christian hegemony and racialized Islamic alterity and examines how the contact zone of the Mediterranean, as imagined by the English, required such racial formations. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing); @DrDadabhoy
-----. “Two-Faced: the Problem of Othello’s Visage.” Othello: The State of Play, The Arden Shakespeare (2014): 121-47. #PCRS
This article examines Othello’s identity through the frame of Ottoman imperial practices, such as devshirme, or tribute boys, arguing that Othello’s colonized subjectivity creates the space to debate whether identity is fluid or stable. @DrDadabhoy
Daniel, Drew. “Early Modern Affect Theory, Racialized Aversion, and the Strange Case of Foetor Judaicus.” Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, ACMRS Press, 2022, https://asu.pressbooks.pub/race-and-affect/.
Daniel considers the relationship between affect and sensory experience in the antisemitic belief that Jews had a distinctive smell and argues that an imagined reaction of disgust to Jews and their alleged odor contributed to the construction of Jews as racially other. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Das, Nandini, João Vicente Melo, Haig Z. Smith, and Lauren Working. Keywords of Identity,
Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England. Amsterdam U P, 2021.
doi:10.2307/j.ctv1t8q92s. (Open Access)
This book offers discussions of central terms and concepts relating to, well, identity, race, and human mobility in early modern England. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Dawson, Mark. Bodies Complexioned: Human Variation and Racism in Early Modern
English Culture, C. 1600-1750, Manchester U P, 2019.
Dawson describes how early modern English understandings of physical differences such as skin color produced prejudice and inequality. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)[a]
Denmead, Louise. “The Discovery of Blackness in the Early-Modern Bed-Trick.” The Invention of Discovery, 1500–1700, edited by James Dougal Fleming, Routledge, 2011.
From abstract: “This chapter examines surrogate sexual partner is a dark-skinned female servant. With primary reference to John Fletcher’s The Knight of Malta, overlooked connection in the period between the bed-trick motif and the myth of Ixion. While there were many variations on the hoax, it focuses on one particular instance of the bed-trick that involves a noblewomans attempting to protect her chastity from male lust by putting a black servant in her bed as her replacement. The discovery of a black woman in the bed-trick, however, produces a far more ambivalent reaction.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Dietering, Averyl. “Black Ink, White Feelings: Early Modern Print Technology and Anti-Black Racism.” Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, ACMRS Press, 2022, https://asu.pressbooks.pub/race-and-affect/.
Dietering “examine the materiality of early modern English print, and print illustrations of black bodies in early modern texts, to show how print illustrations of blackness were deployed to foster the growth of a white English identity that defined itself in opposition to blackness” (n.p.). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
DiGangi, Mario. “Branded with Baseness: Bastardy and Race in King Lear.” Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, ACMRS Press, 2022, https://asu.pressbooks.pub/race-and-affect/.
Focusing on Edmund and his soliloquy, DiGagni argues that “[b]ecause it is always already about social illegitimacy, sexual sin, and bodily impurity, bastardy puts into relief the intersecting racializing mechanisms of lineage, sexuality, and gender” that are cental to hegemonic power (n.p.). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Dimmock, Matthew. New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005.
Dimmock examines how early modern English drama and other works of literature represented Islam and Muslims and how these representations shifted over the course of the sixteenth century.
Erickson, Peter. “Race Words in Othello.” Shakespeare and Immigration, edited by Ruben
Espinosa and David Ruiter, Routledge, 2014, pp. 159–76.
Erickson considers Othello in the context of a cultural shift in emphasis from Mediterranean to Atlantic exchange and argues that Shakespeare presents Othello to his English audience as a non-threatening black alien who is non-agential because he does not influence English identity. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Erickson, Peter, and Kim F. Hall. “‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 1, Aug. 2016, pp. 1–13. This introduction to the first SQ special issue on early modern race studies suggests that, unlike other early modern fields, EMRS has been subject to an unhealthy recursiveness about its central subject and argues, “Ignoring or disparaging race will not make it go away as a question for our— or Shakespeare’s—time. We thus have set our sights on the next decade, using 2025 as a landmark by which to measure subsequent progress toward establishing the field of early modern race studies with a stronger foundation through a wide spectrum of social issues, a broader scholarly framework, a larger academic audience, and deeper public engagement.” It suggests seven concerns for race studies on the horizon and optimistically proposes that by 2025,,” we hope to see a revitalized, intellectually expansive, solidly established field for early modern race studies that attracts much larger audiences in both academic and public spheres.” Drawing on CRT scholar Derek Bell, it concludes with a call for EMRS to “set our own questions and choose methods that embrace strangeness, that refuse an artificial border between past and present, and that listen to the voices of people of color.” #PCRS
Fåhraeus, Anna, 2005. Moors, Social Anxiety and Horror in Thomas Rawlins’s The Rebellion. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 4(2), pp.143–61. DOI: http://doi.org/10.35360/njes.41.
From abstract: “... Fåhraeus contextualizes race within multiple images of social horror in Thomas Rawlins’s little-discussed tragedy The Rebellion (1640). … Fåhraeus contends that the multiple racial doubling works to interrogate the certainty of nature versus culture in relation to race, even as the image of the tailors that runs through the play does the same in relation to class. Both issues … become sexualized through … and gender itself thus becomes a third site of epistemological uncertainty…. Fåhraeus suggests that The Rebellion merits serious consideration because it links the depiction of race to upward social mobility and constructions of female purity, and all three to the loss of white male privilege.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Feerick, Jean E. Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance. Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
Feerick argues that early modern English social hierarchies were based on race and considers the process by which the "race-as-blood" system of categorizing racial difference (6) was replaced by categorizations based on skin color.
Floyd-Wilson, Mary. English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Floyd-Wilson begins with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century “scientific” writing about racial difference and then uses her analysis of those texts to approach drama from the same period.
Fox, Cora. “Othello’s Unfortunate Happiness.” Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, ACMRS Press, 2022, https://asu.pressbooks.pub/race-and-affect/.
Fox examines “the ways Othello highlights happiness not just as a good feeling” and “how the play comments on and challenges happiness as a structuring affective attachment,” arguing that “[i]n its representation of a Black character who is promised a happy inclusion in Venetian life only to have it eroded within a tragic frame, Othello is a play that does the work of challenging the appeal of happiness itself” (n.p.). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives Enslaved Women, Violence & the Archive in the Urban British Caribbean. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Historian Marisa Fuentes examines the lives of enslaved women early modern urban Barbados to rethink assumptions about women, gender and space in the Americas more generally. Working from archival evidence that is often incomplete as well as biased in favor of white power, she uses a methodology she calls reading “along the bias grain” to reconstruct the voices and experienced of enslaved women. You can see an interview with the author here. @ProfKFH #PCRS
Galland, Nora. “Name-calling the Egyptian Queen in Antony and Cleopatra : a case in point of the distortion of Africa through the racial slur ‘gypsy.’” Shakespeare en Devenir vol. 12, 2017, repr. online 2019, https://shakespeare.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/shakespeare/index.php?id=1859. Accessed December 3, 2021.
Identifies the Hellenistic origins of the “Gypsy” slur against the Romani and argues that the term entered early modern culture through the persistence and transmission of this Greek prejudice (e.g. Plutarch via North). (SI)
Gajowski, Evelyn. "Intersecting Discourses of Race and Gender in Elizabeth Cary's the
Tragedy of Mariam." Early Modern Literary Studies, 2017, pp. 1-17.
Gajowski examines how Cary uses early modern discourses on gender and race both to characterize Mariam and Salome and to juxtapose these two characters. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
García García, Luciano. “The Racialized Economy of Desire in The Fair Maid of the West.”
Studia Neophilologica, vol. 88, no. 1, 2016, pp. 56-69.
Abstract: “Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West, Parts 1 and 2 is a key work in which commerce, national and racial identity, gender, capitalism and early globalization crisscross in order to construct a single discourse of the nation in early modern England. In this article the confluence of the above factors has been examined from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari's theorization of economy of desire and the disciplining thereof through historically given social formations. I also resort to lotman's concept of semiosphere. This text sets out to prove how, through a subtext of commercial superiority of the English above the Moroccans, a discourse of economies of desire including racial and national elements is obliquely enacted in the two plays. This discourse manifests the superiority of the typically capitalist disciplining of desire over an older and inferior discipline of desire which may well be termed the imperial mode, represented mainly by the Moors and Mullisheg, the Moorish King of Fez.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. "Washing the Moor White on the Early Modern English Stage (1550-1666): Five
Undetected Cases." Notes and Queries, vol. 60, no. 4, 2013, pp. 547-549.
Abstract: “The common theme of washing a Moor white in some plays that are part of the English Stage in the Early Modern Period indicates the social discourse of the era and the emergence of a national identity. The plays are 'A Jovial Crew,' 'The Scottish History of James IV, Slain at Flodden,' 'Love's Hospital,' 'The Marriage-broaker,' and 'The Shepheard's Paradise.'” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Gillen, Katherine. Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity, and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare’s Stage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
This book addresses the ways in which chastity tropes inform the commoditization and valuation of people in early modern England, thus contributing to racial formation. The chapters most directly related to race are Ch.4 “Chastity and Blackness: Racial Value and Commodity Potential in The Fair Maid of the West, Part I and Othello” and Ch.5 “Mediterranean Markets, Commoditised Masculinity and the Whitening of Christian Chastity in The Merchant of Venice and The Renegado.”
Grady, Kyle. "Emphasis and Elision: Early Modern English Approaches to Racial Mixing and
their Afterlives." New Literary History, vol. 52 no. 3, 2021, p. 585-604.
Abstract: “Early modern English approaches to racial mixing are marked by inconsistency. In this, they find affinity with the approaches of subsequent history, in which the topic of mixedness is subject to divergent, often conflicting, concerns, observations, and theories. In dominant discourse, the topic has historically been—and continues to be—regularly cleaved from historical precedent and present reality, many times in ways that augur otherwise improbable futures. Inconsistency thus offers perhaps the most consistent characteristic through which to chart the trajectory of approaches to racial mixing across time. While we might certainly sketch a broad historical path of dominant approaches to the topic, in practice, beliefs about mixedness regularly emerge and reemerge in ways that complicate and at times contravene what we might envision as the prevailing perspective or historical reality of a given moment.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Grier, Miles P. Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023).
In Inkface, Miles P. Grier traces productions of Shakespeare's Othello from seventeenth-century London to the Metropolitan Opera in twenty-first-century New York. Grier shows how the painted stage Moor and the wife whom he theatrically stains became necessary types, reduced to objects of interpretation for a presumed white male audience. In an era of booming print production, popular urban theater, and increasing rates of literacy, the metaphor of Black skin as a readable, transferable ink became essential to a fraternity of literate white men who, by treating an elastic category of marked people as reading material, were able to assert authority over interpretation and, by extension, over the state, the family, and commerce. Inkface examines that fraternity’s reading of the world as well as the ways in which those excluded attempted to counteract it.
Grogan, Tess. “‘Gather up the Reliques of Thy Race’: Paynim Remains in Faery-Land.”
Spenser Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021, pp. 153–79.
Abstract: “Placing Sansfoy’s death and the disappearance of his body alongside The Faerie Queene’s other defeated paynims—the Souldan and Pollente, Pyrochles and Cymochles—reveals that Spenser’s poem breaks from epic tradition in its treatment of the enemy dead. The corpse desecration and immoderate mourning habitually practiced by Spenser’s foreign characters makes visible early modern English anxieties about the limits placed on grief and the rites owed to the departed. In Book II, classical ideals of universal burial are gradually supplanted by treatment determined by racial and religious difference. Guyon’s evolving response to the question of burial discloses the racial stakes of paynim death in Books I and V. In its ambivalent handling of foreign mourners, however, the poem remains suspended between an emerging racialized logic of death and a human right to decent burial held in common.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Guasco, Michael. Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic
World. U of Pennsylvania P, 2014.
Guasco traces the ways that slavery informed how the people of early modern England and its colonists thought about and engaged with the rest of the world. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Gurr, Andrew. “A Black Reversal.” Shakespeare 4, no. 2 (July 2008): 148–56.
Gurr argues that Othello was in part Shakespeare’s reaction to Peele’s Battle of Alcazar, with Shakespeare reversing the complexions associated with good and evil in the play. The theatre historian then considers techniques the playing companies used to portray moors, of various complexions, in large numbers, and in the same family.
Habib, Imtiaz H. Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period. Lantham, MD: University Press of America, 2002.
Habib looks at various sonnets and plays by Shakespeare through the lens of postcolonial theory in order to examine how Shakespeare represented racial difference and how Elizabethan constructions of racial difference were formed. #PCRS
-----. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
Black Lives in the English Archives is a collection of historical references to black people in early modern England. In addition, Habib takes the archival texts together to analyze racial identity at the time. #PCRS
----. “Elizabethan Racial Medical Psychology, Popular Drama, and the Social Programming
of the Late-Tudor Black: Sketching an Exploratory Postcolonial Hypothesis.”
Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, edited by Stephanie Moss
and Kaara L. Peterson, Routledge, 2004, pp. 93–112.
Abstract: “The topic of my essay is the politics of Elizabethan mental health. I want to pursue this topic within the framework of post-structuralist study in general and postcolonial study in particular, connecting it to the subject of race, as it is a script, like gender, written within the narrative of early modern English nationhood.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. “The Black Alien in Othello: Beyond the European Immigrant.” Shakespeare and
Immigration, edited by Ruben Espinosa and David Ruiter, Routledge, 2014, pp.
135–58.
Habib examines the documentary evidence on black immigrants in early modern England and discusses how Othello reflects their experiences and broader cultural attitudes. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Hadfield, Andrew. “In the Blood: Spenser, Race, and Identity.” Spenser Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021, pp. 47–68.
From abstract: “What is at stake in the existence and transmission of blood is complicated and problematic throughout Spenser’s works. Bloodlines may determine identity, or they may tell us very little about them. In this essay I explore Spenser’s understanding of blood, race, and identity through an examination of selected passages in A View of the Present State of Ireland and the stained hands of Ruddymane at the start of The Faerie Queene, Book II. Blood emerges as a significant factor in establishing identity, with inheritance through the blood determining legal as well as racial identities.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. “Race in Shakespeare’s Histories,” in Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 62–76.
Hadfield discusses lineage in Shakespeare’s history plays and argues that the plays show that racial and national purity have always been impossible. Hadfield gives special attention to bastardy as a site of intermixing or heterogeneity.
Hall, Kim F., and Gwynne Kennedy. “Early Modern Women Writing Race.” Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Options for Teaching). Ed. Margaret Hannay and Suzanne Woods. New York: MLA Publications, 2000. 235-39. #PCRS
Hall and Kennedy write that it is crucial – particularly if we want to teach contemporary women writers about intersectional feminism – to recognize the linked topics of racial and gender oppression in early modern texts because race and gender both informed the contexts in which the periods women authors wrote. Hall and Kennedy explain that encodings of whiteness and racial otherness infuse even woman-authored early modern texts that are already frequently taught.
Hamamra, Bilal T. "Jerusalem and Arabia in Cary's the Tragedy of Mariam." ANQ, vol. 33, no.
1, 2020, pp. 34-36.
From abstract: “Hamamra examines The Tragedy of Mariam by Elizabeth Cary with regard to its depiction of Jerusalem and Arabia. The text suggests that Jerusalem shapes the play's racial, national, and sociopolitical interactions. …. The Tragedy of Mariam is preoccupied by the conflict between two Jewish lines of descent, proto-Christian virtuous ones, deriving from the pure line of David and epitomized in Mariam, and racially impure, inferior ones, enemies of Jesus and epitomized in Herod and Salome.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Hendricks, Margo, "Race: A Renaissance Category?" A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, Ed. Michael Hattaway. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 2003. 690-698. #PCRS
Hendricks gives an overview of the trajectory of ‘race’ in early modern England by reviewing what she calls the “conceptual threads that contributed to the formation of the Renaissance concept / category of race”: the history of the word “race” and Renaissance theories of generation.
Herron, Thomas. “Mixed Up: Race, Degeneration, and Irish ‘Old English’ Politics in
Spenser’s Castle Joyous and Bower of Bliss.” Spenser Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021,
pp. 69–105.
Abstract: “This essay builds on insights into Malecasta’s wanton character to examine her politicized meaning in the allegory of The Faerie Queene Books I–III, as a discourteous and inhospitable threat to the idealized “British” and chaste woman warrior represented by Britomart. Malecasta represents in her bad rule of Castle Joyous (III.i) social pollution with a proto-racial emphasis, that is, degeneration. An unnoticed cognate with Malecasta’s punning name is the Spanish malecasta, to be of “mixed race.” As such, Malecasta in her “bower” appears to allegorize on one level the corrupting influence of Spanish and Continental romances, including those with Irish subject matter, and, on a political level, the Continental-leaning, colonial Old English culture found in Spenser’s Ireland: old noble houses that had intermingled with the Irish, grown and decayed over centuries through excess wealth and power. Comparisons are made with Acrasia in the Bower of Bliss to demonstrate how Britomart in Castle Joyous must not only resist her own sexualized nature but must avoid being pulled down to the muddy level of Malecasta’s corrupted social sphere.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Hornback, Robert. “Blackfaced Fools, Black-Headed Birds, Fool Synonyms, and
Shakespearean Allusions to Renaissance Blackface Folly”, Notes and Queries,
Volume 55, Issue 2, June 2008, pp. 215–219
Abstract: “The author explores the comic tradition of blackface used in the Renaissance, its association with fools, and related associations with black-headed birds. He also discusses allusions to blackfaced folly in various plays by William Shakespeare.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. "Emblems of Folly in the First Othello: Renaissance Blackface, Moor's Coat, and
‘Muckender’." Comparative Drama, vol. 35, no. 1, 2001, pp. 69-99.
Hornback argues that blackface and a colorful costume would have prompted Othello’s original audiences to associate the titular character with fools and stage folly. Hornback suggests that this link helps to explain the presence of surprising comic elements in the tragedy. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. "Extravagant and Wheeling Strangers: Early Blackface Dancing Fools, Racial
Impersonation, and the Limits of Identification." Exemplaria, vol. 20, no. 2, 2008, pp.
197-223.
Abstract: “Challenging the assumption that the minstrel stereotype associating dance with racial impersonation was a uniquely American invention, I argue that it was instead founded upon a type which appeared in various comical blackface guises since the Renaissance. In the wake of the early African slave trade, racial impersonation in the Morris dance is reflected both in accounts of face-painting and in the distinctive raised or bent-limbed gestures, vigorous step-dancing, and wheeling about which historians associate with West African dance movements. But white dancers misread such body language in demeaning terms, as did the oft-reported contortions, twitching, limping, and deformity of the foolish Jim Crow. Jigs and drolls likewise employed blackface dance as an emblem of folly and as a device of exclusion. Consequently, though "Creolization"—the fusion of European and African culture—was long observable in dance, performance of exaggerated, fetishized other ness did not promote the meaningful identification critics have recently assumed.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. “The Folly of Racism: Enslaving Blackface and the ‘Natural’ Fool Tradition.” Medieval
& Renaissance Drama in England, vol. 20, 2007, pp. 46-84,10.
Hornback traces the racist history of blackface and its association with foolish behavior back to its roots in medieval and early modern drama. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Iyengar, Sujata. Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: Cambridge University Press, 2004. #PCRS
Iyengar considers a wide variety of early modern texts in order to understand how perceptions of “bodily, cultural, and social” difference (1) together influenced racial identity formation in early modern England.
---. “Moorish Dancing in The Two Noble Kinsmen.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (2007), pp. 85-107, Lanham, MD: Rosemont/Associated University Presses.
Abstract: I will argue that the supposed Moorish origin of English morris dancing allows Shakespeare to domesticate dark-skinned exoticism by incorporating it into rural English customs and traditions and Fletcher to employ figures of foreign femininity in the service of an emergent, court-centered, coterie feminism. Let me say at the outset that my claims about the collision of the domestic and the foreign owe more to the late Edward Said’s definition of “Orientalism” than to more recent arguments of contemporary postcolonial criticism. That is to say, I am more interested here in the morris dance and the Moorishness that informs it as indices to anxieties within early modern England, rather than in uncovering the material conditions of Moorishness and Moorish dancers in England. There may be no original or authentic “Moorish dance,” as it were, hiding behind the hybrid presentation that makes up the English morris. Renaissance society uses Moorishness, I will argue, to trope geographical, temporal, and literary alterity within that culture. These anxieties circulate around nation-formation, in Shakespeare’s case, around female autonomy and rank, in Fletcher’s, and around the exoticism of the rural—especially of rural women—in their collaboration, The Two Noble Kinsmen. (SI)
---. “Race and Skin Color in Early Modern Women’s Writing.” In The History of British Women’s Writing, Volume 2: 1500-1610.#PCRS
Abstract: This chapter identifies “[t]races of racial or proto-racialized language and tropes...in different genres of early modern women’s writing such as” Sidney’s metrical psalm translations, Cary’s “Senecan closet drama,” and Lanyer’s “anthology” Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.” “Sidney’s Psalms demonstrates how early modern culture imagines the imprint of sin upon flesh as a physical stain, troping such markings as darkness or infection; they also turn race into religious election. Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam ranges across multiple mythologies of color in order to distinguish between women and to figure personal or domestic choices as cosmic chaos. Lanyer mobilizes Italianate literary convention (Petrarchism), generic mixing (a modified contaminatio, the Terential practice of cannibalizing Greek texts for plots, characters and scenes) and biblical allegory (the figure of the Black bride in Canticles) in order to account for herself as a poet in a culture that multiply ‘others’ her as a woman attempting to control her erotic life; a working woman [excluded from]...the aristocratic literary of other well-known women authors; and a ‘black’ woman of Italo-Jewish ancestry.” (SI)
---. “Strangeness: Early Modern European Women and the Invention of Whiteness.” EMLS Special Issue 27: European Women in Early Modern Drama (2017). #PCRS
Abstract: The Afterword to this EMLS Special Issue “European Women in Early Modern English Drama" contextualizes this collection in light of our continued scholarly and social investigation into the invention of "whiteness" and of a pan-European identity. It argues that texturing the flat surface of "whiteness" and "Europeanness" can enable us to "estrange" -- that is, to critique and de-nature, existing stereotypes surrounding race, sexuality, and national origin. It concludes with a call to further research and writing about the material or phenomenological textures of individual women's lives, as we can imagine them through literature and history. (SI)
---. “Race Thinking in Margaret Cavendish’s Drama.” Criticism 63.1-2 (2021): 95-106. https://doi.org/10.13110/criticism.63.1-2.0095
Abstract (HCommons): This essay uses an intersectional approach to identify in the drama of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the patterns that Hannah Arendt called “race thinking” and to extend Arendt’s approach backwards in time as early as the seventeenth century. Famously, Cavendish -- poet, playwright, personality-- prided herself on her “singularity” or originality, from her cultivated eccentricity of dress to her insistence, which anticipates the Romantic movement, that her works come from her alone (down to her punctilious annotation of the occasional lines or stanzas or scenes composed by her husband and included in her plays). The combined authority Cavendish appropriates – rank and individual merit – and that she uses to transcend the restrictions placed on her by her gender makes Cavendish an apt instance through which to investigate how or whether merit and rank – and gender – can produce race thinking. I suggest that Cavendish’s first play, the two-part Loves Adventures, simultaneously queers or questions heteronormative reproduction and the purity of an imagined bloodline or race and yet restricts the ability to transcend race (understood for Cavendish as bloodline and as gender) to those who can demonstrate merit or (to borrow Patricia Akhimie’s invaluable formulation) “cultivation.” Similarly, Cavendish’s later play The Bridals uses cross- or transgender casting and the potential for cultivation not to liberate but to humiliate and racialize its working-class characters. In The Female Academy, wealthy, aristocratic ladies literally become the gatekeepers and guarantors of education and bloodline. The intersectional hierarchies of rank, skin color, gender, and sexual autonomy thus triumph over an imagined innate or even a “cultivated” merit or virtue. (SI)
Jones, Eldred D. The Elizabethan Image of Africa. The University of Virginia Press: 1971.
This booklet, published by the Folger Shakespeare Library is an early foray into
early modern race studies. Jones explores the ways in which Africa and Africans are represented in the early modern English imaginary.
Kafantaris, Mira Assaf. “Desire, Disgust, and the Perils of Strange Queenship in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.” Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, ACMRS Press, 2022, https://asu.pressbooks.pub/race-and-affect/.
Kafantaris examines “The Faerie Queene’s affective constructions of racial identities” (n.p.) and discusses how affects such as desire and disgust, in particular, inform ideas of racial purity and the racial otherness of a foreign queen. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Kao, Wan-Chuan. "In the Lap of Whiteness." New Literary History, vol. 52 no. 3, 2021, p.
535-561. doi:10.1353/nlh.2021.0025.
Abstract: “This article considers medieval and early modern strategies of racialization and periodization through the figure of the hold and the critical lens of empathy. I take as my test case The Squire's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer that reimagines the medieval Mongol empire. Empathy, the act of feeling into a strange aesthetic object, person, or situation, characterizes the affective similitude interposed between the tale's heroine, Canacee, and the wounded falcon. Canacee's empathic lap is one figuration of the premodern hold that attempts to contain and erase difference. Empathy as an approach to history and cross-racial encounters, however, is deeply problematic. Next, I examine periodization as the historiographic equivalent to racial passing, arguing that classification and recognition do not always align. The empathic scene is often a failed encounter marked by the noncoincidence of subjects or objects. The falcon in Canacee's lap signifies whiteness as racial capital in the guise of European courtliness. I then turn to the reception history of The Squire's Tale, in which readers have constructed a modern, Orientalizing Part 1 vis-à-vis a medieval, de-Orientalizing Part 2. The critical periodizing impulses extend to early modern assessments of Chaucer. Milton's designation of the tale as "half told" is a Foucauldian contre-practice that emblematizes all sorts of modernist and Orientalist efforts at periodizing and racializing texts, bodies, and histories. Finally, I consider the limits of figural approaches to periodization and racialization and advocate the practice of critical implication in place of interpellation.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Kaplan, M. L. "Jessica's Mother: Medieval Constructions of Jewish Race and Gender in the
Merchant of Venice." Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1-5,10-I,139.
Kaplan examines the racialized construction of Jewishness in The Merchant of Venice and argues that Jessica can be converted and become white because Jewish racial identity is constructed in such a way that it is far more dependent on fathers’ Jewishness than on the identities of mothers. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. "The Jewish Body in Black and White in Medieval and Early Modern England."
Philological Quarterly, vol. 92, no. 1, 2013, pp. 41-65.
Kaplan explores varying constructions of Jewish complexions as black or white in medieval and early modern England. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Karim-Cooper, Farah. “The Materials of Race: Staging the Black and White Binary in the Early Modern Theatre,” in Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 17–29.
from abstract: “This essay …. addresses the relationship between the audience perception of race and the performance of blackness on the early modern stage while explaining the various materials and technologies available to early modern actors to create a range of racial identities…. Finally, this essay draws upon available evidence about black presence in early modern England to suggest the plausibility of a more diverse audience than theatre scholars have been willing to admit. This diversity therefore would have influenced not only the reception of racial performances but also the development of staged representations of racial otherness over time.”
—--. ‘Emotions, Gesture, and Race in the Early Modern Playhouse’ in Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance, ed. Simon Smith and Emma Whipday (Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 57-76.
Kaufmann, Miranda. Black Tudors: The Untold Story. London: Oneworld, forthcoming October 2017.
Black Tudors explores the untold history of Africans in Tudor and early Stuart England through the lives of ten individuals.
-----. “Making the Beast with two Backs” – Interracial Relationships in Early Modern England, Literature Compass, 12.1, January 2015, pp. 22-37.
Kaufmann reflects on interracial relationships in the context of archival records of Africans in early modern England.
-----. ‘Blanke, John (fl. 1507–1512)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2014.
A short biography of the African trumpeter who was employed by Henry VII and Henry VIII. MK
-----. ‘Sir Pedro Negro: What colour was his skin?’, Notes and Queries, Vol. 253, no. 2 (June 2008), pp.142-146. MK
Kaufmann examines the documentary evidence concerning Sir Pedro Negro, a Spanish mercenary under Henry VIII, and concludes that it is uncertain but possible that Sir Pedro was black. (description added by Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. ‘Caspar Van Senden, Sir Thomas Sherley and the blackamoor Project.’ Historical Research. 81.212 (2008): 366-371.
This article goes back to the archives to explore the circumstances of Elizabeth I’s so-called ‘deportation’ of Africans and shows that the draft proclamation of 1601 was never promulgated and that Van Senden and Sherley’s money-making scheme was unsuccessful. MK
---. ‘English Common Law, Slavery and.’ Encyclopedia of Blacks in European History and Culture. Ed. Eric Martone. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008: I.200-3. MK
Describing several relevant court cases, Kaufmann relates the ambiguous status of slavery in early modern England as a practice that was never addressed by statutes. (description added by Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
LaPerle, Carol Mejia. “An Unlawful Race: Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and the Crimes of Early
Modern Gypsies.” Shakespeare, vol. 13, no. 3, 2017, pp. 226–38.
LaPerle argues that Shakespeare’s portrayal of Cleopatra as a racialized, sexualized, and disloyal figure links her with Roma, who were constructed similarly in early modern England. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. "Ill-Will as Racialized Affect: Early Modern Volition, Critical Race Theory, and Shakespearean Ill-Will." New Literary History, vol. 52 no. 3, 2021, p. 563-583. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nlh.2021.0026.
Abstract: “Seventeenth-century accounts of will are a fundamental part of race-making. By reading critical race theory's interventions alongside early modern accounts of volition, I reveal the implications of social contract theorists' consideration of will as a means to calibrate one's relationship to power. Embedded within these discourses is a fundamental, rather than circumstantial, disavowal of participation in the commonweal. I theorize this category of exclusion as "ill-will," a selectively essentialized category that does not require empirical evidence but is instead a pre-emptive anticipation of threat.Ill-will marks relational incompatibility, an abnormal volition, attributed to racialized subjects. As a racializing mechanism in the early modern period, ill-will precludes civic participation. The essay concludes with considerations of how these categories of preclusion inform William Shakespeare's representations of race. Performances of volition, along with affects that the history of will attaches to intention, desire, and ability, are crucial features of Shakespeare's representation of ill-will as a racialized affect.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
---. “The Racialized Affects of Ill-Will in the Dark Lady Sonnets.” Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, ACMRS Press, 2022, https://asu.pressbooks.pub/race-and-affect/.
LaPerle examines the role of ill-will in Shakespeare’s Dark Lady Sonnets and “consider[s] the problem of feeling as a disturbance of the sonnet sequence’s default investments in white futurity and racial insularity” by “putting] pressure on ‘ill’ as simultaneously an attribution of her characterization and a hue that racializes her corruption of desire” and arguing that “[v]olition emerges as an index for the affective experience of racial formation” (n.p.). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. “Race in Shakespeare’s Tragedies,” in Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 77–92.
from abstract: “This chapter reveals the ways in which race is … central to the genre’s attention to social forces and philosophical concerns. Shakespeare’s tragedies reveal how the premodern imaginary considers race as both a mimetic, ephemeral enactment and proof of an essential, inherent difference. …depictions of race often move between fluid, malleable, and unstable expressions of identity, providing a lexicon for the epistemological crisis of tragedy’s formation of subjectivity. In the genre’s epistemological exploration of subjectivity as a publicly scripted experience and a fundamentally separate, and at times inaccessible, essence, Shakespeare’s tragedies engage the multilayered, contradictory template of racial impersonation. Thus, attention to regimes and categories of race animates some of the most fundamental issues of inclusion and exclusion that the English looked to tragedy to illuminate.”
Lerner, Ross. “Allegorization and Racialization in The Faerie Queene.” Spenser Studies, vol.
35, no. 1, 2021, pp. 107–32.
Abstract: “Ania Loomba has suggested that we attend to two techniques of racialized governance in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England: ‘the creation of internal hierarchies within a population” and the increasingly reified assumption of “correspondence between the ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ of human beings.’ This essay claims that The Faerie Queene produces a surprising resemblance between racialization and allegory as a literary form. Testing this hypothesis primarily in Book V’s scenes of racialized punishment, it explores how allegory produces internal hierarchies and a correspondence between the outside and inside of beings in the poem. At the same time, it suggests Spenser’s immanent critique of allegory as technique and mode might also be viewed as the poem’s own analysis of the intimacy between racialization and colonial violence, repeatedly revealing the failure of the production of difference and the instability of racialized hierarchy.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Lewis, Tamara E. "'Like Devils Out of Hell': Reassessing the African Presence in Early Modern England." Black Theology: An International Journal, vol. 14, no. 2, 2016, pp. 107-120.
Abstract: “Early modernists have traditionally argued that Black representations in English Renaissance art and literature did not reflect the historical presence of persons of color. In contrast, documentary research has uncovered Africans in England as early as 1500. From that time, the existence of a substantial African population was erased from contemporary histories in order to suppress knowledge of England's participation in the transatlantic slave trade. Separation of the Church of England from Rome had exacerbated political and economic conflict with Catholic nations, particularly Spain. Protecting the Protestant English state image became a primary concern. Despite national and theological differences, English monarchs and law courts appropriated Roman Catholic pronouncements on the relationship between Blackness and religion. This paper demonstrates the intersection of political and economic factors with theological discourse and emergent conceptions of race at a defining moment in English history.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Little, Arthur L., Jr. Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape and Sacrifice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. #PCRS
Little considers the relationship between representations of sexual violence and representations of race in Shakespeare’s plays in order to analyze how early modern English drama used race to perform England's nationalist and imperialist ventures.
— (ed). White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture and the Elite (Bloomsbury, 2023).
From the publisher: What part did Shakespeare play in the construction of a 'white people' and how has his work been enlisted to define and bolster a white cultural and racial identity?
Since the court of Queen Elizabeth I, through the early modern English theatre to the storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, white people have used Shakespeare to define their cultural and racial identity and authority. White People in Shakespeare unravels this complex cultural history to examine just how crucial Shakespeare's work was to the early modern development of whiteness as an embodied identity, as well as the institutional dissemination of a white Shakespeare in contemporary theatres, politics, classrooms and other key sites of culture.
Loomba, Ania and Jonathan Burton, eds. Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Race in Early Modern England is a collection of historical texts that illuminate early modern English understandings of race. The collection includes both early modern texts and earlier texts that were foundational to early modern English writers.
López-Peláez Casellas, Jesús. “Building an English (Early Modern) Identity: ‘Race’ and
Capitalism in Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, or, A Girl Worth Gold.” Revista
Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, vol. 54, no. 2007, p. 55-68.
https://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/14409?locale-attribute=en.
Abstract: “In the early modern period England develops a process of construction of national identity based on ‘racial’ and religious differences and the adoption of capitalism. This epistemological and material transition can be perceived in much of the drama of the period, which, like Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, functions as much within this process as in response to it. All these changes, and the resistances to it, can be best analyzed through the semiotic notion of Juri Lotman’s semiosphere.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Lutz, Michael. “Poisoned Sight: Race and the Material Phantasm in Othello.” Journal of
Narrative Theory, vol. 49, no. 3, 2019, pp. 296–322.
Lutz discusses Othello as an example in a tradition of blackface theatre that trains white audiences to have a paranoia about blackness – since it is presented via a white body and has to be imagined into existence. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
MacDonald, Joyce Green. “Black Ram, White Ewe: Shakespeare, Race, and Women.” A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Dympna Callaghan, 2nd ed., Wiley Blackwell, 2016, pp. 206–25.
From Abstract: “Including The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicusin the author's analysis reiterates race's multiple manifestations in Shakespeare, a broadness of conception which refutes a narrow modern location of race primarily in skin color and transcends differences in genre or artistic maturity. The chapter presents the author's process of reading for the simultaneous and mutually interpenetrating operations of race and gender in Othello by unraveling some of the social meanings assigned to and ideological uses made of women and family in the developing racial climate of the early modern period.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. Women and Race in Early Modern Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. #PCRS
MacDonald examines the racial identities of female characters in Renaissance and early modern texts (including dramatic literature) as well as those of the female playwrights and audience members of the time. She does so by comparing these texts to their classical precursors in order to consider the formations of racial and gender identities in early modern England.
Malcolmson, Cristina. Studies of skin color in the early Royal Society: Boyle, Cavendish, Swift. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.
Malcolmson’s is the book to give sustained attention to the role of skin color in the experiments and writings/observations of England’s Royal Society and shows the interrelationship of science, government, colonialism and the slave trade in making prominent ideas of race.
Mendoza, Kirsten N. “Navigating a Kiss in the Racialized Geopolitical Landscape of Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West.” Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, ACMRS Press, 2022, https://asu.pressbooks.pub/race-and-affect/.
Mendoza examines the role of affect in Heywood’s “twin[ning] an English nationalism with the representation of white femininity” inThe Fair Maid of the West and argues that the play “charges whiteness with affective value that was central to Bess’s success as an entrepreneur. In other words, Heywood’s play provides a particularly incisive example of how the accretion of emotional responses — from the overtly dramatic to the trivial and innocuous — orientates audiences toward whiteness as the prerogative of the English and as a coveted tool for mercantile, colonial, and cultural domination” (n.p.). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Momma, Haruko. "The Theater of Race and Its Supporting Actors: A Tale of Two Islands."
New Literary History, vol. 52 no. 3, 2021, p. 407-429. doi:10.1353/nlh.2021.0020.
Abstract: “This essay uses the "Race and Periodization" conference of 2019 as a point of departure to consider the role played by different types of words that contributed to the construction of racial thinking over the centuries. The words to be examined in the main sections include race and one of its synonyms (kin), a proper name (Aryan), and adjectives denoting colors (black and white in Old English). The concluding section circles back the word Anglo-Saxon to compare the trajectory of the semantic development of this word with those of race and Aryan in order to foreground some of the resemblances among these three. In order to place its investigation of race and other English words in a larger, global perspective, this essay begins each section with brief accounts of events that took place in two very different parts of the world: namely, England and Japan. While it is more common to consider the question of race in relation to the Western hemisphere, this essay encourages us to look in the other direction to recognize the global impact of racial thinking.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Moosa, Hassana. "White skin, white mask: constructing Whiteness in Thomas Kyd's The Tragedy of Solyman and Perseda." Renaissance Studies vol. 37 no. 5 (2023), p. 665-684. https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12890
This essay examines how White supremacy is dramatically constructed against the male, Muslim, Ottoman, a figure who, the essay argues, would have been performed as phenotypically white on the English stage. By examining the racialisation of the Ottoman Soliman in Thomas Kyd's late sixteenth-century play The Tragedy of Solyman and Perseda, this article illustrates how anxieties around the Muslim character's white sameness are negotiated by fashioning the Whiteness, or fairness, of the Greek, Christian Perseda as ‘natural’, while correspondingly framing Soliman's whiteness as ‘artificial’. It considers how Kyd renders Soliman's whiteness in this way by drawing on early modern English cosmetic language, customs, and debates. (@hassanamoosa)
—”Marking Muslims: The Prince of Morocco and the Racialization of Islam in
The Merchant of Venice.” in Global Shakespeare and Social Justice. eds. Chris
Thurman and Sandra Young (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 120-141.
The essay argues that Islam is racialised through the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, and points to how Muslim identity is encoded in cultural markers and signs projected onto the body. (Link to the presentation of this paper at RaceB4Race Genealogies Toronto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5MUJYEBxk0) (@hassanamoosa)
Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. #PCRS
Examining the importance of African women’s labor in English colonies, historian Jennifer Morgan argues for the importance of English notions of gender and reproduction in the development of racial ideologies and racial slavery in the seventeenth century English Atlantic world. Of particular note is the widely cited and reprinted first chapter, "‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology.”
Ndiaye, Noémie. “Aaron’s Roots: Spaniards, Englishmen, and Blackamoors in Titus Andronicus,” Early Theatre 19: 2 (2016).
Ndiaye focuses on the play’s genealogy and various allusions to the black legend to recover the long-neglected Spanish dimension of Gothic identity in Titus Andronicus and reconsider the racial discourse of the play in the light of this information. She argues that within an analogical setup, the play thinks through the topical question of the black African presence in 1590s England on English terms — outside of the Iberian conceptual frameworks with which black Africans had long been associated.
----. “‘Come Aloft, Jack-Little-Ape’: Race and Dance in The Spanish Gypsie.” English Literary Renaissance 51.1 (2021). 121-151
Ndiaye posits that, on the early modern stage, dance was a powerful communicative modality which performed racializing work. Focusing on The Spanish Gypsie (1623), she argues that Middleton, Rowley, Ford, and Dekker’s play innovatively deployed around Gypsy characters an animalizing choreographic discourse called “antics.” That discourse, given the early modern understanding and uses of dance, had the ability to downgrade its dancers in the Great Chain of being by kinetic means long before the development in the Enlightenment of the racist taxonomic systems with which we usually associate such downgradings. Ultimately, the essay brings to light the relational logic of early modern theatrical racecraft by tracing the popular extension of that new animalizing choreographic device to another ethnic group in the repertory of The Queen of Bohemia’s Men from 1623 to 1642: Blackamoors —who were similarly entangled in the processes of exclusion from ownership and self-ownership at play in the rhetoric of animalization, both on stage and off stage.
-----. “Shakespeare, Race, and Globalization: Titus Andronicus,” in Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 158–74.
Ndiaye unpacks the strategic role of race in Titus Andronicus and brings to light the play’s earnest representation of racism’s entanglement in the demands of the global capitalist project born in Shakespeare’s time. Titus Andronicus dreams of London as a cosmopolitan capital with imperial aspirations in a proto-colonial world-economy. In the possible futures that the play dreams up for England, prescribing the most profitable forms of inter-cultural trafficking is a priority. The smart device used for establishing such prescriptions is called race. The racial regime ushered by early modern globalization, triggered by colonization, and forged in the furnace of early capitalism, was predicated not upon the elimination of racialized others, but on their strategic and contingent inclusion at inferior ranks in a hierarchical multicultural society. Titus Andronicus dramatizes the push and pull between the exclusion and inclusion of racialized Others necessary to the growth of early modern world-economies.
Neill, Michael. Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Neill considers the relationship between early modern drama and a few different aspects of English identity formation. The collection includes important essays on the bed in Othello, England’s linguistic nationalism, and a reconsideration of race in Othello after Bartels’ WMQ essay.
Oldenburg, Scott. “The Riddle of Blackness in England’s National Family Romance.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 1.1 (Spring/Summer 2001), 46-62.
Oldenburg first compares two early modern theories of the origins of blackness and concludes that both “inscribe blackness into a narrative of family relations” (50). He then considers this narrative and its racial implications in the context of the formation of an English national identity (and discusses Peele’s Battle of Alcazar).
O’Rourke, James L. “Racism and Homophobia in The Merchant of Venice.” ELH, vol. 70, no. 2, 2003, pp. 375–97.
O’Rourke “argue[s] … that a close reading of the play within the micropolitics of its immediate historical moment suggests that The Merchant is in fact an antiracist response to the hanging of Rodrigo Lopez in 1594. The stability of the Jewish/Christian opposition in the play… is unsettled by the repeated juxtaposition of inconsistencies, contradictions, and hypocrisies in the Tudor stereotyping of Jews and Italians….” (pp. 375-76). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Onyeka. Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England Their Presence Status and Origins. London: Narrative Eye, 2013.
Onyeka makes his case that Africans in Tudor England were not slaves. His book contains many carefully detailed references, supported by copious footnotes and a prodigious number of primary sources.The book is however to my mind let down through the way in which it handles images, specifically the few genuine black African English Tudor images e.g. cover is a German mythical black presence. Nevertheless the text makes an outstanding contribution to the scholarship of black Africans in Tudor Times. With the reservation on how the book manages images, I fully recommend this work as an account of blacks in the period. (Complete review http://bit.ly/1iyiT6x) @michael1952
-----. England’s Other Countrymen: Black Tudor Society. London; Zed Books, 2019. @mirandakaufmann
From publisher’s description: “Onyeka Nubia's original research shows that Tudors from many walks of life regularly interacted with people of African descent, both at home and abroad, revealing a genuine pragmatism towards race and acceptance of difference. Nubia also rejects the influence of the 'Curse of Ham' myth on Tudor thinking, persuasively arguing that many of the ideas associated with modern racism are in fact relatively recent developments.” (description added by Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Poitevin, Kimberly Woosley. “‘Counterfeit Colour’: Making up Race in Elizabeth Cary’s ‘The Tragedy of Mariam.’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 24, no. 1, 2005, pp. 13–34.
Poitevin examines The Tragedy of Mariam and considers “the ways early modem women ascribed moral and racial meanings to each other's bodies and to the ways they may have self-consciously manipulated their own bodily appearances to intervene in and help produce the meanings that others ascribed to them,” suggesting “the possibility that early modem women were makers as well as bearers of racial meaning” (15). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Robinson, Benedict S. “‘Swarth’ Phantastes: Race, Body and Soul in The Faerie Queene.”
Spenser Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021, pp. 133–51.
Focusing on the racialized description of Phantastes as “swarth,” Robinson examines how race and allegory relate in The Faerie Queene and argues that Spenser raises ontological questions about race and its relationship to the body and soul. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Sachdev, Rachana. “Sycorax in Algiers: Cultural Politics and Gynecology in Early Modern
England.” A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Dympna Callaghan, 2nd
ed., Wiley Blackwell, 2016, pp. 226–43.
Abstract: “This chapter provides a map for a different reading of Sycorax and The Tempest based on the early modern English discovery of Africa and of its cultural traditions by the medical and cultural authorities. It examines the ways in which at least one of the cultural traditions of Northern Africa, female circumcision, could be appropriated by the English medical and cultural texts to establish gender and national boundaries within European nations. The gaze outward to the body parts and cultural habits of women outside England is seen to modify the ways in which the English medical authorities understood the English female body. The medical experts felt compelled not only to use this new knowledge about female circumcision to control gender boundaries, but also to distinguish between English and non-English female bodies. Hence, cultural knowledge of other nations provided the impetus for the medical creation of a specifically English female body.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Sale, Carolyn. “Black Aeneas: Race, English Literary History, and the ‘Barbarous’ Poetics of Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 1, Spring 2011, pp. 25-52,143.
Asserting that that Titus Andronicus “confutes the claim that marks inscribed in flesh are the zero degree of literary history” and “inserts itself into literary history on its own terms and asks us to reconsider how we situate Shakespeare's dramatic corpus within that history,” Sale argues that “[t]o read Aaron and the actor representing him as I have done here is to read the text of the play as defining Shakespeare's theater, at the outset of his career of writing for the stage, as an arena in which one may hear blank verse … but one in which, more importantly, one may engage with the human body as signifying material that may ‘possess the sight of the soul’ in a way that no ‘woordish description’ can do” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Sanchez, Melissa. “Was Sexuality Racialized for Shakespeare?: Antony and Cleopatra,” in Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 123–38.
From abstract: “This essay argues that Antony and Cleopatra questions both a binary vision of racialized sexuality and the colonial and imperial projects that such a binary legitimizes. Along with the seemingly whitest of men, Caesar, and the darkest of women, Cleopatra, this play includes a range of racialized sexual types. … These racialized sexual types converge in surprising ways in Antony and Cleopatra, and this convergence undermines any clear opposition between Roman virtus and its seductive and corrupting others. It also illuminates the contradictions and fissures within Roman ideals of self-mastery and self-determination that continue to shape modern ideals of respectability and responsibility.”
Segal, Janna. “‘And Browner than Her Brother’: ‘Misprized’ Celia’s Racial Identity and
Transversality in As You Like It.” Shakespeare, vol. 4, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–21.
From abstract: “This essay … utilizes Bryan Reynolds's transversal theory and historiography of early modern English criminal culture to assess the subversive potential of Celia's dissident court behaviour and of her engagement in a popular criminal practice Reynolds refers to as “becoming gypsy”. This reading of Celia in and out of her transversally empowered, “‘browner’” (4.3.89) Aliena identity will consider how Celia/Aliena, unlike Rosalind/Ganymede, functions to transgress then dominant and intersecting conceptualizations of race, social class, nationality, gender, and sexuality circulating off stage and colouring the landscape of Arden.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Shaw, Justin. "'Rub Him About the Temples': Othello, Disability, and the Failures of Care,"
Early Theatre 22.2 (December 2019), forthcoming.
Focusing on how race and disability expose the facades of friendship, Shaw explores the ethical differences in models of care in Othello. The article examines the networks of care surrounding the character of Othello and demonstrates how, by revealing the many pretensions and failures of relationship, the play develops a theory and praxis for ethical caring that attends to the complexity of a black and disabled character.
Smith, Ian.“Othello’s Black Handkerchief.” Shakespeare Quarterly 64.1 (2013): 1-25.
This essay interrogates the critical assumption that the handkerchief in Othello is white and associated in many ways with Desdemona’s body. Smith argues that the text associates the handkerchief more closely with Othello’s lineage than with Desdemona. The line, “It was dyed in mummy” (see 3.4.72), materially connects it with mummy, or the fluid found in mummified bodies, which would have been black. Smith states, “This arresting color is a graphic reminder of the handkerchief’s function as a visible metonym for Othello, the portable object that Desdemona carries around as a constant reminder of her black African love” (Smith 20). #PCRS @ProfKFH
-----. Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.
In Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance, Smith explores the relationship between language and racial identity formation in English Renaissance literature. #PCRS @ProfKFH
-----. “We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2016): 104–24. https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2016.0000.
“This essay probes our scholarly commitment to Shakespeare at a time when contemporary racial politics continues to test our resolve in mobilizing our scholarship in the cause of a just society. An intense public debate over the deaths of unarmed black persons has emerged at a time when the thesis of a post-racial, colorblind America had inserted itself into mainstream thinking as evidence of the growing sentiment to move beyond race and to erase its explicit and violent history. Among the most striking findings arising from the documentation of these killings is the split in the public reaction along distinctly racial lines. Othello’s dying speech raises related concerns insofar as he is anxiously aware of the possible outcome of having a white narrator tell his story. Such a narrator, the essay argues, is a prototype for the modern scholar in a majority white field like Shakespeare studies who must confront new data pertaining to white privilege and bias in the United States. Hazlitt and subsequent critics appear to have little difficulty affirming that “it is we who are Hamlet,” but the same has not been true of black Othello. By contrast, the essay’s appeal, “We are Othello,” is meant to disrupt the silence around whiteness in order to make visible and productively politicize the subject identities of critical practitioners in the field.” #PCRS @ProfKFH
-----. “White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage.” Renaissance Drama ns. 32 (2003): 33-67.
Smith’s article considers the representation of black characters onstage in early modern England, given that they could only be portrayed by white actors. He considers the role sight played in racial formulation in this context and the effects of this “visual transaction” (37)
Steffen, William. “Hewers of Wood, Drawers of Gall: The Wooden Economies of Race in
Titus Andronicus and Lust’s Dominion.” Renaissance Drama, vol. 48, no. 2, 2020,
pp. 157–81.
From abstract: “By focusing on the imported wooden ingredients that constituted the black skin worn by the White actors who played Aaron and Eleazar--Moors who have been both reduced by critics to racist representations of dark-hearted villains and, at the same time, admired for their rhetoric and intelligence—[Steffen] investigates how the materials of the stage may have mediated early modern representations and interpretations of emergent racial categories.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Steggle, Matthew. "Othello, the Moor of London: Shakespeare's Black Britons" in Robert C. Evans, ed., Othello: A Critical Reader (London: Arden, 2015), 103-124. Reads Shakespeare's play against the new work of Habib, Kaufmann, and others on early black Britons. (@matthewsteggle)
Stevens, Andrea. Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama. Oxford University Press, 2013.
From abstract: “This book challenges the narrative of Shakespeare's ‘bare’ stage by looking at the ‘ground zero’ of early modern theatrical representation: the painted body of the actor. Organised as a series of studies and considering the impact of the materiality of stage properties on live performance, the four chapters of the book examine goldface and divinity in York's Corpus Christi play; bloodiness in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, including the unexpected use of blood as a disguise device; blackface performance within seventeenth-century court masques and in popular plays performed at the public playhouses; and finally whiteface, death, and stoniness in two King's Men plays of 1611. … Addressing current debates about the relationship between pre- and early modern subjectivity and embodiment, this book challenges the persistent notion that the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries was built predominantly around a new, ‘modern’ language of interiority.”
----. “Mastering Masques of Blackness: Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, The Windsor Text of
The Gypsies Metamorphosed, and Brome’s The English Moor.” English Literary
Renaissance, vol. 39, no. 2, Mar. 2009, pp. 396–426.
From abstract: “… discusses the impact of blackface paint upon three early modern performances of racial change or racial masquerade…. Each production is shaped by the medium's often unruly materiality. When used as a device for disguise, blackface carries with it the possibility of aborted transformations, of misrecognition, of theatrical unpredictability—and, given early modern conceptions of the body, of worrisome physiological change.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Swarbrick, Steven. “On Eating, the Animal That Therefore I Am: Race and Animal Rites in Titus Andronicus.” The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals, edited by Karen Raber and Holly Dugan, Routledge, 2020.
From abstract: “This chapter brings together Jacques Derrida’s philosophical reflections on the human-animal divide … with recent work in posthumanism and critical race theory to investigate tropes of eating in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Throughout Shakespeare’s play, ‘eating’ is connected to figures of mourning, burial, racial otherness, the animal, and the earth as tomb. Although these figures generally work to divide human/animal and racial norm/other, ‘eating well,’ as defined by Derrida and imagined by Shakespeare, also works to unsettle human definition. It does so not by circumventing the masticatory violence of eating but by tracing that violence back to figures of the earth, where bodies, species, and physical differences intersect.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Tavares, Elizabeth E. “A Race to the Roof: Cosmetics and Contemporary Histories of the Elizabethan Playhouse, 1592–1596.” Shakespeare Bulletin 34, 2 (2016): 193–217.
Discusses brownface and the performance of early modern drama, with some reference to medieval traditions.
Teramura, Misha. “Black Comedy: Shakespeare, Terence, and Titus Andronicus.” ELH, vol.
85, no. 4, 2018, pp. 877–908.
“In the first part, [Teramura] outline[s] the accessibility of Terence's biography in sixteenth-century editions and reconstruct how his African background would have been understood by early modern English readers, including those who struggled to reconcile it with their assumptions about classical literature. In the second part, [Teramura] argue[s] that Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus … registers this tension and responds to it” (p. 878). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Thompson, Ayanna. Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Thompson uses performance theory to analyze Restoration drama in terms of the relationship between torture and race. She also places this analysis in conversation with racial identity formation post-Enlightenment.
-----. “Did the Concept of Race Exist for Shakespeare and His Contemporaries?: An Introduction,” in Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 1–16.
Thompson’s introductory chapter to The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race traces the academic history of race and/in early modern culture from an idea seen as an anachronistic absurdity a few decades ago to an important and productive point of study in contemporary Shakespeare scholarship and several of its subfields.
Timbers, Frances. “The Damned Fraternitie”: Constructing Gypsy Identity in Early Modern
England, 1500-1700, 2016.
Timbers examines the historical evidence on the history and origins of Roma people in England and explores how they were defined in the early modern period. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Turner, Timothy A.. "Making the Moor: Torture, Sleep Deprivation, and Race in Othello".
Forming Sleep: Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance, edited by
Nancy L. Simpson-Younger and Margaret Simon, Penn State U P, 2021, pp. 89-108.
Turner argues that the characters who exact sleep deprivation on others in The Taming of the Shrew and Othello exercise biopower in doing so and that in Othello, specifically, Iago uses it to enforce racial hierarchy. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Vaughan, Virginia Mason. Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Like Callaghan’s book and Smith’s article, Vaughan’s book considers dramatic literature in performance and focuses on how black characters were portrayed. Vaughan details the theatrical techniques that white performers in early modern England used to perform blackness and examines their effect on racial identity formation and perception.
----- and Alden T. Vaughan. “The Tempest and Early Modern Conceptions of Race,” in Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 139–57.
Vaughan and Vaughan contextualize Prospero and Miranda’s subjugation of, and disdain for, Caliban by explaining contemporary European attitudes about people from Africa and the Americas.
Vitkus, Daniel. “Othello, Islam, and the Noble Moor: Spiritual Identity and the Performance of
Blackness on the Early Modern Stage.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare
and Religion, edited by Hannibal Hamlin, Cambridge U P, 2019, pp. 218–233.
Vitkus discusses race and spiritual identity in Othello. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Weissbourd, Emily. “‘Those in their possession’: Race, Slavery, and Queen Elizabeth’s ‘Edicts of Expulsion’ Huntington Library Quarterly 78 (2015), 1-19.
Weissbourd analyzes three now-notorious documents from the turn of the seventeenth century that authorize the removal of “negars and blackamoors” from England. Although they are frequently described as edicts of expulsion, Weissbourd argues that the documents implicate Elizabeth’s Privy Council in a nascent slave trade.
Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Wheeler examines how skin color came to signify racial difference as part of her larger examination of how the English interpreted visual differences among people. She argues that “Christianity, civility, and rank were more explicitly important to Britons’ assessment of themselves and other people” than physical attributes that more commonly signify racial difference today (7, emphasis Wheeler’s).
Wood, Jennifer Linhart. Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel: Uncanny Vibrations in
the English Archive. In the “New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800” Series, edited by Mihoko
Suzuki, Ann Rosalind Jones, and Jyotsna Singh (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
From Abstract: Sounds are a vital dimension of transcultural encounters in the early modern period.
Using the concept of the soundwave as a vibratory, uncanny, and transformative force, Jennifer
Linhart Wood examines how sounds of foreign otherness are experienced and interpreted in
cross-cultural interactions around the globe. Many of these same sounds are staged in the sonic
laboratory of the English theater: rattles were shaken at Whitehall Palace and in Brazil; bells jingled in an English masque and in the New World; the Dallam organ resounded at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul and at King’s College, Cambridge; and the drum thundered across India and throughout London theaters. This book offers a new way to conceptualize intercultural contact by arguing that sounds of otherness enmesh bodies and objects in assemblages formed by sonic events, calibrating foreign otherness with the familiar self on the same frequency of vibration.
“Wood provides a model for how the field might move forward by bringing Indigenous Studies and
Premodern Critical Race Studies into fruitful dialogue.” (MRDS, Medieval and Renaissance Drama
Society, 2021).
Young, Sandra. "Imagining Alterity and Belonging on the English Stage in an Age of
Expansion: A Reading of Othello." Shakespeare in Southern Africa, vol. 23, 2011, pp.
21-29, 94.
From abstract: “The period's preoccupation with an emergent English nationalism precedes the appearance of the "Moor of Venice" before the newly crowned James. It is this anxiety, manifest in the period's cultural production, which Young takes as the setting for an investigation into alterity and belonging in "Othello." The drama of Othello -- the Moor of Venice -- bespeaks precisely the instability of early modern cultural identifications and hints at the anxiety that attends cultural formation in an expanded, competitive and changing global context.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
2. Racial formation in Early Modern Europe and Beyond
Bartels, Emily. Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Bartels explores representations of the Moor on the early modern English stage from 1588-1604. She argues that these constantly shifting representations positioned the Moor as "the intersection of European and non-European cultures" (5).
Bartlett, Robert. “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001), 39-56.
Bartlett examines racial and ethnic terms in medieval texts in order to understand racial formation in the Middle Ages. He argues that despite the etymological link between these terms and genealogical ideas, these texts more often emphasized the role of culture and society in identity formation.
Belo, André. “Language as a Second Skin: The Representation of Black Africans in
Portuguese Theatre (Fifteenth to Early-Seventeenth Century).” Renaissance and
Reformation, vol. 36, no. 1, 1, Aug. 2013, pp. 3–29.
https://doi.org/10.33137/rr.v36i1.20018.
Belo examines how cultural stereotypes and language informed the construction of black African characters in early modern Portuguese drama. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Boyarin, Jonathan. The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Boyarin argues, first, that Christian Europeans used religious difference to define themselves through contrast with others long before they knew about the Americas, second, that colonialism was shaped by this identity construction, and, third, that the colonial encounter revealed points of weakness in that construct.
Chakravarty, Urvashi. “Race, Natality, and the Biopolitics of Early Modern Political
Theology.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, 2018, pp.
140–66.
From abstract: “This essay explores the nexus of race and natality in three of Shakespeare's plays: Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello. …. Following a primarily biopolitical framework, the essay demonstrates in its readings of these plays that even as the eugenic management of spectacular race comprises a critical concern, it also articulates a crucial prehistory of slavery. This essay thus seeks to affirm the importance of situating race at the center of readings of early modern political theology. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Deroux, Margaux. “The Blackness Within: Early Modern Color-Concept, Physiology and
Aaron the Moor in Shakespeare's ‘Titus Andronicus.’” Mediterranean Studies, vol.
19, 2010, pp. 86–101.
Deroux argues that “[t]he character of Aaron the Moor functions to reveal notions of blackness held during the Early Modern period (notions rooted in the intersection between color concept, physiology, and race relations), demonstrating the psychological framework where-in blackness becomes associated with all that must be expelled, contained, or dominated; however, when subjected to scrutiny Aaron also serves to reveal a measure of instability and disjuncture present in such a framework” (p. 86). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Earle, T. F. and K. J. P. Lowe, eds. Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
The essays in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe examine representations of Africans across Spain, Portugal, Italy, England, France, and Germany during the Renaissance.
Epstein, Steven A. Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Epstein analyzes the rhetoric around slavery in Italy through history in order to understand racial identity formation in Italy (as well as other aspects of Italian cultural thought).
Espinosa, Ruben and David Ruiter, eds. Shakespeare and Immigration. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014.
The essays in Shakespeare and Immigration examine the role of immigrants in Shakespeare’s plays. Those by Bernadette Andrea, Imtiaz Habib, and Peter Erickson seem
most relevant to this seminar.
Fuchs, Barbara. Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
In Passing for Spain, Fuchs explores different kinds of identity formation in Spain in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, focusing on the role of disguise and boundary-crossing in these processes.
Gallucci, Mary. "Mistaken Identities?: Alessandro De' Medici and the Question of ‘Race’." Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, 2015, pp. 40-81,150.
From abstract: “The history of Alessandro de' Medici is inseparable from claims made for liberal society against tyranny, from evolving concepts of race, and from ideas of European cultural superiority over Africa. This essay studies images, both written and visual, of Alessandro de' Medici with a focus on race and on the changing significance of traits now associated with ideologies of ethnicity and nationhood.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Green-Mercado, Mayte. “Ethnic Groups in Renaissance Spain.” A Companion to the
Spanish Renaissance, ed. Hilaire Kallendorf. Brill, Oct. 2018, pp. 121–40.
From abstract: “In the Early Modern period, the reconfiguration of communal boundaries was concomitant with the transformation of political and legal categories regarding membership. Thus, new vocabularies of ethno-religious identification emerged as a result of processes of expulsion, forced conversion, and attempts at assimilation and homogenization …. …this chapter approaches the subject of ethnic groups in Renaissance Spain by analyzing some of these newly emerging vocabularies of inclusion and exclusion as they were defined, debated, negotiated, and contested in Early Modern Iberia.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Grogan, Jane. "'Fatall Turkes' and the Limits of Epic: King James's Lepanto (1591)." Scottish
Literary Review, vol. 13, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1-15.
From abstract: “... even before the 1603 edition's defensive preface, the paradoxes and challenges of James's task--to find a markedly Scottish voice, style, and attitude in which to narrate this Catholic victory over what was commonly presented as the encroaching force of Islam--find striking expression in the poem's complex and overdetermined form. This essay explores James's literary and political choices in the poem as they seek articulation through the genre of Christian epic, focussing less on the well-studied European sectarian context but instead on James's representation of the Muslim Ottomans.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
González, José Manuel, ed. Spanish Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006.
The essays in Spanish Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries provide analyses of Renaissance and early modern drama in the context of Spain. The essays by Clara Calvo and Ana María Manzanas seem to be of particular relevance for this seminar.
Hall, Meghan E. “New World Encounters and the Racial Limits of Friendship in Early Quaker Life Writing.” Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, ACMRS Press, 2022, https://asu.pressbooks.pub/race-and-affect/.
Hall examines the role of white femininity in racial formation through the writings of Alice Curwen and Quaker women in the Americas more broadly, showing how these women’s expressions of disorientation in their experiences in the New World contributed to the formation of the boundaries between belonging and otherness. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Holmes, Megan. “‘How a Woman with a Strong Devotion to the Virgin Mary Gave Birth to a Very Black Child’: Imagining ‘Blackness’ in Renaissance Florence.” Fremde in der Stadt: Ordnungen, Repräsentationen und Praktiken. Ed. Gerhard Wolf, Peter Bell, and Dirk Suckow. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010. 333-351.
Holmes “make[s] an argument for the reciprocal influence and agency between this religious discourse about the >blackness< of characters in a miracle story and the historical incidence of slaves, particularly, sub-Saharan Africans, in the city of Florence” (p. 333).
Jones, Nicholas R. Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in
Early Modern Spain. Penn State U P, 2019.
From publisher’s description: “... Jones analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s…. Jones makes a strong case for revising the belief, long held by literary critics and linguists, that white appropriations and representations of habla de negros language are “racist buffoonery” or stereotype. Instead, Jones shows black characters who laugh, sing, and shout, ultimately combating the violent desire of white supremacy. By placing early modern Iberia in conversation with discourses on African diaspora studies, Jones showcases how black Africans and their descendants who built communities in early modern Spain were rendered legible in performative literary texts.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Kaufmann, Miranda. ‘Courts, Blacks at Early Modern European Aristocratic’ Encyclopedia of Blacks in European History and Culture. Ed. Eric Martone. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008 (Vol. I, pp. 163-166)
A brief summary of evidence for Africans working in royal and aristocratic households. Available online at: http://www.mirandakaufmann.com/courts.html
Leskinen, Saara. “Two French Views of Monstrous Peoples in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 31, no. 2, 2, Jan. 2008, pp. 29–44.
https://doi.org/10.33137/rr.v31i2.9182.
Leskinen “examine[s] the reasons why two French vernacular writers of the sixteenth century … denied that there were monstrous peoples in sub-Saharan Africa” (p. 30). Both writers insisted on a distinction between physical deformity and the cultural differences they perceived as savagery. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Lowe, Kate. “‘Representing’ Africa: Ambassadors and Princes from Christian Africa to Renaissance Italy and Portugal, 1402-1608.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 17 (2007): 101-128.
Lowe examines the perceptions of Africa and Africans by Portuguese and Italian societies during the Renaissance by examining diplomatic meetings between Europeans and representatives from different African countries (especially Ethiopia and the Congo).
------. “Black Africans’ Religious and Cultural Assimilation to, and Appropriation Catholicism in Italy, 1470-1520.” Renaissance and Reformation 31.2 (2008): 67-86.
In this essay, Lowe examines the experiences of black Africans in Italy during the Renaissance in terms of their racial and religious identities in the context of their conversion to Catholicism.
Malcolmson, Cristina, and Sujata Iyengar, eds.,Special Cluster on Race and Skin Marking in the Early Modern Period, JEMCS 18.1.
Includes: Intro (Iyengar and Malcolmson, “Spots, Stripes, Stipples, Freckles, Marks, and Stains: Variations in Skin Pigmentation and the Emergence of Race in the Early Modern Period”); Craig Koslowsky, “Superficial Blackness?: Johann Nicolas Pechlin's De Habitu et Colore Aethiopum Qui Vulgo Nigritae (1677)”; Malcolmson, “"The Fairest Lady": Gender and Race in William Byrd's "Account of a Negro-Boy that is dappel'd in several Places of his Body with White Spots" (1697),”; Rana Hogarth, “To "excite the curiosity, and gratify the beholder": Displaying Dappled Skin and Crafting Racial Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic.”
From the intro: “The essays in our collection examine, and to differing degrees contrast, the ways in which parti-colored or freckled individuals were used in medical texts to shore up pre-existing and emergent hierarchies of dark and light skin (as Hogarth suggests) or to undermine them (as Koslofsky and Malcolmson imply).” (SI, on behalf of the late Tina Malcolmson)
Moore, Barrington, Jr. “Ethnic and Religious Hostilities in Early Modern Port Cities.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 14.4 (Summer 2001): 687-727.
Moore looks at examples of conflicts in early modern port cities (including Amsterdam, Genoa, Constantinople, and others) in order to examine how trade affected the ways early modern cultures interacted with those they perceived as outsiders.
Mourão, Manuela. “Whitewash: Nationhood, Empire and the Formation of Portuguese Racial Identity.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11.1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 90-124.
Mourão examines the formation of Portuguese racial identity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries based on Portugal’s interactions with other early modern cultures. She also puts this period in conversation with racial identity in Portugal today.
Ndiaye, Noémie. Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).
Abstract: Scripts of Blackness shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism. In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques—black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)—in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could/would ultimately live in their midst. Those scripts were often gendered and hinged on notions of demonization, exclusion, exploitation, animalization, commodification, sexualization, consensual enslavement, misogynoir, infantilization, and evocative association with other racialized minorities. Scripts of Blackness attempts to grasp the stories that Western Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effects of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects.
—-. “‘Everyone Breeds in His Own Image’: Staging the Aethiopica across the Channel,” Renaissance Drama 44: 2 (2016).
Ndiaye argues that stage adaptations of Heliodorus’s The Aethiopian Story were a major site for the reconfiguration of blackness as a racial paradigm in early modern France, and she examines the influence of that French theatrical discourse over English Caroline drama. She shows that several French playwrights across the Channel rework the Aethiopica in ways that question the chromatic fluidity of human skin in the Greek novel and manifest the pull of heredity in the context of an incipient early modern racialization of blackness. Giving credit to Henrietta Maria as transnational cultural agent, Ndiaye traces the influence of the French Heliodoric trend onto English theatrical culture and argueS that the Aethiopica became on stage a vehicle for thinking through the urgent issues of blackness and race.
----. “The African Ambassadors’ Travels: Playing Black in Late Seventeenth Century France and Spain.” In Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre, edited by M.A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek, 73-85. Manchester University Press, 2020.
Ndiaye examines the emergence and significance of the theatergram of the African Ambassador in 1660s French theatre, in plays like Le Mort Vivant, by Edmé Boursault (1662), L’Ambassadeur d’Affrique, by Du Perche (1666), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Molière (1670), and Le Mariage de la reine de Monomotapa by Bel-Isle (1682). Reading this theatergram in conversation with contemporary policies in the French Caribbean colonies, she argues that African ambassadors on stage contributed to the development and dissemination of a solidifying racial discourse in late seventeenth century France. Ultimately, this essay promotes the integration of transnational foci and comparative methods into early modern race studies.
----. “Off the Record: Contrapuntal Theatre History.” In Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, Tracy C. Davis and Peter Marx, eds., 229-248. New York: Routledge, 2020.
Ndiaye hypothesizes the existence of a tradition of timbral impersonation of blackness across early-modern European performance culture, and she explores the methodological difficulties and ethical pressures faced by historiographic attempts at reclaiming that acousmatic facet of the early-modern culture of racialization in our particular day and age. She argues that theatre historians must, consciously and transparently, position themselves on the spectrum of openness to methodologies of historical reclamation induced by the revisionist turn. She proposes a new model of historiographic practice called “recording.” That model, which takes seriously the conceptually fertile polysemy of the word “record” in the early-modern period, aims at enabling theatre and performance historians to navigate those difficulties without abdicating their projects of reclamation. Ultimately, she illustrates the purchase of that historiographic model by using it as a lens to re-read Barbary’s song in Othello.
—-. “Rewriting the Grand Siècle: Blackface in Early Modern France and the Historiography of Race.” Literature Compass 18.10 (2021). e12603. 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12603 This essay critiques the French cultural aversion to racial thinking which has resulted in the absence of race as a theme and analytic in French historiographic practices, especially in relation to the ancien régime. This essay argues that focusing on 17th century theater and performance culture, especially on baroque ballets and their oblique representations of Blackness and slavery through black- face, reveals a long national history of racism against Black people. This essay is a call to rewrite as an age of race‐ making a period often construed as a cultural and literary golden age that still plays a central role in definitions of French heritage and identity today.
Ng, Su Fang. "Making Race in the Early Modern East Indies." New Literary History, vol. 52 no.
3, 2021, p. 509-533. doi:10.1353/nlh.2021.0024.
From abstract: “In the early modern East Indies new categories for race appeared, such as white Bengalis and Black Portuguese. European arrival placed a new emphasis on epidermal race to reconfigure older ethnic identifications. This essay examines three ways in which early modern race which was made at the faultlines of boundary shifts: ancient physiognomy inherited from the Arabs and its interaction with European notions of epidermal race centered on the Black/white binary; an intensifying emphasis on ethnic categories, both new and old, such as mestiço and "Chinese," which acquired additional layers of meaning; and, finally the emergence of "Malay" as a capacious category.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Nocentelli, Carmen. Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern
Identity. U of Pennsylvania P, 2013.
Nocentelli argues that encounters with Asia informed how early modern Europeans conceived of their own sexual and racial identities. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Ortega-del-Cerro, Pablo, and Juan Hernández-Franco. “Debates on the Nature of Blood and the Forging of Social Models in Early Modern Spain (1630s).” Journal of Early Modern History, vol. 1, no. aop, Mar. 2022, pp. 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10028.
From abstract: “In this article, we study different concepts of blood and seek to understand their symbolic value. …. We focus on three Castilian treatises that deal with the issue of purity-of-blood, written … in the 1630s – a decade of resurgent Anti-Judaism and racist attitudes in Castile. They represent different currents of opinion about purity-of-blood statutes – essentially, those wishing to abolish, reform, and preserve this system of social segregation – and they allow us to examine the characterization of blood traits, the construction of social principles, and the forging of ideal societies.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Redworth, Glyn. “Mythology with Attitude? A Black Christian’s Defence of Negritude in Early
Modern Europe.” Social History, vol. 28, no. 1, Jan. 2003, pp. 49–66.
From abstract: “This article examines what may be the earliest post-classical letter from a European person of colour. …it deals with an episode of racial abuse before providing a defence of blackness. This article stresses the rarity of any text dealing with early modern racialism. … this text indicates that racialism based on colour pre-dates the industrialized slave-trade.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Sanchez, Melissa E. "Transdevotion: Race, Gender, and Christian Universalism." Journal for
Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 19, no. 4, 2019, pp. 94-115,308.
From abstract: “This essay examines biblical and early modern discourses of Christian universalism promising the incorporation of racialized and gender-nonconforming believers. … The article emphatically takes the eunuch not as an ancestor of the modern nonbinary or transgender person, but rather as a historically and geographically specific instance of the violent erasure that occurs when racialized and gender-nonconforming persons are treated as figures of the particularity that Christian universalism (or neoliberal inclusivity) transcends. The valorization of the fair male body is especially pronounced in early modern devotional lyrics, which draw upon biblical depictions of transdevotion-the ecstatic transcendence of the black and gendernonconforming body to achieve a white and masculine soul-to conceptualize the experiences of faith, penitence, and salvation. This kind of poetry reveals the imbrications of racial and gender nonconformity that provide the parameters of universalist discourses past and present.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Shahani, Gitanjali G. Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early
Modern Literature. Cornell U P, 2020.
Shahani explores how early modern European discourses of race were informed by the introduction of foods from other parts of the world. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Smith, Justin E. H.. Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern
Philosophy. Princeton U P, 2017;2015;.
Smith traces the history of race in early modern European philosophy, finding that efforts to taxonomize played a major role in how race was constructed by thinkers. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Spiller, Elizabeth. Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Spiller explores the connections between Renaissance ideas about race and those about reading in order to trace the influence of print culture on racial formation across Europe.
Rönnbäck, Klas. "The Idle and the Industrious - European Ideas about the African Work
Ethic in Precolonial West Africa." History in Africa, vol. 41, 2014, pp. 117-145.
From abstract: “This paper studies the stereotype of the ‘lazy African’ in European travel accounts from precolonial West Africa. … It is argued in the paper that the stereotype has existed for much longer than suggested in previous literature in the field. Previous studies have also made over-simplified statements about the stereotype, since it overlooks a most significant trend among European writers, who described not only idleness, but also industriousness, among the Africans they wrote about.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Wainwright, Anna. “‘Tied Up in Chains of Adamant’: Recovering Race in Tasso’s Armida
Before, and After, Acrasia.” Spenser Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021, pp. 181–212.
Abstract: “Spenser’s use of Italian sources in The Faerie Queene has been widely explored by scholars. But how does race work in those texts themselves? In this essay, I consider the Bower of Bliss and its literary antecedents—Spenser’s sources provide a rich opportunity to explore race and its interplay with gender and religion. My focus lies on the character of Acrasia’s foremother, the Muslim enchantress Armida, and the dramatic change to her fate between the two versions of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581) and the Gerusalemme conquistata (1593). I argue that a consideration of how Tasso violently excludes Armida from the second half of the Conquistata, which was published after Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, provides a new understanding of the particular racialization of Tasso’s enchantress. Across substantial national and religious boundaries, Spenser’s and Tasso’s choices demonstrate a common racial logic in play in 1590s Europe, one that allows neither Armida nor Acrasia to survive their poems.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Whitford, David. “A Calvinist Heritage to the ‘Curse of Ham’: Assessing the Accuracy of a
Claim about Racial Subordination.” Church History and Religious Culture, vol. 90, no.
1, 2010, pp. 25–45.
Abstract: “This article assesses the validity of the claim that Puritan theology was ‘preset for racism’ and that it played a preeminent role in establishing racial hatred in America. It does so by examining a number of Puritans beliefs regarding the most important theological justification for slavery, the socalled Curse of Ham.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Whitford, David Mark. The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and the
Justifications for Slavery. Ashgate, 2009.
Whitford discusses the emergence of Biblical justifications for slavery from the context of the Protestant Reformation. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
3. Early Modern Colonialism
Akhimie, Patricia. “Performance in the Periphery: Colonial Encounters and
Entertainments,” Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity. Eds. Suzanne Cusick and Emily Wilbourne. Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK, 65-82 @pakhimie #PCRS
When early modern English travelers relate their exchanges with the people they have met in far-flung places, they frequently include descriptions of music both familiar and strange, performed by both foreign visitors and indigenous peoples. However, the presence of music and its seemingly transparent meanings enables perilous miscommunications. Failures of musical interpretation or sudden alterations of meaning in musical exchanges proliferate in reports of English and European encounters in the New World. This essay argues that the English carried with them an epistemology of musical meaning predicated on the ways that music functioned in European entertainments, particularly those associated with English country estates.
----. “Travel, Drama, and Domesticity: Staging Huswifery in Fletcher and Massinger’s The
Sea Voyage,” in “Early Modern Travel Writing” eds. Dan Carey and Claire Jowitt, special issue Studies in Travel Writing 13.2 (June 2009): 153-66 @pakhimie
This essay re-evaluates John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's The Sea Voyage (1622) by investigating the often elided role of huswifery (women's domestic labour) in early modern English colonial discourse. First-hand accounts of travel and plantation conventionally present a homo-social world, in which the role of women is either deemphasised or occluded altogether. The potential for fiction to reimagine the conditions necessary for the long-term survival of European colonies overseas was realised in The Sea Voyage, a play which dramatises the crucial and equal role women play in the success of either country estate or plantation.
Andrea, Bernadette. The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.
Focusing on historical girls and women from the Islamic world in Scotland and England, this book examines “the displacement of gendered and racialized subalterns to British shores” in relation to the established Ottoman and Iberian empires and the emerging English one.
----. “‘Travelling Bodyes’: Native Women of the Northeast and Northwest Passage Ventures
and English Discourses of Empire.” Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies,
edited by Ania Loomba and Melissa E. Sanchez, Routledge, 2016.
Andrea challenges the archival renderings of abducted non-European women brought as gifts to Elizabeth I as passive non-subjects. Andrea discusses the difficulty and importance of making visible the gendered, racialized agential subjects whom we have too long assumed did not exist. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Bach, Rebecca Ann. Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World, 1580-1640. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
In Colonial Transformations, Bach analyzes early modern English and Gaelic texts in terms of how these texts frame England's colonial endeavors. In doing so, Bach explores the relationship between colonialism and racial formation in early modern England. In particular, Chapters 3 and 4 focus on different types of theatrical performances.
Beidler, Philip and Gary Taylor, eds. Writing Race Across the Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave, 2005.
The essays in Writing Race Across the Atlantic World explore the works of early modern writers from many different cultures on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in order to examine early modern constructions of race. Essays by Baker, Beidler, Braude, Fuchs, Hall, Kupperman, Roach, Royster, Sayre,
Bennett, Herman L. Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.
Bennett explores the many identities of Africans in colonial Mexico as influenced by different aspects of colonial Mexican society, such as slavery and the Catholic Church.
Bohrer, Ashley J. “Just Wars of Accumulation: The Salamanca School, Race and Colonial
Capitalism.” Race & Class, vol. 59, no. 3, Jan. 2018, pp. 20–37,
Abstract: “This paper explores the links between international law, race and colonial capitalism through the Spanish and Portuguese Conquests of the Americas. Turning to the early modern philosophers of the School of Salamanca, Bohrer argues that economic theories of emergent capitalism are deeply intertwined with the racial theories of colonial conquest. Moreover, through a close reading of these texts, and in particular of the texts of Francisco de Vitoria, this paper argues that the conceptions of international trade, commerce and travel at the heart of liberal notions of international law are themselves suffused with the logics of racism, colonisation, and capitalist accumulation.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Chakravarty, Urvashi. “‘Fitt for Faire Habitacion’: Kinship and Race in A Vewe of the Present
State of Irelande.” Spenser Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021, pp. 21–46.
Abstract: “This essay attends to the nexus of family, kinship, and blood in A vewe of the present state of Irelande through the intersection of critical race theory and queer theory. In A vewe, this essay argues, race colludes with genealogy and chronicity to achieve its structural effects, which work to construct both racial genealogies as well as racial futures. In particular, this essay looks at the concept of kincogish to propose that this Irish form of affinity both underscores and resists colonial modes of familial organization marked by consanguinity and lineal descent. The racialized strictures of straight, White temporality and genealogy, I suggest, also rely on the language and distinctions of epidermal race, as the English mandate for a “fairer waie” attempts to map both the land and the bodies of the Irish in the visual lexicon of light and dark and tries to discipline temporality and terrain by means of straight genealogy and White futurity.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Chapman, Matthieu. "Red, White, and Black: Shakespeare's the Tempest and the
Structuring of Racial Antagonisms in Early Modern England and the New World."
Theatre History Studies, vol. 39, 2020, pp. 7-23,281-282.
“By using Afro-pessimist theories of ontological absence and libidinal economy to unpack the power dynamics of the play,” Chapman “argue[s] that Shakespeare's Caliban represents not the colonized subaltern but the black ontological Slave” (p. 8). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
de Avilez Rocha, Gabriel. “Maroons in the Montes: Toward a Political Ecology of Marronage
in the Sixteenth-Century Caribbean.” Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical
Anthology, edited by Cassander L. Smith et al., Springer International Publishing,
2018, pp. 15–35.
Abstract: “Foregrounding a colonial archive of Black lives in the sixteenth-century Caribbean, Gabriel de Avilez Rocha analyzes how marronage, or slave flight, played an important role in the ecologies, power struggles, and discourses of Spanish colonialism in the Greater Antilles. Rocha argues that the politically charged term of cimarrón, while forming part of an emergent Iberian discourse of racial prejudice against African and Afro-descendant men and women, also highlighted how a critical basis of the social and economic order across the islands—their environments—were being fundamentally altered by the cumulative weight of maroon agency. His contribution sheds important light onto how Africans and Amerindians influenced a nascent legal and political framework for agrarian property relations, colonial rule, and avenues for liberation in early colonial Spanish America.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Earle, Rebecca. “The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in
Spanish America, 1492-1700.” The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the
Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700, Cambridge U P, 2013.
From publisher’s description: “This fascinating history explores the dynamic relationship between overseas colonisation and the bodily experience of eating. It reveals the importance of food to the colonial project in Spanish America and reconceptualises the role of European colonial expansion in shaping the emergence of ideas of race during the Age of Discovery. Rebecca Earle shows that anxieties about food were fundamental to Spanish understandings of the new environment they inhabited and their interactions with the native populations of the New World.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Fuchs, Barbara. "Black Faces, White Hands: La celosa de sí misma and the Negotiation of Race." MLN, vol. 133 no. 2, 2018, p. 242-256.
Fuchs addresses the treatment of race in the Spanish Golden Age play La celosa de sí misma by placing the work in the context of interractial relationships in the Americas and the complexities they posed. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Fuchs analyzes representations of Islam and the New World in early modern European texts in order to explore identity formation in Spain and England.
Greer, Margaret R., Walter D. Mignolo and Maureen Quilligan, eds. Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.
The essays in Rereading the Black Legend take up Spain's colonial practices alongside those of Holland, Portugal, and England as well as the Chinese, Mughal, and Ottoman empires at the same time in order to contextualize racial identity in Europe.
Grier, Miles P. “Inkface: The Slave Stigma in England’s Early Imperial Imagination.” In
Scripturalizing the Human: The Written as the Political, edited by Vincent L. Wimbush, 193–220. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Grier argues that early modern theatre and visual culture transferred the stigma of the tattoo from the British (who had been enslaved in the classical Mediterranean) to Africans and Amerindians, whom the British hoped to enslave in the Atlantic world. Texts include Jonson’s Masque of Blackness and Harriot’s Brief and True Reporte on the New Found Land of Virginia. MPG
Habib, Imtiaz. “‘Hel’s Perfect Character’; or The Blackamoor Maid in Early modern English drama: The Postcolonial Cultural History of a Dramatic Type.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 11, no. 3, 2000, pp.277-304.
Counter-study of race through the figure of the Tudor black male by focusing attention on the Tudor black female, particularly the Blackamoor maid within Tudor-Stuart culture. @margalarrita
Hadfield, Andrew, ed. Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550-1630. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels is a collection of travel writing and colonial texts from Renaissance England.
Harris, Jonathan Gil, ed. Indography: Writing the "Indian" in Early Modern England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
The essays in Indography follow Shankar Raman's Framing "India" in order to take up the question of "the global history of the term 'Indian'" (2). The essays focus on representations of "Indians" in many forms of early modern English writing.
Hashhozheva, Galena. “From ‘Custom Is King’ to ‘Custom Is a Metal’: The Early Modern
Afterlife of Ancient Scythian Culture.” Beyond Greece and Rome: Reading the
Ancient Near East in Early Modern Europe, edited by Jane Grogan, Oxford U P,
2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198767114.003.0004.
From abstract: “In early modernity, the ancient Scythians were mostly the subject of ethnographic tales that delighted audiences with their exoticism and barbarity. Yet … one stereotypical Scythian trait—the resistance to foreign cultural influences—became associated with a wider sixteenth-century discourse about custom in its philosophical, religious, and legal dimensions. This discourse was utilized in the service of imperialist agendas that had to reckon with the durability and obduracy of native culture. In Edmund Spenser’s colonial dialogue A View of the State of Ireland, the Irish are presented as genealogical descendants of the Scythians and are reviled for adhering to their Scythian-like customs. … Spenser allows the cultural conservatism of the colonized to illuminate what he perceives as the cultural degeneracy of the colonists, and turns the quarrel about ethnographic custom into an interrogation of customary law.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Hatfield, April Lee. “A ‘very Wary People in Their Bargaining’ or ‘very Good Marchandise’:
English Traders’ Views of Free and Enslaved Africans, 1550–1650.” Slavery & Abolition 25, no. 3 (2004): 1–17.
———. “Slavery, Trade, War, and the Purposes of Empire.” The William and Mary Quarterly 68,
no. 3 (July 1, 2011): 405–8.
Hollis, Gavin. The Absence of America: the London Stage, 1576-1642. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. (forthcoming)
The Absence of America: the London Stage 1576-1642 examines why early modern drama’s response to English settlement in the New World was muted, even though the so-called golden age of Shakespeare coincided with the so-called golden age of exploration: no play is set in the Americas; few plays treat colonization as central to the plot; a handful features Native American characters (most of whom are Europeans in disguise). However, advocates of colonialism in the seventeenth century denounced playing companies as enemies on a par with the Pope and the Devil. Instead of writing off these accusers as paranoid cranks, this book takes as its starting point the possibility that they were astrology ute playgoers. By so doing we can begin to see the emergence of a “picture of America,” and of the Virginia colony in particular, across a number of plays performed for London audiences: Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, The Staple of News, and his collaboration with Marston and Chapman, Eastward Ho!; Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso; Massinger’s The City Madam; Massinger and Fletcher’s The Sea Voyage; Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl; Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. We can glean the significance of this picture, not only for the troubled Virginia Company, but also for London theatre audiences. And we can see that the picture that was beginning to form was, as the anti-theatricalists surmised, often slanderous, condemnatory, and, as it were, anti-American. -Gavin Hollis
Hollis, Gavin. “Enter Orlando with a scarf before his face”: Indians, Moors, and the Properties of Racial Transformation in Robert Greene’s The Historie of Orlando Furioso.” Indography: Writing the ‘Indian’ in Early Modern England. Jonathan Gil Harris, ed. New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2012. 183-196.
Robert Greene’s adaptation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (c.1593) is baffling, even at points nigh-on incomprehensible, for numerous reasons; indeed, the play has mainly interested bibliographic and performance studies scholars, because a document of the original part of Orlando, as played by Edward Alleyn, indicates that actors of this period were only given their lines to learn and did not have a full script. The focus of this essay, however, is on why Greene makes Orlando adopt a “base or Indian shape” in the course of defeating his enemy Sacrepant. The “Indian shape” is indeterminate: at other points Orlando is described as a “moor” and also as a “countryman”; nor is this an American play, as Greene sets the action in a vaguely-spatialized “Kingdom of Africa.” It is not my intention to argue that Orlando Furioso is a play fixated on the transatlantic to the exclusion of Africa or the East. However, the fact that Orlando’s disguise is described as “Indian,” albeit alongside other terms, is significant because of the recurrence of New World allusions at the margins of the play. -Gavin Hollis
Hollis, Gavin. “‘He would no goe naked like the Indians, but cloathed just as one of our selves’: Clothing, Conversion, and ‘the Naked Indian’ in Massinger’s The City Madam.” Renaissance Drama n.s. 39 (Winter 2011), 129-162.
This article analyzes drama which employs the trope of European males dressing up and disguising themselves as American Indians (what I call “alterity-as-disguise”). Indian disguise drew attention to the colonial project of clothing (a metaphor for conversion) while also stressing the impossibility of converting the infidel, because clothing (both attachable and detachable) was both a marker of identity and an index of the inscrutability of identity. Philip Massinger’s The City Madam argues for the futility of this mission, because the Indian used clothing to mask their allegiances rather than as a token of their allegiance to the English, through the play's allusions to the attacks on the colony in 1622--attacks which revolved Native Americans disguising themselves as pious converts. -Gavin Hollis
Hutner, Heidi. Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Hutner analyzes representations of women in colonial English dramatic literature and argues that these representations served to establish the authority of English patriarchal culture during the Restoration.
Ireton, Chloe. "“They are Blacks of the Caste of Black Christians”: Old Christian Black Blood
in the Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Iberian Atlantic." The Hispanic
American Historical Review, vol. 97, no. 4, 2017, pp. 579-612.
From abstract: “Hundreds of Castilian free black men and women obtained royal travel licenses to cross the Atlantic in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as black Old Christians. They settled across the Spanish Indies …, often becoming prominent and wealthy (residents). Exploring these often obscure and long-invisible biographies of individuals, the article revisits key historiographical debates about race, purity of blood, and vassalage in the early Spanish empire.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Johanyak, Debra and Walter S. H. Lim, eds. The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
The essays in The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia consider representations of Asia in writing from Renaissance England as well as the ways that ideas of Asia shaped early modern English culture.
Jowitt, Claire. “‘Books Will Speak Plain’? Colonialism, Jewishness and Politics in Bacon’s
New Atlantis.” Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: New Interdisciplinary Essays,
Manchester U P, 2018, pp. 129–55, open access:
https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526137388/9781526137388.00012.
xml.
Jowitt “explore[s] whether Bacon argued in the New Atlantis for England’s continued imperial growth and whether he advocates a policy of Christian toleration of Jews" (p. 130). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Kamps, Ivo and Jyotsna G. Singh, eds. Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
The essays in Travel Knowledge explore early modern English travel writing; many explore racial formation through colonial encounters. The book includes both essays and the primary texts that they analyze.
Kumar, Rebecca. “‘Do You Love Me, Master?’: The Erotic Politics of Servitude in The
Tempest and Its Postcolonial Afterlife.” Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A
Critical Anthology, edited by Cassander L. Smith et al., Springer International
Publishing, 2018, pp. 175–96.
Abstract: “Kumar upends the popular postcolonial interpretation of The Tempest with a queer-positive reading of Prospero’s more obedient slave Ariel. Delving into a fraught and ambivalent expression of love between master and slave, Kumar locates strategies for black resistance not in the earthy, masculine Caliban, as one would expect, but in the light, airy, and feminine figure of Ariel. This project promises to challenge the tenets of masculinist terms of revolutionary nationalism that have come down through postcolonial thinkers such as Fanon, Césaire, and Retamar.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.
Kupperman explores documentations of encounters between English colonists and Native Americans and considers how these encounters affected the processes of identity formation.
Loomba, Ania. ""Break Her Will, and Bruise no Bone Sir": Colonial and Sexual Mastery in Fletcher's the Island Princess." Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2002, pp. 68-108.
Loomba “examine[s] how the play offers a fantasy of colonial and sexual possession by using the figure of an Eastern princess who converts to Christianity, and also by responding to contemporary writings about the Moluccas. By doing so, it contributes both to the development of mercantile colonial romance in English theater, as well as to a distinct dis course about the Moluccas that evolves during this period” (p. 68). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Loomba explores the history of racial difference through the lens of Shakespeare's plays, analyzing their representations of other perceptions of difference such as gender and sexuality, religion, class, skin color, etc.
-----. “Teaching Shakespeare and Race in the New Empire.” Teaching Shakespeare: Passing It On. Ed. G.B. Shand. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009. 160-80.
Loomba discusses the work of getting her American students to become aware of the historical and ongoing intertwining of Shakespeare with colonialism and racism. Loomba discusses the role of Shakespeare and academia in her own experiences with racialization and advocates actively opposing longstanding oppressive and discriminatory elements of the field.
----. “The Great Indian Vanishing Trick: – Colonialism, Property, and the Family in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream.” A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, edited by
Dympna Callaghan, 2nd ed., Wiley Blackwell, 2016, pp. 181–205.
From abstract: “This chapter probes some aspects of organic relationship to discourses about gender and the family in Europe. Given the overlaps between vocabularies of gender, wealth, and colonial conquest, a parental struggle for the control of the Indian boy surely has colonial undertones. Mapping colonial and gender structures onto one another, critics have increasingly interpreted the struggle between Oberon and Titania over the Indian boy as a gendered contest over the proper control of foreign merchandise, as a progression both patriarchal and imperial.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
-----. “Race and the Possibilities of Comparative Critique.” New Literary History 40.3 (Summer 2009): 501-522.
Loomba explores "the politics of comparison as a method" (503), arguing that religious difference is intertwined with perceptions of racial difference by focusing on caste differences in India and Latin America.
----- and Martin Orkin, eds. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. New York: Routledge, 1998.
The essays in Post-Colonial Shakespeares explore the influence of colonialism on Shakespeare's works as well as on the way they were interpreted in early modern England.
Normandin, Daniel. “Ripping Up Ancestries: Indigeneity and Genealogy in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene.” Modern Philology, vol. 119, no. 2, U of Chicago P, 2021, pp. 213–34, https://doi.org/10.1086/716578.
Normandin argues that the combat in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene “allegorizes the historical progression out of primitivism” and points out “the intimate connections between Spenser’s antiquarian and colonial interests as embodied in his epic” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Oldenburg, Scott. “Headless in America: The Imperial Logic of Acephalism.” The
Mysterious and the Foreign in Early Modern England. Helen Ostovitch, Mary Silcox, and Graham Roebuck, eds. (University of Delaware Press, 2008). 39-57.
Oldenburg argues that the trope of headless beings in early modern travel and colonial narratives relates to a notion of the body politic, as a way of symbolically arguing for English dominance of indigenous peoples.
Orr, Bridget. The Empire on the English Stage, 1660-1714. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
In Empire on the English Stage, Orr analyzes Restoration drama as a center for colonial debate through plays' representations of racial and national identities.
Perreault, Melanie. “‘To Fear and to Love Us’: Intercultural Violence in the English Atlantic.” Journal of World History 17.1 (Mar 2006): 71-93.
Perreault explores the relationship between texts that positioned the English as loving protectors of Native Americans and the violence that the English perpetrated against them.
Raman, Shankar. Framing “India”: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Raman explores representations of India in early modern European texts (primarily dramatic literature, but also other texts, including maps) in order to look at the ways that colonial thought was developing.
Ritger, Matthew. "Time in the Tempest: Shakespeare, the Mock-Tempest, and Early Modern
Carceral Labor." Shakespeare Studies, vol. 49, 2021, pp. 247.
Ritger discusses the significance of temporality and penal labor for The Tempest and early modern thinking about colonialism. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Sandrock, Kirsten. “Ancient Empires and Early Modern Colonialism in William Alexander’s
Monarchicke Tragedies (1603‐07).” Renaissance Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 2017, pp.
346–64.
From abstract: “This article examines discourses of empire in William Alexander's Monarchicke Tragedies (1603–07) and shows that the dramas actively engage in early Jacobean debates about geopolitical expansion. … the essay suggests that The Monarchicke Tragedies were partly devised as counsel for James VI and I on foreign politics, both in Europe and abroad. … The article closes with a consideration of how the critique of ancient empires in The Monarchicke Tragedies relates to early Stuart expansion ideologies in general and to Alexander's colonial endeavours in particular.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Segev, Ran. "Mestisaje (Miscegenation) and Labor: Rethinking Free Afromexicans and the
Colonial Labor Market in the Age of Mercantilism." Journal of Colonialism & Colonial
History, vol. 20, no. 1, 2019.
From abstract: “By analyzing labor proposals regarding African descendants in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico—which had one of the largest populations of free Blacks in the Americas—this article investigates how Spaniards responded to the emergence of new types of peoples who were the unintended consequence of early European colonialism. I further claim that the attempt to implement labor policies toward colonial populations deemed "undesirable" should be understood within the desire of the early modern state to expand its jurisdiction through the development of new conceptualizations of population and wealth.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Shahani, Gitanjali. “The Spicèd Indian Air in Early Modern England.” Shakespeare Studies,
vol. 42, 2014, pp. 122-137,14-15.
Shahani examines how early modern texts “registered the impact of the spice trade through a variety of real and fantastic modes,” and reads “the spicèd Indian air” in Midsummer in light of the conclusion: “As rarities from distant climes, spices seemed to arouse an insatiable appetite for the exotic. But as foreign bodies from heathen lands, their admixture into the body politic provoked an acute sense of discomfort about cultural and corporeal boundaries” (p. 123). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Singh, Jyotsna G., ed. A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
The essays in A Companion to the Global Renaissance primarily focus on England's relationships with other cultures (both within Europe and outside of it) in the early modern period, exploring "English conceptions of the 'global'" (5) and the ways that these relationships affected English culture.
Smith, Cassander L. Black Africans in the British Imagination. LSU Press, 2016.
Cassander L. Smith investigates how the physical presence of black Africans both enabled and disrupted English literary responses to Spanish imperialism. By examining the extent to which this population helped to shape early English narratives, from political pamphlets to travelogues, Smith offers new perspectives on the literary, social, and political impact of black Africans in the early Atlantic world. With detailed analysis of the earliest English-language accounts from the Atlantic world, including writings by Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Ralegh, and Richard Ligon, Smith approaches contact narratives from the perspective of black Africans, recovering figures often relegated to the margins. This interdisciplinary study explores understandings of race and cross-cultural interaction and revises notions of whiteness, blackness, and indigeneity. Smith reveals the extent to which contact with black Africans impeded English efforts to stigmatize the Spanish empire as villainous and to malign Spain’s administration of its colonies. In addition, her study illustrates how black presences influenced the narrative choices of European (and later Euro-American) writers, providing a more nuanced understanding of black Africans’ role in contemporary literary productions of the region.
Villagrana, José Juan. Racial Apocalypse: The Cultivation of Supremacy in the Early
Modern World. Routledge, 2022.
From publisher’s description: “This book reveals the relationship between apocalyptic thought, political supremacy, and racialization in the early modern world. The chapters in this book analyze apocalypse and racialization from several discursive and geopolitical spaces to shed light on the ubiquity and diversity of apocalyptic racial thought and its centrality to advancing political power objectives across linguistic and national borders in the early modern period.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Williard, Ashley. “Ventriloquizing Blackness: Citing Enslaved Africans in the French
Caribbean, c.1650–1685.” Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical
Anthology, edited by Cassander L. Smith et al., Springer International Publishing,
2018, pp. 83–105.
Abstract: “Williard’s essay argues for the importance of texts coming out of the French Caribbean in the seventeenth century in accessing black lives in the early modern era. She points out that the seventeenth-century Caribbean presents a vast yet understudied network of archival and narrative traces of enslaved and free people of African descent. She examines the period c.1650–1685, a crucial time for colonial encounters and the transformation of metropolitan ideas about human difference. In particular, she examines the accounts of missionaries, who often quoted and ventriloquized their encounters with black Africans in the French Caribbean. Through those moments of representation and appropriation, Williard argues, we can glean information about how black Africans negotiated their encounters in the French Caribbean.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Young, Sandra. Inscribing the Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.
from abstract: “Young proposes a new set of terms with which to understand the racialized imaginary inscribed in the scholarly texts that presented the peoples of the south as objects of an inquiring gaze from the north. …. Young examines, in turn, the representational methodologies, or 'artes,' deployed in mapping the 'whole' world: illustrating, creating charts for navigation, noting down observations, collecting and cataloguing curiosities, reporting events, formatting materials, and editing and translating old sources. By tracking these methodologies in the lines of beauty and evidence on the page, we can see how early modern producers of knowledge were able to attribute alterity to the 'southern climes' of an increasingly complex world, while securing their own place within it.”
-----. “How Have Post-Colonial Approaches Enriched Shakespeare’s Works?” in Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 254–67.
Focusing on The Tempest, Young argues that Shakespeare can be used to antiracist, anticolonial pedagogical ends when approached through the lens of postcolonial theory.
Wagner, Sydnee. “Racing Gender to the Edge of the World: Decoding the Transmasculine Amazon Cannibal in Early Modern Travel Writing.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (Fall 2019): 137-155,308.
The pervasive figure of the Amazon cannibal woman in early modern travel writing is depicted as animalistic, hyper-sexualized, and predominately a racialized "other." Using early modern travel literature like Sir Walter Raleigh's The Discoverie of Guiana and the illustrations of Theodor De Bry, this essay argues that the Amazonian cannibal woman is a transmasculine figure, serving as a platform for white European thinkers to reshape their ideologies around race and gender. Through trans and critical race theory, this essay reimagines early modern representations of indigenous women as part of the work of recovering transhistoricity. By taking up intersectional feminist calls to attend to gender as an inherently racialized project, this essay considers travel writings and visual materials as a space in which white European ideals of gender and sexuality can be constructed through the vilification of (and desire for) people of color's bodies and behaviors. (abstract) #PCRS @ProfKFH
Weissbourd, Emily. “‘I Have Done the State Some Service: Reading Slavery in Othello through Juan Latino.” Comparative Drama 47 (2014), 529-551.
Weissbourd compares representations of blackness and slavery in Ximenez de Enciso’s play Juan Latino to similar but less explicit references in Shakespeare’s Othello.
Working, Lauren. The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis. Cambridge University Press: January 2020. (@lauren_working)
This book brings to life the interaction between America, its peoples, and metropolitan gentlemen in early seventeenth-century England. Arguing against colonization as operating in a remote ‘elsewhere’ or on the peripheries of the political realm, The Making of an Imperial Polity confronts the entangled histories of political participation and the nascent imperial-mindedness of the English elite in London, reframing the Jacobean era as one in which shifting attitudes to governance and status became deeply embedded in aspirations to colonize.
4. Early Modern Indigenous Studies
Bard in Borderlands Working Bibliography (also linked under Shakespeare and Latinidad)
Chakravarti, Paromita. “Natural Fools and the Historiography of Renaissance Folly.”
Renaissance Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2011, pp. 208–27.
In part, Chakravarti describes how early modern European writers employed understandings of natural fools, or people with cognitive disabilities, to think about indigenous Americans and construct them as primitive and lacking culture. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Cox, Emma. "Reconciling Shakespeare and Indigeneity in Australia: Star-Cross'd
Communities and Racial Tempests." Australasian Drama Studies, no. 44, 2004, pp.
78-95,149.
Cox discuss es two productions that explore Shakespeare and indigeneity in Australia and writes that “both productions examined the operations of racial divisiveness and prejudice, and enacted narratives of reconciliation between indigenous and Euro-Australians, on and offstage” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Grier, Miles P. “Staging the Cherokee Othello: An Imperial Economy of Indian Watching.” The William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2016): 73.
Grier considers a 1752 Virginia newspaper report that the empress of the Cherokees interrupted a performance of Othello because she could not understand that the swashbuckling actors were in no danger as evidence of an imperial desire--as old as Columbus’s first voyage--to figure American Indians as literal-minded and, therefore, incapable of participating in the mediated world of Atlantic, capitalist modernity. In addition, he reconstructs the empress’s likely motives and addresses broader implications for the periodization of the career of the race concept. MPG
Kuhn, John. “Sejanus, the King’s Men Altar Scenes, and the Theatrical Production of Paganism.” Early Theatre 20, no. 2 (2017): 77–98. https://doi.org/10.12745/et.20.2.2952.
This article traces the lineage of the popular performance set-piece of the ‘oracular altar scene’ from its inception in Jonson’s Sejanus through its frequent reuse by the King’s Men and their imitators later in the century. By doing so, it demonstrates how material practices of reuse in the seventeenth-century theatre helped shape the production of popular knowledge about the nature of ‘pagan’ ritual and its practitioners in the Stuart era of intensified antiquarian discovery and colonial expansion.
Peace, Thomas G. M. “Deconstructing the ‘Sauvage/Savage’ in the Writing of Samuel de
Champlain and Captain John Smith.” French Colonial History, vol. 7, Michigan State
University Press, 2006, pp. 1–20, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41938262.
“This paper examines the nouns that each writer used to describe Amerindian peoples in selected texts from three of Smith's and Champlain's works. It shows that although sauvage and savage were dominant words in most of the texts, neither man's use of the term was stagnant. Over time, Smith used the word increasingly, while Champlain used it decreasingly - thus demonstrating a certain flexibility that can be explained through their influences and experiences” (p. 2). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Round, Philip H. Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010.
“Round examines the relationship between Native Americans and the printed book over a 200-year span, arguing persuasively for the essential role of the book and of print culture in Indian lives from the sixteenth century through the Removal Period to the rise of U.S. assimilation policies in the late nineteenth century.”
Thrush, Coll. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016.
Thrush’s work draws from the experiences of the Indigenous peoples who traveled to London (willingly and otherwise) from across the world. Beginning in the sixteenth century, these “captives and diplomats, missionaries and shamans, poets and performers” were central to London’s learning “to be a global, imperial city.” @ProkKFH
Yim, Laura Lehua. "Reading Hawaiian Shakespeare: Indigenous Residue Haunting Settler Colonial Racism." Journal of American Studies; Cambridge Vol. 54, Iss. 1, (Feb 2020): 36-43.
As scholarly work on race in Shakespeare studies continues to develop, this article examines how important insights from critical Indigenous studies can help us to refine and enhance this work to more fully see historical moments at which Shakespeare's works have been appropriated in response to the oppression of settler colonialism. Taking an 1893 political cartoon from a New York newspaper as a representation of settler violence against Queen Lili‘uokalani of Hawai‘i, this essay traces the uses of Banquo's ghost in Hawaiian newspapers as a figure that haunts the racializing elimination of Native rule. #PCRS #CriticalIndigenousStudies @ProfKFH
5. Shakespeare and Latinidad
Bard in Borderlands Working Bibliography (also linked in Shakespeare and Indigeneity)
Boffone, Trevor and Carla Della Gatta, editors. Shakespeare and Latinidad. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021.
A collection of 25 contributors focusing on the intersections of Shakespeare and
Latinidad. Essays by directors, actors, scholars, dramaturgs, vocal coaches, and
playwrights.
Chapman, Matthieu. “Chicano Signifyin’: Appropriating Space and Culture in El Henry.”
Theatre Topics, vol. 27, no. 1, 2017, pp. 61-69.
Abstract: “An adaption of William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, Herbert Siguenza's "El Henry" is site-specific to downtown San Diego. "El Henry's" aesthetics position the play within Siguenza's larger history of Latina/o performance as a member of the theatre group Culture Clash, whose works have long engaged with notions of the Chicana/o identity that were established during the Chicano movement of the 1960s. "El Henry," however, does not just engage with contemporary Chicana/o performance practices, but advances the art form by presenting new contexts for Chicana/o aesthetics and new ideations of the Chicana/o identity.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Della Gatta, Carla. “Accruing Gravitas, Or Why There Isn’t a Latino King Lear (Yet), Shakespeare,
Special Edition on Inessential Shakespeare, 2024.
From abstract: the essay argues that notions of vocal command, sensuality, and the challenge for Latinx actors to be cast consistently in main roles all work against the necessary element for the role of Lear: gravitas. The essay details a theatrical and filmic history of Latinx actors and adaptations of King Lear to illustrate that in order to play King Lear, the Latino actor must be associated with the perception of having accrued gravitas, a capacious characteristic that functions in contrast to mainstream U.S. perceptions of Latinx.
–. “From West Side Story to Hamlet, Prince of Cuba: Shakespeare and
Latinidad in the United States,” in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 44 (2016): 151–56.
This was a speech at the first-ever NextGenPlen introducing the field of Shakespeare and Latinidad. It briefly touches on a number of aspects of performing Latinx culture through Shakespeare, and it serves to highlight the key categories of Della Gatta’s first monograph, due out in 2023.
---. “Shakespeare and American Bilingualism: Borderland Theatricality in Romeo y Julieta,” in Renaissance Shakespeare/Shakespeare Renaissances: Proceedings of the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress, ed. Martin Prochazka et al., University of Delaware Press, 2014, 286–95.
Della Gatta examines recent bilingual productions of Romeo and Juliet in the United States and compares and contrasts ways they portray the cultural dynamics of a multilingual society. Della Gatta ultimately argues that such productions show that blending Shakespearean dialogue with contemporary language can make that dialogue more accessible.
---. Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater. Forthcoming, University of Michigan Press, 2023.
This book attends to Latinx-themed Shakespeare productions in the U.S. across a breadth of dramaturgical strategies over the last seventy years.
—. Latinx Shakespeares.Org. The first open access archive of Latinx theatre adaptation. The archive holds information on over 275 plays and productions, including ephemera and resources. The site has reviews from over 20 contributors and growing. Launched in February 2023.
Espinosa, Ruben. “Beyond The Tempest: Language, Legitimacy, and La Frontera” in The Shakespeare User: Creative and Critical Appropriation in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Valerie Fazel and Louise Geddes (Palgrave, 2017): 41-61.
—-. “Chicano Shakespeare: The Bard, the Border, and the Peripheries of Performance.” Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare, edited by Hillary Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman, Edinburgh U P, 2019, pp. 76–84.
Espinosa discusses Shakespeare pedagogy “that speak[s] meaningfully to social justice initiatives striving to advance dignity, legitimacy, and social equity for Chicanxs—and, more broadly, Latinxs—who often struggle to locate their place in American society” (p. 77). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
—-. “‘Don’t it Make My Brown Eyes Blue’: Uneasy Assimilation and the Shakespeare-Latinx Divide” in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson (Routledge, 2019): 48-58.
----. “Stranger Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly; Washington, D. C., vol. 67, no. 1, Spring 2016, pp. 51-67.
This essay considers how the dynamics of identity politics for Mexican Americans—who are often forced to negotiate cross-cultural identity and pressures of assimilation—stand to shed light on both the promise and the failings of Shakespeare studies amid the shifting demographic in America. It suggests that a better understanding of Latina/o engagement with Shakespeare would ultimately generate a more thorough understanding of the potential and limitations of Shakespeare’s cultural capital.
—-. “Traversing the Temporal Borderlands of Shakespeare,” New Literary History 52.3/4 (Autumn 2021): 605-623.
Gillen, Katherine. “Shakespearean Appropriation and Queer Latinx Empowerment in Josh Inocencio’s Ofélio,” in the Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson(London: Routledge, 2019), 90-101.
This essay examines Inocencio’s example of community oriented Latinx theater in light of the generally white-dominated history of representing Ophelia.
Gonsalez, Marcos. “Caliban Never Belonged to Shakespeare |.” Literary Hub (blog), July 26, 2019. https://lithub.com/caliban-never-belonged-to-shakespeare/. See annotation above.
Gonsalez sees Caliban as representative of subjects who are marginalized by a colonialist, white supremacist conflation of “the language of whiteness” with authority and universality. Gonsalez advocates embracing the subject position of Caliban as a strategy for resistance.
Kliman, Bernice and Rick J. Santos. Eds. Latin American Shakespeares. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2005. 242-61. Print.
The essays in this anthology examine Latinx receptions of Shakespeare.
6. Early Modern Whiteness Studies
Britton, Dennis A. "From the Knight's Tale to the Two Noble Kinsmen: Rethinking Race, Class and Whiteness in Romance." Postmedieval, vol. 6, no. 1, 2015, pp. 64-78.
From abstract: “Drawing from its Chaucerian source, Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen uses the integration of the Amazon into Athens to suggest that white skin is proof of not-yet-realized racial sameness. At the same time, the play tests the limits of white skin as a marker of racial sameness and class affiliation. Although the play upholds the connection romances produce between race and class, it undermines the power of white skin to create this connection. The Two Noble Kinsmen instead uses images of Africanness to link race and class, suggesting that Africanness is better able than white skin to mark racial and class identity.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Dadabhoy, Ambereen. “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being (in) Shakespeare,” in postmedieval. Basingstoke Vol. 11, Iss. 2-3, (Aug 2020): 228-235.
What happens to the critical work of scholars, teachers, and performers of Shakespeare if we take very seriously the whiteness of our author and the critical epistemologies that develop and contour the body of his corpus? How is such work affected by the BIPOC identities of these scholars, teachers, and performers? In this essay I consider these questions through a sustained critique of Shakespeare’s whiteness and the whiteness of the critical gaze that has been directed at Shakespearean canon. My essay is subtended by the personal, which is an important facet of the confessional mode being considered, interrogated, and recapitulated in this issue. My confession, to which I turn at the close of this essay, rehearses a pedagogical experience wherein the wages of whiteness exact their usual cost from me and my students, demanding that we yield to white practices of knowledge-making in Shakespeare.
Gillen, Katherine. “Fashioning English Whiteness in The Revenger’s Tragedy,” in The Revenger’s Tragedy: The State of the Play, ed. Gretchen Minton, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 113-33.
This essay examines the relationship between whiteness and revenge tragedy’s discourses of blood as well as tensions between a specifically national English whiteness and a broader pan-European whiteness.
Hall, Kim F. “‘These Bastard Signs of Fair’: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Post-Colonial Shakespeares. Ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin. London: Routledge, 1998. 64-8.
from abstract: “The author considers the development of ‘whiteness’ as an identity in William Shakespeare's sonnets. The chapter examines the ways in which fairness is racialized in Elizabethan culture and looks at the sonnets as a site at which white privilege is reified.”
Little, Arthur L., Jr. “Is It Possible to Read Shakespeare through Critical Whiteness Studies?” in Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 268–80.
Little argues for the importance of thinking critically about whiteness in Shakespeare studies, noting that failing to do so in our consideration of race risks maintaining the uncritical treatment that has treated whiteness as an unremarkable default.
Ndiaye, Noémie. “‘Read it for restoratives’: Pericles and the Romance of Whiteness.” Early Theatre 26.1 (2023), 11–27
Abstract: This essay reads Shakespeare and Wilkins’s Pericles (1608) through the lens of early modern critical whiteness studies. Tracing how the play reworks the colour-coding of its medieval source text along new racial lines, this essay sees Pericles’s melancholia as an allegory of the always incomplete condition of whiteness. It then shows how Pericles uses the erotic mechanics of romance to pursue his quest for whiteness. Ultimately, the essay underlines the relevance of Pericles’s quest to Shakespeare’s cultural moment before discussing the voices of resistance to the project of whiteness embedded within the play, and the uses of that play for our own times.
Paris, Jamie. “Bad Blood, Black Desires: On the Fragility of Whiteness in Middleton and
Rowley’s The Changeling.” Early Theatre, vol. 24, no. 1, June 2021, pp. 113–137.
Abstract: “This essay reads Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (ca 1622) as a meditation on the fragility of white privilege. The anxieties about blood in the play are situated by how the English viewed Spain as the least white nation within Europe. The trope of blackness impacts the way others read Beatrice-Joanna's sexual transgressions, ultimately questioning her chastity and challenging her privileges as a white woman. Rather than seeing whiteness as a stable identity category, I argue that the privileges of whiteness were particularly unstable for white women in the early modern period.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Poitevin, Kimberly. “Inventing Whiteness: Cosmetics, Race and Women in Early Modern England.” Journal For Early Modern Studies 11.1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 59-89.
Poitevin considers the ways that women in early modern England used cosmetics to perform racial identities in a manner parallel to blackface onstage. Additionally, many of these cosmetic products were imported from outside of England, further complicating the formation of national and racial identities.
Royster, Francesca T. “White-limed Walls: Whiteness and Early Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000): 432-55.
Royster focuses her analysis of Titus Andronicus on Tamora. She argues that Tamora's whiteness is a racial category in the play and as such, Tamora's actions can be used to explore Elizabethan attitudes towards racial identity, especially as it intersects with gender and national identity.
Sanchez, Melissa E. “‘To Giue Faire Colour’: Sexuality, Courtesy, and Whiteness in The
Faerie Queene.” Spenser Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021, pp. 245–84.
Abstract: “This essay explores the losses that Spenser studies has incurred in its neglect of the scholarship on early modern race that has compounded over the past thirty years. Much of this work has been produced by scholars of color, and particularly feminist scholars of color, who remain strikingly underrepresented in Spenser studies. If we treat this body of knowledge as central rather than peripheral to analysis of The Faerie Queene, we can expand our understanding of the multidimensional nature of Spenserian racial formations, which collaborate with White norms of gendered hierarchy and sexual innocence. Extensively, even obsessively, allegorizing female appetite and autonomy in racialized terms, Spenser’s Book of Courtesy allows us to appreciate the centrality of Whiteness to the seemingly race-neutral ideals of courtesy and civility, as well as the dependence of those ideals on the selective deployment of slander and violence.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Song, Eric. “Maybe She’s Born with It: Spenser’s Una, Milton’s Eve, and the Question of
Golden Hair.” Spenser Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021, pp. 213–44.
from abstract: “By insisting on the relevance of race, this essay details how Spenser and Milton still uphold what we would now label a Eurocentric standard of beauty even while questioning attachment to golden hair as potentially idolatrous. In both Book I of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, the problems of particularity in relation to universality are not so much resolved as they are deflected into narratives of rocky conjugal unions. It is important that Redcrosse and Milton’s Adam both have hair of unspecified color. This essay pays special attention to the precedents set by Italian epics, in which the allure of golden hair is a site of racial fantasies and anxieties.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Taylor, Gary. Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture and Identity from Columbus to Hip Hop. New York: Palgrave, 2005.
In Buying Whiteness, Taylor considers, through art and literature, the formation of whiteness as a racial category and identity.
Varnado, Christine. “The Quality of Whiteness: The Thief of Bagdad and The Merchant of Venice.” Exemplaria, vol. 31, no. 4, Routledge, 2019, pp. 245–69.
Abstract: “This article reads Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice through a framework of critical whiteness studies, addressing the invisibility by which whiteness operates as a racial formation. Using the Aarne-Thompson taxonomy of folk-tale types, it analyzes the structural parallels between Merchant and the hyperbolically Orientalist 1924 silent film The Thief of Bagdad, with which it shares the archetypal plot motif of the Suitor Test. In articulating the unacknowledged debts of both the silent film and the Shakespeare play to Islamic folklore, the article opens up a reading of Merchant in which Portia and Bassanio are made visible as figures of white feminine virtuousness and masculine entitlement. It argues that whiteness in The Merchant of Venice is dramatized as a way of being, a set of values and behaviors (hazarding with others’ resources, re-casting good luck as moral virtue) rewarded and celebrated in the text. The article culminates in a new reading of Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech as an apologia for nascent ideologies of whiteness in Shakespeare.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
7. Early Modern Visual Culture
Bindman, David and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III, parts 1-3. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010-11.
The Image of the Black in Western Art is an archive of images from the expansive art collection of Dominique de Menil. The three parts of Volume III cover art from the early modern period. See also Erickson's review, "Picturing Race: Early Modern Constructions of Racial Identity" (below). Also reviewed by @michael1952 here http://bit.ly/2boLKPL and here http://bit.ly/1EuLy9J including later additions.
Brienen, Rebecca Parker. “Black, Brown, and Yellow: Eckhout’s Paintings of Africans, Mestizos, and Mulattos.” Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. 131-169.
Brienen “demonstrate the artificiality and constructed quality of Eckhout’s ethnographic portraits, which are informed by the pictorial conventions of costume book and travel account illustration as well as traditional portraiture” (20-21).
Dietering, Averyl. "Abject Black Flesh and the Manufacture of White Fear in Early Modern
Anatomical Illustrations." Shakespeare Studies, vol. 49, 2021, pp. 153.
Dieterling gives an Afro-pessimist analysis of “The Printer to the Reader” from Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia and argues that racism is the main tool it uses in dehumanizing its subject. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Erickson, Peter. “Invisibility Speaks: Servants and Portraits in Early Modern Visual Culture.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1 (Spring/Summer 2009): 23-61.
Erickson analyzes early modern portraits through the lens of black identity formation. He argues that looking at portraits in this way reveals the process of identity formation more than its products.
-----. “The Black Atlantic in the Twenty-First Century: Artistic Passages, Circulations, Revisions.” NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art 24 (2009): 56-70.
In this essay, Erickson begins with Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness and the term "Black Atlantic." Where Gilroy focused on literature, Erickson considers the concept of the Black Atlantic through the lens of visual culture.
-----. "Picturing Race: Early Modern Constructions of Racial Identity." JEMCS 13.1 (Winter 2013): 151-169.
(Book review) Erickson reviews The Image of the Black in Western Art (David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds.), The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem (Elizabeth McGrath and Jean Michel Massing, eds.), and Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal, eds.).
----- and Clark Hulse, eds. Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race and Empire in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
The essays in Early Modern Visual Culture focus on visual objects (art, maps, etc.) that were produced during the Early Modern period in terms of their social context – both in terms of how the social context informed the creation and consumption of the objects and in terms of how those objects helped to shape the social context. The essays most relevant to this seminar appear to be those by Erickson, Hall, Mullaney, Frye, Traub, and Dalton.
Fracchia, Carmen. “(Lack of) Visual Representation of Black Slaves in Spanish Golden Age Painting.” Journal of Iberian & Latin American Studies 10, no. 1 (June 2004): 23–34. doi:10.1080/1470184042000236251.
Comments on the visual representation of black slaves in Spanish Golden Age painting. Painter Diego Velazquez's depiction of blacks in his paintings; Visibility of the black population in early modern Spain; Velazquez's departure from the traditional representation of blacks in Spanish painting; Complexities of the representation of blacks in early modern Spain.
----. "Constructing the Black Slave in Early Modern Spanish Painting." Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe: Picturing the Social Margins. Ed. Tom Nichols. Aldershot, England, 2007, pp. 179–195
Fracchia determines that representations of black slaves in early modern Spanish art largely reflect imperialist ideology, but notes that ambiguities in portrayals and differences among them reflect the complexities and diversity of black slaves relationship to the dominant culture. Fracchia also discusses the ambiguity painters of nativity scenes put into their portrayals of the black member of the Magi.
----. "The Fall into Oblivion of the Works of the Slave Painter Juan de Pareja." Art in Translation 4, no. 2 (2012): 163-184.
Abstract: “This thought-provoking article focuses on the reception of the Spanish artist Juan de Pareja, the slave and collaborator of Velázquez, who developed a career at the court of Philip IV after his manumission in 1650. Fracchia examines the writings of significant commentators on Pareja, such as Antonio Palomino, Carl Justi, and Gaya Nuño. The historiography is marked by ethnic prejudices, emphasis on Pareja's social status, and comparison with Velázquez, all of which ultimately contributed to the neglect of Pareja's work until recently. In addition, Fracchia's analysis of Pareja's Calling of St Matthew reveals his own efforts to present himself in a way that would be acceptable to the seventeenth-century beholder.”
Halikowski Smith, Stefan. “Lisbon in the Sixteenth Century: Decoding the Chafariz d’el Rei.”
Race & Class, vol. 60, no. 2, Oct. 2018, pp. 63–81, doi:10.1177/0306396818794355.
Abstra/ct: “An anonymous sixteenth-century painting of the King’s Fountain in the Lisbon Alfama, Chafariz d’el Rei, recently the subject of speculation over its provenance and date, has also been of interest because of its depiction of so many black and white figures together, from all social strata and walks of life and in many (often water-related) trades in a public square. It very obviously suggests that black residents of Lisbon at that time, if originating from the trade in slaves, had been able to make their way as freedmen and women into Portuguese society. With careful reading of the figures in the painting against other written and painted portrayals from the time, the author attempts to deduce if this was an accurate depiction of Lisbon in the 1500s, or whether the painter might have distorted reality to render Lisbon as a ludic or exotic space – or indeed to disparage it. The painter himself might well have come from northern Europe.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Hitomi, Omata R. "How to make “Colored” Japanese Counter-Reformation Saints - A Study
of an Iconographic Anomaly." Journal of Early Modern Christianity, vol. 4, no. 2,
2017, pp. 195-225.
Abstract: “The 1627 beatification of the twenty-six martyrs of Japan was a major milestone in the history of the Church and especially for the missionary orders. These martyrs were the first officially recognized saints from the newly “discovered”lands. However, while the majority of the twenty-six were in fact Japanese, surviving paintings depict them as white-skinned missionaries and without any physical features that would have been considered “typically Asian”at the time. This paper analyzes this iconographic tradition and shows how it can be understood as a consequence of a process of assimilation of Christian Japan into the Catholic world view. Associating particular skin color with true faith and civilization was part of discourses that blended the physical “otherness”of these martyrs. This paper demonstrates how these discourses point to the first seeds of a racial perception of East Asians, which would later become the notion of “yellow.”” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Kaplan, Paul. “Black Turks: Venetian Artists and Perceptions of Ottoman Ethnicity.” The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450-1750. Ed. James Harper. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 41-66.
Kaplan examines Venetian paintings of black Turks and explores why they were created and influence they have had on perceptions of Ottoman ethnicity.
Leitch, Stephanie. “Burgkmair’s Peoples of Africa and India (1508) and the Origins of Ethnography in Print.” Art Bulletin 91.2 (2009): 134-159.
Letich analyzes Peoples of Africa and India, a woodcut frieze completed by German artist Hans Burgkmair in 1508, from an ethnographic perspective, arguing that its representations of non-Europeans mark a shift from those in the art that came before it.
Lugo-Ortiz, Agnes and Angela Rosenthal, eds. Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
The essays in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World consider representations of black enslaved peoples in portraits and the duality of erasure and representation of the enslaved
McGrath, Elizabeth, and Jean Michel Massing, eds. The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem. London: Warburg Institute, 2012.
The essays in The Slave in European Art consider representations of slaves in early modern art. Though the slave trade itself was largely avoided as an artistic subject, the ways early modern artists depicted slaves reveals different European societies' perceptions of nationality and racial difference.
Rosen, Mark. “Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori and the Conditions of Slavery in Early Seicento Tuscany,” Art Bulletin 97, no. 1 (2015): 34-57.
Examines the production, historical context, and reception of Tacca’s Livorno monument, particularly its representation of enslaved peoples.
Stoichita, Victor I. Darker Shades: The Racial Other in Early Modern Art. London: Reaktion Books, 2019.
Stoichita explores how representations of non-westerners in early modern European art shaped constructions of racial otherness. Stoichita also suggests that a tension existed between portraying racial others and the basic premises of western art.
8. Early Modern + Modern in dialogue
Akhimie, Patricia. “‘Fair’ Bianca and ‘Brown’ Kate: Shakespeare and the Mixed-Race Family in José Esquea’s The Taming of the Shrew,” in “Shakespeare and Black America.” Eds. Patricia Cahill and Kim Hall, special issue, Journal of American Studies 54 (2020): 89-96 @pakhimie
This essay explores the world of a new production of The Taming of the Shrew, still in the earliest stages of development, that will employ non-traditional casting and re-envision Katharina (“as brown in hue / as hazelnuts”), “fair” Bianca, and their father Baptista as members of a mixed-race family. The production is conceptualized, cast, and rehearsed under the guidance of José Esquea, producer/director of the Soñadores Productions Shakespeare series (formerly of Teatro LATEA), a classical theater group that features Latinx, African American and Asian American actors, and mixed-ability casting (the combination of professional and amateur actors from the community).
Albanese, Denise. “Black and White, and Dread All Over: The Shakespeare Theatre’s
‘Photonegative’ Othello and the Body of Desdemona.” A Feminist Companion to
Shakespeare, edited by Dympna Callaghan, 2nd ed., Wiley Blackwell, 2016, pp.
244–65.
Abstract: “This essay is sparked by a singular and idiosyncratic staging of Othello that resonates beyond its particular theatrical boundaries.1 Offered by the Washington Shakespeare Theatre in the fall of 1997, the production was characterized by those involved in it as ‘photonegative’. Unusually for recent productions, the title role was taken by a white actor; almost every other speaking part, however, featured an actor of African descent, so that the racial dynamics of the script were visually reversed.2 Although the lead actor, Patrick Stewart, did not modify his appearance to portray Othello, the script’s colour-coding of the central character as markedly black remained unmodified. For reasons I’ll go on to suggest, I consider this production to have been problematic — indeed, unsuccessful, to use the aestheticized and evaluative language of the reviewer. Nevertheless, my aim is less to evaluate it than to consider how director Jude Kelly’s realization of ‘photonegativity’, while perhaps a foreseeable consequence of the theatre’s efforts at colour-blind casting, offers a contradictory view of raced masculinity to be read against conflicts about integration and affirmative action in the United States at the end of the twentieth century on the one hand, and against the body of a woman on the other.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Bassi, Shaul. “Angry Jewish Resistance. Interpreting Shylock’s Rage.” Shakespeare, vol.
ahead-of-print, no. ahead-of-print, 2021, pp. 1–16.
Abstract: “This essay explores different cultural protocols of representation of Jewish anger in different “emotional communities”, a category proposed by historian Barbara H. Rosenwein. I examine documents from early modern Venice that provide a more nuanced comprehension of how local Jews, Shylock’s historical counterparts, did feel, express and were allowed to express their anger, trying to show their relevance for the interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. Taking my cue from James Shapiro’s new preface for the twentieth anniversary edition of Shakespeare and the Jews, I compare the conditions of Jewish anger in the United States and Italy in reference to public and literary discourse on the Shoah and on Israel, in their intersections with criticism of The Merchant of Venice.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Bayer, Mark. “The Merchant of Venice, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and the Perils of Shakespearean Appropriation.” Comparative Drama 41 (2007): 465-92.
This article demonstrates how the play, and especially the figure of Shylock, has been consistently invoked in the Arab-Israeli conflict as propaganda for both Palestinians and Israelis in an effort to posit and maintain a stable racial enemy.
-----. Shylock, Palestine, and the Second World War.” Shakespeare and the Second World War: Theatre, Culture, Identity. Eds. Irena Makaryk and Marissa McHugh. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013, pp. 63-82.
This article discusses how The Merchant of Venice became a tool of Imperial Britain in manipulating Arab allegiance during the Second World War, while illuminating the persistence of racial attitudes towards both groups during the war.
Breen, Margaret S. "Race, Dissent, and Literary Imagination in John Bunyan and James
Baldwin." Bunyan Studies, no. 21, 2017, pp. 9-32.
Breen examines how Baldwin used elements from Bunyan’s writing to work for a more racially and sexually just America – and how we can follow Baldwin in this. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Brienen, Rebecca P. “Types and Stereotypes: Zwarte Piet and His Early Modern Sources.”
Dutch Racism, edited by Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving, Rodopi, 2014, pp.
179–200.
“This chapter focuses on the earliest images of Zwarte Piet, nineteenth-century book illustrations, and their important connection … to early modern paintings that include black servants and slaves. [Brienen intends] that this art historical discussion will contribute to the difficult and often heated debate … on the extent to which Zwarte Piet and his imagery may be considered part of a racist discourse” (p. 182). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Cahill, Patricia A., and Kim F. Hall. “Forum: Shakespeare and Black America.” Journal of American Studies 54, no. 1 (February 2020): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875819000902. #PCRS
This short introductory essay attempts to both model how one might read race, blackness, activism and Shakespeare and contextualizes the many “Shakespeares” that might be at work in the essays in this cluster that emerge from the Shakespeare Association of America seminar “Shakespeare and Black America.” It suggests that scholars in this Shakespearean subfield have political, pedagogical and personal investments that both overlap with and diverge from Shakespeare study as traditionally understood. It addresses some of the complexities of performing, teaching and reading Shakespeare not as an agent of cultural dominion, but as part of resistance and activism in Black America. @ProfKFH
Chakravarty, Urvashi. “Race, Labour, and the Future of the Past: King Lear’s ‘true Blank.” Postmedieval a Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, vol. 11, no. 2–3, 2020, pp. 204–11.
Abstract: “This essay argues that our nostalgic desire for narratives and paradigms of devoted domestic service – from Downton Abbey to King Lear – are both implicated in, and comprise part of, a racial project: the propagation of whiteness. Looking in particular at Kent’s status as his master’s ‘true blank,’ I suggest that ‘devoted service’ is articulated in racialized terms, and thus the search for an idealized, valorized service rehearses the rhetorical and real terms of white supremacy. In their investment in familial metaphors, texts which traffic in the terms of ‘good service’ also stage the literal reproduction of whiteness. The essay therefore ends by suggesting that attending to the interstices of critical race and queer theory can offer a mode of critical resistance to the generation and genealogy of whiteness encoded in the practices of ‘devoted service’ and in our perennial and often deeply problematic attempts to recover them.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. “What Is the History of Actors of Color Performing in Shakespeare in the UK?” in Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 190–207.
Chakravarty not only gives a contextualized history of Shakespearean actors of color from the early modern period to the present, but also discusses methods and difficulties involved in the archival research for this topic.
Corredera, Vanessa I. “Get Out and the Remediation of Othello’s Sunken Place: Beholding
White Supremacy’s Coagula.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare
an Appropriation 13.1 (2020).
Corredera argues that Get Out’s emphasis on the bodily and psychological violence black individuals experience from white supremacy offers a framework in which Othello’s intense reactions can be attributed to the white supremacy around him rather than his race. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. “‘Not a Moor Exactly’: Shakespeare, Serial, and Modern Constructions of Race.
Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1 (2016): 30–50.
Corredera writes that scholars tend to distinguish between early modern and contemporary understandings of race through reference to a supposedly more uniform modern notion of race. Corredera pushes back on this assumption on a stable contemporary concept of race and argues for putting today’s protean idea of race in conversation with its similarly multifarious early modern precursor. Corredera argues that this practice can help us to better understand the complexities of race’s construction both then and now. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. “The Moor Makes a Cameo: Serial, Shakespeare, and the White Racial Frame.” The
Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation. eds. Christy
Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson. Routledge, London and New York,
2020. 359-69. #PCRS
This article uses Joe R. Feagin’s conceptualization of the white racial frame to draw
parallels between the way Serial’s host and producer Sara Koenig centers her voice and affective experiences over those of her subjects, all persons of color, with Iago’s similar strategies for making his own perspective dominant. This homology calls scholars to “be wary about the invisibility of the ideological frames used to understand Shakespare, and those frames that Shakespeare is used to reify…” (362).
Dadabhoy, Ambereen. “Wincing at Shakespeare: Looking B(l)ack at the Bard.” in “Shakespeare in Black America.” Journal of American Studies vol. 54. 1. 2020 (82-88). This article explores the connection between Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor and Black American engagement with Shakespeare, arguing that Cobb’s appropriation of Othello exposes the limits drawn by the dominant white culture around Black artists claims to “the Bard.” @DrDadabhoy #PCRS
----. “The Moor of America: Approaching the Crisis of Race and Religion in the Renaissance and the Twenty-First Century.” Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2014. 123-140. Dadabhoy explores the ways in which Barack Obama’s candidacy and presidency raised questions of religious and racial belonging that contained echoes of Shakespeare’s Othello. She examines how Obama and Othello negotiate their identity to test the limits of western liberalism and humanism. @DrDadabhoy #PCRS
Daileader, Celia. Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Interracial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Daileader observes that the most widely-read works of literature that portray interracial sex most often feature black males and white females. She analyzes the effects of this trend, which she calls "Othellophilia," in literature spanning from the Renaissance to today.
de Barros, Eric. “(Ig)Noble Lies: Personal Historicism and Richard Mulcaster’s Positions
Concerning the Bringing Up of Children (1581).” Changing English, vol. 20, no. 3,
2013, pp. 317–26.
Abstract: Attempting to push early modern presentism to the radical, logical conclusion of a more personal historicism, this essay draws on a number of interpretive practices and theoretical insights--Stephen Greenblatt's self-reflectivity, Toni Morrison's "rememory," Marianne Hirsch's "postmemory," bell hooks's "passion of experience," and Linda Charnes's alternative historicism--to establish the ethical and interpretive significance of my own painful situatedness as an African American man in Renaissance/Early Modern studies. Specifically, I illustrate that significance in a reading of Richard Mulcaster's "Positions Concerning the Bringing Up of Children," a sixteenth-century educational treatise that responds, as I argue, to early modern educational access and social mobility with an insidiously complex, exclusionary admissions policy.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Distiller, Natasha. "Authentic Protest, Authentic Shakespeare, Authentic Africans:
Performing Othello in South Africa." Comparative Drama, vol. 46 no. 3, 2012, p.
339-354.
Distiller describes the racial and gender politics involved in presenting Othello onstage in South Africa. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Duncan, Sophie. “‘Washing the Ethiope White’: Biography of a Handkerchief.”
Shakespeare’s Props, Routledge, 2019.
Abstract: “This chapter looks at originally black, African surface that has been ‘washed’ since the Renaissance. This is the stolen handkerchief in William Shakespeare’s Jacobean tragedy Othello a black textile washed white less wittingly but no less troublingly than in Victorian advertisements for detergents or in banned 1930s cartoons. In 2005, Michael Neill noted that, with the twentieth century’s civil rights struggles, ‘the significance of Othello’s blackness has come to dominate interpretation of the play to an extraordinary degree’. His essay contrasts this emphasis on race with the historical periods of apparent indifference to or acceptance of the otherwise loaded issue of Othello and Desdemona’s interracial marriage. Lynda Boose’s Shakespeare ‘insistently created for his audience a highly visual picture of a square piece of white linen spotted with strawberry-red fruit’, which functioned as ‘a visually recognizable reduction of Othello and Desdemona’s wedding-bed sheets, the visual proof of their consummated marriage’.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Erickson, Peter. Citing Shakespeare: The Reinterpretation of Race in Contemporary Literature and Art. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Erickson examines Shakespeare's writing as it is quoted or cited in works of literature and art by black artists. @ProfKFH #PCRS
Espinosa, Ruben. Espinosa, Ruben. "A ‘nation of such barbarous temper’: Beyond the White Savior of Sir Thomas More." Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 39 no. 4, 2021, p. 683-694. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/852592.
From abstract: “Shakespeare’s social capital positions him as a touchstone for those attentive to social justice issues, and as such, his works are often thought to offer understandings or answers to the manifold social ills we encounter. When it comes to the plight of refugees, Shakespeare is frequently deployed to lend his authority to those who champion an ethics of hospitality. Shakespeare’s Globe, for example, collaborated with The International Rescue Committee to produce the speech from Sir Thomas More, ‘The Stranger’s Case,’ for World Refugee Day 2018. … Such performances have become somewhat commonplace when considering anti-immigrant sentiments, but beyond working on our pathos, they offer very little in regard to the lived experiences of refugees/immigrants. This essay considers the energies and the pitfalls behind such performances as a means of scrutinizing how the actual, horrific policies for family separation that are in place on the US-Mexico border need much more than Shakespeare. Without doubt, the theater has the power to influence its audiences, but when it comes to attention to the oppression of Black and brown individuals, the efficacy of the theater is left in doubt. While calls for humane treatment of immigrants are certainly necessary, a pointed interrogation of the structures and architects of white supremacy is where we need to focus the collective energies of our academy.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing / @allo_nothing)
----. Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism. Routledge, 2021.
Espinosa puts contemporary racial issues and Shakespeare’s plays into conversation in order to better understand both and to understand Shakespeare’s significance for the contemporary issues. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Frazier, Marten. "Approaching Insurrection through Early-Modern Texts." English Journal,
vol. 111, no. 1, 2021, pp. 92-94.
Frazier discusses using The Merchant of Venice, Sir Thomas More, and Loomba and Burton’s Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion to address today’s xenophobic and racist conspiracy theories and disinformation with high schoolers. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Grady, Kyle. "Othello, Colin Powell, and Post-Racial Anachronisms." Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1 (2016): 68-83.
from abstract: “This essay engages the more equivocal contours of the play’s intolerance toward its Moor, arguing that it is precisely this complexity that characterizes regimes of racialism. Colin Powell provides a helpful point of juxtaposition because the former American secretary of state encourages debates about the prevalence of modern-day racism. To many, Powell’s ascent signals racism’s disappearance… But critics of such post-racial perspectives have cogently demonstrated that an over-investment in narratives of racial transcendence hides and thus aids the persistence of more subtle and pernicious forms of racialization. In this essay, a study of Powell’s reception informs an approach to Shakespeare’s tragedy. …. it prompts the field to move away from conceptions of racism in which intolerance is too easily controverted by shows of tolerance, because such reductive notions inhibit the historicization of a nuanced early modern racialism.”
Gonsalez, Marcos. “Caliban Never Belonged to Shakespeare |.” Literary Hub (blog), July 26, 2019. https://lithub.com/caliban-never-belonged-to-shakespeare/.
“Something becomes clear to me throughout the years taking these many classes in the United States education system. Something becomes clear to me while writing from the margins, as a poor and gay and mentally ill and fat and Mexican-Puerto Rican person existing in the margins of the United States. I, Caliban, am meant to be in awe of, always under the tutelage and auspices of, an imitation of and a foil to, never, dare I even say it, to surpass, these many Prosperos.” Useful for discussions of whiteness, Latinx Shakespeare and Pedagogy. @ProfKFH #PCRS
Grier, Miles. “Are Shakespeare’s Plays Racially Progressive? The Answer Is in Our Hands,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, ed. Ayanna Thompson, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 237–53.
Grier argues that Shakespeare’s plays’ potential for antiracist and redistributive work (or its contrary) lies in how we choose to perform them, not in understanding authorial intent. Grier provides analyses of a number of Shakespearean productions to illustrate this argument.
----. “Toni Morrison and the Masquerade of Black Oral Imprint with a Meditation on the Preparation of Soft-Boiled Eggs” in Masquerade: Scripturalizing Modernities through Black Flesh, ed. Vincent Wimbush (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2023)
Grier tracks the early modern consignment of Africans to the realm of the illiterate to its aesthetic resolution in Toni Morrison’s depictions of print and orality in Song of Solomon and Beloved.
Hall, Kim F. “I Can’t Love This the Way You Want Me to: Archival Blackness.” Postmedieval 11, no. 2–3 (2020): 171–79.
In our introduction to the first Shakespeare Quarterly special issue on early modern race studies, Peter Erickson and I spoke of a ‘desire to sing a new scholarly song’ (Erickson and Hall, 2016, 13). Researching my current project, ‘Othello Was My Grandfather: Shakespeare and Race in the African Diaspora,’ I come across many Othello ‘citings’ that defy being folded into a traditional scholarly narrative, and I have been experimenting with incorporating personal voice – my strange style, if you will – in my writing. Responding to Ayanna Thompson’s intervention about the placement of the political investments of early modern race studies and the astute insights of Eric Debarros about the ways my personal experience recedes into the background in my earlier work, this is a personal meditation offering a sense of what it’s like to follow traces of Othello in archives meant to celebrate white achievement (De Barros, 2016, 623–4; Thompson 2008, 259–60). #PCRS @ProfKFH
Henderson, Diana E. “Catalysing What? Historical Remediation, the Musical, and what of Love’s Labour’s Lasts.” Shakespeare Survey 64: Shakespeare as Cultural Catalyst. Ed. Peter Holland. Cambridge University Press, 2011: 97-113.
This essay examines the first West End Black British musical based on "Love's Labour's Lost," reset with the Windrush immigrants coming to London (and its scholarly invisibility, v. Branagh's musical version). -Diana Henderson
------“Othello Redux?: Scott’s Kenilworth and the Trickiness of ‘Race’ on the Nineteenth-century Stage.” Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 2: Literature and Culture. Eds. Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003: 14-29.
Henderson examines the transposition of Othello’s storyline onto a white character in Walter Scott’s 1821 historical novel Kenilworth in order “to understand some key changes in the cultural place of Othello, most notably bearing upon race and gender” (17). Henderson concludes that this erasure of blackness contributed to a ‘whitening’ of Othello in nineteenth-century culture but that it also allowed for other types of ethnic conflict to be explored.
Hendricks, Margo. “Visions of Color: Spectacle, Spectators, and the Performance of Race.” A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W.B. Worthen. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 511-526.
Hendricks writes that race was largely a matter of performativity in the early modern period. Hendrick then considers how this performativity informs understanding s of passing and authenticity within the text and in performance.
Heng, Geraldine. “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages.” Literature Compass 8.5 (2011): 259-274.#PCRS
See description below the following entry.
------. “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race.” Literature Compass 8.5 (2011): 275-293. NOW included in the 2018 book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages
In this pair of essays, Heng offers both a catalogue of racial phenomena and representation in the Middle Ages and a larger critique of temporality in canonical critical race theory. She argues that even though CRT recognizes that “race has “no singular or stable referent” and that race “is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content” (262), it nonetheless still relies on the narrative of race as an Enlightenment- based phenomenon and ignores the pre-and early modern eras as part of “racial time, largely because this genealogy serves the interests of certain conceptions of modernity: “Like many a theoretical discourse, race theory is predicated on an unexamined narrative of temporality in the West: a grand recit that reifies modernity as telos and origin and [262] that, once installed, entrenches the delivery of a paradigmatic chronology of racial time through mechanisms of intellectual replication pervasive in the Western academy, and circulated globally” (262-63). (see abstracts at beginning of each essay for more detail.) @ProfKFH
Hilb, Benjamin. “Afro-Haitian-American Ritual Power: Vodou in the Welles-FTP Voodoo Macbeth.” Shakespeare Bulletin 32.4 (Winter 2014): 649-681.
This essay examines the Afro-Haitian religious dimension of the famous 1936 Federal Theatre Project production of “Voodoo Macbeth” in Harlem. It was published with responses by Ayanna Thompson, Peter Erickson, and Marguerite Rippy. Issues discussed include race and reception; religion, race, and authenticity; adaptation, appropriation, and history.
Kemp, Sawyer K. "Two Othellos, Transitioning Anti-Blackness: A Dialogue with Skyler Cooper." Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 39 no. 4, 2021, p. 651-665. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/852590.
Abstract: “This essay grows out of an interview with actor, director, and activist Skyler Cooper. In Livermore Shakespeare Festival’s 2019 season, Cooper was fêted as the first transgender man to play the role of Othello, but it was actually his second time in the part. Cooper had previously performed a butch lesbian version of Othello in Impact Theatre’s 2005 production. In dialogue with Cooper’s account of the two roles, this essay posits that Cooper’s unique lived experience and performance history illustrate the intersections of gender, race, and trans identity both in Othello and in the contemporary American landscape. Although both characterizations represent cisgender interpretations of Othello as male and female, respectively, this essay engages critical race studies and transgender theory to argue that within and across these productions we can read a third interpretation: a transgender and transmasculine Othello whose experience of racist interpersonal violence, microaggressions, and gaslighting speaks to a contemporary Black transmasculine perspective that is often forgotten or ignored.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing / @allo_nothing)
Lester, Adrian. “Othello: A Performance Perspective,” in Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 223–36.
Abstract: “Adrian Lester talks us through his research in preparation for his portrayal of Othello at the National Theatre in 2013. His examination of the play’s racial politics in performance includes interviews with Iago (Rory Kinnear), Desdemona (Olivia Vinall), and the iconic James Earl Jones who has played Othello four times. In this chapter Lester argues that our reaction to the play is not based on Shakespeare’s intentions but based on Western culture’s manipulative, complex racial history and sexual politics – a history that clouds any attempt at a balanced view when looking at these subjects.”
Little, Arthur L., Jr. “Black Hamlet, Social Justice, and The Minds of Apartheid.” The Arden
Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice, edited by David Ruiter, Bloomsbury,
2021, pp. 74–93.
Little discusses freedom and self-determination in relation to Wulf Sachs’s Black Hamlet, growing racism and antisemitism, and how Shakespeare can help up to reject these trends. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Litvin, Margaret. Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011.
This book explores how Arabs have consistently turned to the figure of Hamlet to comment on their own politics.
MacDonald, Joyce Green. “Actresses of Color and Shakespearean Performance: The Question of Reception,” in Ayanna Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021. 208–22.
MacDonald examines how two prominent black female Shakespearean elocutionists responded to the racist gatekeeping that prevented them from performing Shakespearean roles in plays. Henrietta Vinton Davis ultimately gave up performance for political organizing, while Adrienne McLean Herndon began a tradition of Shakespearean performance and ownership at HBCUs.
Newstok, Scott L. and Ayanna Thompson, eds. Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
The essays in Weyward Macbeth take up different performances and interpretations of Macbeth spanning from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries in order to explore the connections between the play and American racial formation.
Oldenburg, Scott. “The View from Here: The Tempest and Race in New Orleans.” English: Journal English Association (advanced online printing, October 2019). https://academic.oup.com/english/advance-article/doi/10.1093/english/efz039/5584221
This article examines the anxious construction of whiteness in The Tempest and a number of Tempest-related artworks from New Orleans. Oldenburg connects Prospero’s incessant storytelling to the South’s clinging to Confederate monuments. @scottkoldenburg
Pikli, Natália. “Staging The Merchant of Venice in Hungary: Politics, Prejudice and
Languages of Hatred.” Shakespeare’s Others in 21st-Century European
Performance: The Merchant of Venice and Othello, edited by Boika Sokolova and
Janice Valls-Russell, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 152–70.
Pikli discusses how a 2013 Hungarian production of The Merchant of Venice took a political stand against antisemitism in Hungary while a 2016 Hungarian production sidestepped political engagement with Jewishness or antisemitism and discusses the political context for this fairly rapid shift in how artists approached the play. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Pittman, L. Monique. “Resisting History and Atoning of Racial Privilege: Shakespeare’s
Henriad in HBO’s The Wire.” The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global
Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet et al., Routledge, 2020, pp. 378–87.
Abstract: “Much of The Wire reminds its audience of racial and economic privileges denied a wide range of the series’ characters. The Shakespearean presence in The Wire constitutes a move to expand the audience who hears the stories to which Simon lends voice. The creators of The Wire remain keenly aware of the danger inherent in that task — that representing the underclass from a position of privilege can devolve into a troubling aestheticization of suffering. Passivity in the face of overwhelming human suffering and the intransigence of culpable institutional structures may threaten the efficacy of The Wire as a catalyst for social change. The writing of history both reveals and conceals, speaks and silences. Historiography transforms the concrete and the ephemeral evidences of an always-already vanished past into consumable narrative. Though history serves a self-definitional function for a dominant group, its gaps, fissures, shards, and denials inevitably prompt disruptive questions.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Pittman, L. Monique. Shakespeare’s Contested Nations: Race, Gender, and Multicultural
Britain in Performances of the History Plays. Taylor and Francis, 2022.
From abstract: “Shakespeare’s Contested Nations argues that performances of Shakespearean history at British institutional venues between 2000 and 2016 manifest a post-imperial nostalgia that fails to tell the nation’s story in ways that account for the agential impact of women and people of color, thus foreclosing promising opportunities to reexamine the nation’s multicultural past, present, and future in more intentional, self-critical, and truly progressive ways.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Royster, Francesca T. Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Royster looks at different representations of Cleopatra in theater, film, and literature in terms of how these representations perform her race and sexuality. #PCRS
-----. “The ‘End of Race’ and the Future of Early Modern Cultural Studies.” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 59-69. #PCRS
In this essay, Royster focuses on productions of Othello and the ways that they perform black masculinity. She argues that in order to study Shakespeare and early modern England, scholars must engage with historicity in order to "expos[e] the points of crisis with our own sense of racial categorization” (63).
Smith, Ian. “We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies.” Shakespeare
Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2016): 104–24.
Smith considers Othello’s anxiety, in his final speech, of having his story relayed by a white teller in connection with the racial divide on attitudes toward black lives in the United States. Smith argues that the white narrator of Othello’s speech anticipates the scholars’ avoidance of racial topics and realities within the white-dominated field of Shakespeare studies. Smith offers identifying with Othello (in contrast to the Othering scholars frequently subject him but not white characters to) as a means of disrupting this trend. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Smith, Cassander L., Nick Jones, Miles Grier, editors. Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies. Palgrave 2018. #PCRS
The essays that make up this volume offer new critical approaches to black African agency and the conceptualization of blackness in early modern literary works, historical documents, material and visual cultures, and performance culture. The sources include French, Spanish, and English law, travel literature, choreography, and theatre. Ultimately, this critical anthology revises current understandings about both racial discourse and the cultural contributions of black African s in early modernity and in the present across the globe.
Thompson, Ayanna, ed. Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance. New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2006. #PCRS
The essays in Colorblind Casting look at the history of colorblind/nontraditional casting in productions of Shakespeare's plays in England and America since the 1950s.
-----. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. #PCRS
In Passing Strange, Thompson analyzes how Shakespeare is positioned within American culture and how that positioning interacts with racial identity in America. She considers literature, film, digital media, and stage performances in a few different contexts, including prison reform programs.
Valls-Russell, Janice. “The Merchant of Venice in France (2001 and 2017): Deconstructing a
Malaise.” Shakespeare’s Others in 21st-Century European Performance: The
Merchant of Venice and Othello, edited by Boika Sokolova and Janice Valls-Russell,
Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 108–26.
Valls-Russell writes about two French productions of The Merchant of Venice (a rather uncommon occurrence, she notes) that reflect on recent antisemitic violence in France and suggest that French republican ideals are giving way to hostility toward those seen as outsiders. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Walker, Jessica. “‘What Should His Sufferance Be?’ Protesting Injustice in Shakespeare’s
Venice and the Age of Black Lives Matter.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 54, no.
1, Feb. 2020, pp. 44–50.
Abstract: “This essay considers the impossibility faced by The Merchant of Venice’s Shylock in seeking redress for his suffering and how dismissal of his complaints parallels criticism of protests against racial injustice in the twenty-first century, with particular attention to Colin Kaepernick's 2016 protest against police brutality. Venice's idealization of Christ-like passivity and our own age's veneration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence create impossible standards for those attempting to call attention to injustice, leading to condemnation of protesters’ actions and misinterpretation of their motives.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Weissbourd, Emily. “Beyond Othello: Juan Latino in Black America.” Journal of American Studies 54, no. 1 (February 2020): 59–65.
This essay focusses on references to the sixteenth-century black poet and scholar Juan Latino in African American journals in the 1920s–1940s. Although Juan Latino is largely forgotten in the present day, publications such as the Journal of Negro History and the New Negro referred to the poet as an important figure in the intellectual history of the African diaspora. My essay posits Juan Latino (both the historical figure and an early modern play about him) as an alternative exemplar of blackness in early modern Europe to that found in Othello. By turning to Juan Latino instead of to Othello, scholars in the 1920s–1940s were able to suggest a transnational and transhistorical black diasporic identity linked with African American solidarity with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.” (abstract) @ProfKFH
Westfall, Suzanne. "Love in the Contact Zone: Gender, Culture, and Race in The Merchant
of Venice". Shakespeare's Comedies of Love, U of Toronto P, 2016, pp. 126-154.
Edited by Karen Bamford and Ric Knowles.
Westfall “discuss[s] The Merchant of Venice in terms of what Mary Louise Pratt calls ‘contact zones,’ areas where cultures meet to negotiate power and to express, in rhetorical structures, the various tensions that inform relationships between genders, between generations, between religions, and between ethnicities. By examining the convergence, collisions, and transformations that occur as these diverse characters slouch toward their act 5 denouement, [Westfall] hope[s] to show how seventeenth-century concerns about miscegenation, feminism, and homoeroticism continue to preoccupy performers and audiences today” (p. 126). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Black Africans in Renaissance Europe
Interpretations of the black presences in Renaissance Europe focusing on the Black Magus and St Maurice from a graduate of Art History from the Open University
A contemporary Art and Archive project celebrating John Blanke the Black trumpeter to the Tudor courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII.
Medieval POC: People of Color in European Art History (http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/)
This is a Tumblr (a short-form blog or microblog) that is a portal to the largest publicly available collection of images of POC in pre-Enlightenment art. It was anonymously created to “address common misconceptions that People of Color did not exist in Europe before the Enlightenment,” and to emphasize the cognitive dissonance in the way this is reflected in media produced today.” It advocates for both antiracism and historical accuracy by showcasing the presence of People of Color and attempting to introduce viewers to new works of art as well as to encourage viewers to look at well known works with a different perspective. Despite the title, Medieval POC is less concerned with the Middle Ages per se (indeed its author complains about traditional notions of historical period in the 19th century) and more concerned with the historiography of race; that is how history is written and specifically how History as a discipline writes about and creates race. Thus it includes artworks from as early as the twelfth century and as late as the eighteenth century. It is makes robust use of both categories and tags, so that users can search for entries by time period or by subject. The content is also shared on a regular basis across social media: Twitter (@medievalpoc), a separate website (http://medievalpoc.org/), Facebook, etc. You do not need a password to access the content on Tumblr or the website, but may for other platforms. -K.F. Hall
An extensive digitized postcard collection that features Shakespeare performances in New York and the UK from the 1880s to 1914. Website also features much information about Shakespeare performances between these dates on both sides of the Atlantic. From Justin Shaw for Emory University's Center for Digital Scholarship. @justinpshaw
TIDE: Travel, Transculturality, and Identity in England, c. 1550-1700.
This five year project (2016-2021) “aims to investigate how mobility in the great age of travel and discovery shaped English perceptions of human identity based on cultural identification and difference. The role of those marked by transcultural mobility was central to this period. Trade, diplomacy and politics, religious schisms, shifts in legal systems, all attempted to control and formalise the identity of such figures. Our current world is all too familiar with the concepts that surfaced or evolved as a result: foreigners, strangers, aliens, converts, exiles, or even translators, ambassadors and go-betweens. By examining how different discourses tackled the fraught question of human identity in this era, TIDE will open a new perspective on cross-cultural encounters. It will put pressure on our understanding of cultural difference, transculturality and identity, and generate a new understanding of key terms, concepts, and debates. It will produce new knowledge about the unique role played by literature, and even as the project illuminates how some of our key concepts of cultural difference and identity took shape, that research will be used by writers to generate new literature about our encounters with those same issues today. This project will consolidate our fragmented understanding of transculturality and the idea of ‘betweenness’ in the early modern period, which continues to have a significant impact on the contemporary world.” (From website) The site has an extensively researched “Keywords” section as well as case studies, and scholarly presentations. @ProfKFH
MOVES: Migration and Modernity
This European joint doctorate “identifies the contemporary issue of migration as a problem to be treated within the wide context of modernity, acknowledging the way it has shaped European identity, first in the outward thrust of European nations in colonial movements, then through emigration from many European countries, and recently through immigration as the predominant form of mobility in Europe.” Project is in the early stages, but several relevant publications have ensued and are listed here. (SI)
Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Premodern Critical Race Studies: New Directions. 2021. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tevzvjaw58A. [Video recording.]
From description: “This roundtable brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss new methodologies in premodern critical race studies. Branching from art history, history of the African diaspora, history of medicine in science, European history, and more, these scholars offered new lines of inquiry that enrich premodern critical race studies. Featuring the work of Herman Bennett, Surekha Davies, Cécile Fromont, Pablo F Gómez, and Hannah Murphy, this roundtable asked: what futures can we imagine for premodern critical race studies with new methodologies and practices?” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Shakespeare and Indigeneity: A Dialogue with Natalie Diaz, Scott M. Stevens, and Madeline Sayet. 2020. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieJWMBbiSXg. [Video record.]
From description: “This conversation between Natalie Diaz and Scott Manning Stevens, moderated by Madeline Sayet, imagines the spaces and interactions between Shakespeare, contemporary poetry, performance, and indigeneity. An informal and fluid dialogue, our speakers ask us questions about Shakespeare's role in Indigenous Studies, in the way we think about language, and in terms of decolonizing on the canon.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Upstream: A Conversation Between Two Early Career Scholars of Color. 2021. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS6zdP3e46E. [Video recording.]
From description: “Featuring ACMRS Short Term Residencies Letha Ch'ien and Mira Assaf Kafantaris. An art historian and a literary critic talk about race, both as a subject in their work and as a lived experience in the academy. Recognizing that the personal cannot be separated from the political, they reflect on disciplines that have traditionally positioned Whiteness as the neutral and universal. In this conversation, they consider their own personal narratives alongside critical reflections on methodology. What does it mean to become undisciplined in pre-modern studies in 2021?” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies - RaceB4Race
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Region and Enmity: A RaceB4Race Symposium. [Video recordings. Program found here.]
Early Modern Typography/Race/Gender Roundtable. The Bibliographical Society of America, 2021. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_dSpWp1dE. [Video recording.]
From description: “B.K. Adams, Erika Boeckeler, Claire M. L. Bourne, Jill Gage and Miles P. Grier “discuss from various angles the metaphorics and literal uses of type, ink, paper, and the mechanics of printing to demonstrate how textual design functioned as a site for negotiating and securing a discourse of whiteness that—in effect and in reality—marginalized non-conforming bodies and identities. We will also discuss whether early modern typography might challenge this discourse.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Folger Shakespeare Library - Critical Race Conversations
Folger Shakespeare Library, Shakespeare’s Birthday 2020: Whiteness: A Primer for Understanding Shakespeare. 2020. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsD0DNk-0Oo. [Video recording.]
From description: “The Folger Institute’s annual birthday lecture may be postponed, but our lecturer Ian Smith discusses the premise behind his topic: that race cannot be narrowed to an association with blackness. Rather, Smith calls for an understanding of whiteness as everywhere implied, but nowhere acknowledged. If it sparks self-scrutiny and personal accountability, such an understanding may make us more credible bearers of the twinned traditions of Shakespeare and humanism.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Folger Shakespeare Library. Shakespeare Unlimited: Podcast Episodes by Topic: Race, Gender and Identity. https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/podcast-episodes-by-topic#identity.
“Invisible Bondage: The Other Side of Working on Shakespeare and Race in the Age of COVID-19.” University of Maryland Department of English, 2020. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHTaNbkXrEk. [Video recording.]
From description: “The ‘Antiracism: Research, Teaching, Public Engagement’ series of the Center for Literary & Comparative Studies continued with Professor David Sterling Brown (SUNY Binghamton) and Professor Arthur Little (UCLA) reflecting on the invisible labor of Black scholars in Shakespeare studies, especially in this historical moment of Black Lives Matter (#BLM) and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black communities. Their conversation focused on the nostalgia of whiteness in Shakespeare studies as well as the pervasive violence BIPOC scholars face in the academy.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Issa, Islam with Rhiannon Davies. “How Shakespeare Inspired Terrorists: Islam Issa
Reveals How Terrorists Have Twisted Shakespeare’s Life and Work to Suit Their
Own Ends over the Centuries.” 27 November 2021. BBC, History Extra Podcast.
https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/how-shakespeare-inspired-terrorist
s-podcast-roderick-beaton/. [Audio recording.]
Islam Issa discusses how groups including the American Confederacy and the Nazis have used Shakespeare for their purposes.
Joubin, Alexa Alice. Asian Embodiment of a White Canon: Shakespeare on Film/Stage with
Dr. Alexa Alice Joubin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP3735KLpIg. San Diego
Shakespeare. [Video recording.]
From video description: “Dr. Joubin will illustrate through entertaining examples how Shakespeare is connected to theatre, film, and literature in East Asia. Her book identifies four themes: Japanese formalistic innovations in sound and spectacle; reparative adaptations from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; the politics of gender and reception of films and touring productions in South Korea and the UK; and multilingual works in Singapore and the UK. These adaptations are reshaping debates about the relationship between East Asia and Europe, and this book reveals deep connections among Asian and Anglophone performances.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing / @allo_nothing )
Karim-Cooper, Farah. Shakespeare, Race and Performance.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/shakespeare-race. Gresham College
Lecture Series, Museum of London. [Video recording].
Description: “How do Shakespeare's familiar plays Othello and Romeo and Juliet reflect the early modern preoccupation with race and emerging concepts of colour-based racism? How do these ideas play out in early modern as well as in contemporary performance?” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Lafayette College. Keefe Colloquium in the Public Humanities: “Shakespeare, Race, and
Queer Sexuality”. https://sites.lafayette.edu/symposium-2021/program/. [Video
recordings.]
This colloquium in Lafayette College's "Shakespeare and Race" series focuses on queer sexuality, Shakespeare, and race. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
NHC Virtual Book Club: “Othello Was My Grandfather.” National Humanities Center, 2020. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o7wtZt4Dqc. [Video recording.]
Kim Hall “places “Othello: The Moor of Venice” in an Afrodiasporic family story by exploring appearances of Othello and “Shakespeare” in the African Diaspora, specifically at sites of the Black freedom struggle. She suggests that we learn much about modern Blackness from how Afrodiasporic peoples evoke, appropriate, and contest “Shakespeare” in their quest to make legible new political Black identities. The talk covers: the role of Shakespeare in constructions of Blackness and race; the appropriation of Shakespeare by Black communities; the policing of canonical literature along racial lines; and the race and gender politics of the American stage and popular media” (from description). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
NPR Code Switch. All That Glisters Is Not Gold. https://www.npr.org/2019/08/21/752850055/all-that-glisters-is-not-gold. [Podcast and transcript.]
The hosts and Ayanna Thompson discuss whether it is a good idea to use The Merchant of Venice as a way for students to confront antisemitism. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Shakespeare Association of America 50th Anniversary Plenary Panel: Fifty Years of Early Modern Critical Race Studies. 8 April 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTMZKfXEFrQ. [audio only] Jacksonville, Florida.
Ruben Espinosa, “Borders, Bridges, Shakespeare, and My Twin Skin”; Lisa M. Barksdale-Shaw, “‘Unless thou bear a mind courageous and invincible’: Neurological Imaging, Race, and Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine”; Ian Smith, “Blind Spots: Confessions of a Shakespeare Scholar”. Organizer: Ian Smith. Chair: Farah Karim-Cooper.
Shakespeare Teachers’ Conversation: Teaching Anti-Racism through Shakespeare. The English Association, 2020. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=514eXyZ5kBo. [Video recording.]
Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi discuss using Shakespere to teach anti-racism. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Shakespeare’s Globe - Anti-Racist Shakespeare/Shakespeare & Race
SiPC4 (4th International Shakespeare in Prisons Conference). Shakespeare at Notre Dame, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF2QbT7cszC783c74ZIYYrVkoq0CAESH9. [Playlist of video recordings.]
From description: “SiPC4 gathers theatre arts practitioners, researchers, and scholars who are currently engaged with or interested in programs for incarcerated (and post-incarcerated) populations.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
The Show Must Go Online: Hamlet. The Show Must Go Online, 2020. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIDkPcYdSG0. [Video.]
This online production of Hamlet begins with David Sterling Brown giving a critical introduction that “offers a preview of his scholarship that will appear in Arden’s forthcoming Hamlet: The State of Play volume” (from description). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Thompson, Ayanna, Peter Sellars, Library Foundation of Los Angeles. ALOUD @ Los
Angeles Public Library. “Shakespeare Now: Race, Justice and the American Dream”.
https://lfla.org/media-archive/shakespeare-now-race-justice-american-dream/.
January 19, 2017. [Audio recording.]
Episode description: “Peter Sellars, the renowned avant-garde theater director, and Ayanna Thompson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar, will discuss the ways Shakespeare remains relevant in our contemporary American world. From expressions of black rage to the challenges facing systems of justice, they hope to illustrate how Shakespeare’s plays provide rich texts through which the most pressing problems in our world can be debated and solutions become, perhaps, imaginable.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Under This Light: A Revelation of Shakespeare and Self. Seattle Shakespeare and Lamar
Legend. https://www.seattleshakespeare.org/under-this-light/. [Podcasts.]
Website description: “Seattle Shakespeare Company’s podcast series gathers locally and nationally recognized POC theatre professionals [some from within academia, some not] for a conversation about their relationship with Shakespeare and the classics. Each episode in this new, biweekly series hosted by Lamar Legend, Seattle Shakespeare Company’s Diversity Programming Coordinator, explores the guest artist’s background and career to uncover personal triumphs, current struggles, future ambitions, while revealing what Shakespeare means to them.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Abonyi, Odirin V. “Context and Co-Text in Bernard Ogini’s Hamlet for Pidgin (Oga Pikin).”
Shakespeare in Southern Africa, vol. 34, Jan. 2021, pp. 44–52.
doi:10.4314/sisa.v34i1.4.
From abstract: “This article examines a phenomenon that may trigger a resurgence in the pleasure of reading or watching performances of Shakespeare's plays in Nigeria: adaptation and translation into Naija (previously Nigerian Pidgin). Specifically, it examines how the Naija translation Hamlet for Pidgin (Oga Pikin) is prototypical for such a revival. The study adopts a comparative approach and explicates how anaphoric reformulation (AR), cataphoric reformulation (CR) and exophoric reformulation (ER) condition the translation's peculiar lexico-semantic choices in terms of borrowing, reduplicatives, calquing and the like. These forms enter a networked relationship within the co-text and context to bring about a contemporary equivalent to Hamlet. …The article concludes that this translation is also significant for its shift away from the cathartic effect of Shakespearean tragedy and towards a comic mode that has greater popular appeal.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Bharucha, Rustom. “Foreign Asia/Foreign Shakespeare: Dissenting Notes on New Asian
Interculturality, Postcoloniality, and Recolonization.” Theatre Journal, vol. 56, no. 1,
2004, pp. 1–28.
Bharucha works through the ways Asia and Shakespeare interrelate (often with a potential for conflict and generally in conjunction with ideas of foreignness) in an effort to decolonize both topics. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Brown, David Sterling. "I Feel Most White When I Am . . .: Foregrounding the “Sharp White Background” of Anchuli Felicia King’s Keene." Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 39 no. 4, 2021, p. 577-593. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/852586.
Brown considers Keene within a “dramatic Black genealogy that has developed from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century,” describes its color-consciousness, “examines the “productive discomfort” generated by King’s art,” and “challenges white people, and all who operate with internalized white supremacy and anti-Blackness, to examine themselves and interrogate their own racist ways” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing / @allo_nothing)
---- and Sandra Young. "(Un)Just Acts: Shakespeare and Social Justice in Contemporary Performance." Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 39 no. 4, 2021, p. 529-535. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/852583.
This special issue introduction raises the questions, “does the field of Shakespeare studies contain the necessary tools and commitment to support the work of innovative theater practice? Is it doing everything it can to address persistent legacies of injustice and violence, and to attend to the pervasiveness of racism, sexism, misogyny, and other issues in its own structures?” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing / @allo_nothing )
Burnett, Mark T. "’Not that Cheapo China Con-Job’: Alterity, Race and Same-Sex Desire in
Jarum Halus, a Malaysian Film Adaptation of Othello." Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 34,
no. 4, 2016, pp. 554-575.
Burnett “argue[s] that Jarum Halus ‘translates’ Shakespeare in such a way as to understand race and same-sex desire as urgently linked thematic” (p. 554). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Cahill, Patricia A. “Adrienne Herndon’s Homeplaces: Shakespeare and Black Resistance in
Atlanta, c.1906.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 54, no. 1, Feb. 2020, pp. 51–58.
Cahill describes how Herndon used the teaching and performing of Shakespeare for resistance in the Jim Crow South. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Chatterjee, Koel. “Black Skin, White Masks: Izzat as an Appropriation of Othello.” Indian
Theatre Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, Aug. 2021, pp. 29–41,
https://doi.org/10.1386/itj_00014_1.
Chatterjee discusses Izzat as the first mainstream Hindi film to draw on Othello, “explore[s] the ways in which Shakespearean tropes, and in particular Shakespeare’s Othello, has been used to explore postcolonial anxieties about identity in India,” and “examine[s] how Othello impacts the Indian psyche and why the referencing of Othello in this film points towards the many ways in which Othello is adapted and appropriated in Indian mainstream media” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Cheesman, Tom. “Shakespeare and Othello in Filthy Hell: Zaimoglu and Senkel's
Politico-Religious Tradaptation,” Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 46,
Issue 2, April 2010, pp. 207–220,
https://doi-org.umiss.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/fmls/cqp165 [open access].
Cheesman writes that Zaimoglu and Senkel's German-language Othello “is a radical “tradaptation” in terms of language and plot. The script uses a simulation of contemporary multi-ethnic underclass slang, and alters the action of Shakespeare's play so as to comment on the European politics of “race” and migration, and the military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet such political allusions remain incidental. The script's focus is on emotional dynamics and (ir)religiosity. The writers' heterodox religious imagination opposes Europe's dominant ideology of secular humanism or atheistic materialism. Their play is self-evidently unfaithful to the word of Shakespeare, but as Carol Chillington Rutter has argued, it both reproduces the original shock effect of Othello and creates a new form of tragedy for our time” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Churin, Arnaud, and Janice Valls-Russell. “Inverting Othello in France (2019): Director
Arnaud Churin in Conversation with Janice Valls-Russell (University Paul-Valéry,
Montpellier, France).” Shakespeare’s Others in 21st-Century European Performance: The Merchant of Venice and Othello, edited by Boika Sokolova and Janice Valls-Russell, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 245–57.
Churin and Valls-Russell discuss Churin’s production of Othello, which emphasized gender and the interplay of race and racism with a variety of other topics and located its white Othello and otherwise black cast of other characters in a setting inspired by east Asian martial traditions. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Cimitile, Anna Maria. “‘Venice’ Is Elsewhere: The Stranger’s Locality, or Italian ‘Blackness’ in
Twenty-First-Century Stagings of Othello.” Shakespeare’s Others in 21st-Century
European Performance: The Merchant of Venice and Othello, edited by Boika
Sokolova and Janice Valls-Russell, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 29–48.
Writing that Italian adaptations of Othello have used verbal style and body language, rather than visible blackness, to mark racial otherness, Cimitile argues that productions use these strategies to resist movement toward cultural and linguistic homogeneity in Italy. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Cinpoes, Nicoleta. “‘Barbarous Temper’, ‘hideous Violence’ and ‘Mountainish Inhumanity’:
Stage Encounters with The Merchant of Venice in Romania.” Shakespeare’s Others
in 21st-Century European Performance: The Merchant of Venice and Othello, edited
by Boika Sokolova and Janice Valls-Russell, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 131–51.
Cinpoes writes that Romanian productions of The Merchant of Venice have used the play and Shylock’s Jewishness to reflect on a variety of othered ethnic and social identities within Romanian society. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Cocks, Malcom. “Re-Enacting Hamlet in Southern Africa.” The Arden Handbook of
Shakespeare and Social Justice, edited by David Ruiter, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp.
175–89.
Cocks examines the ongoing popularity within South Africa of the notion of Shakespeare’s universality. Cocks suggests that while this attitude is problematic, it can provide a vehicle for social justice by being a source of cultural capital. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Coonrod, Karin, et al. “The Merchant in Venice in the Venetian Ghetto (2016): Director Karin
Coonrod in Conversation with Boika Sokolova (University of Notre Dame, London,
UK) and Kirilka Stavreva (Cornell College, USA).” Shakespeare’s Others in
21st-Century European Performance: The Merchant of Venice and Othello, edited by
Boika Sokolova and Janice Valls-Russell, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 233–44.
Coonrod, Sokolva, and Stavreva discuss Coonrod’s production of The Merchant of Venice, which used the “estrangement” of multilingualism and actor doubling to explore multiplicity of forms in which diaspora and antisemitism come. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Corredera, Vanessa I. ““How Dey Goin’ to Kill Othello?!” Key & Peele and Shakespearean Universality.” Journal of American Studies 54, no. 1 (February 2020): 27–35. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875819001981. #PCRS
Claims for Shakespearean universality often position Shakespeare's works as resonating with all people across all time. But how far can one take such a claim? A 2013 sketch on Comedy Central's Key & Peele, entitled “Othello Tis My Shite!”, uses satire precisely in order to challenge assertions of Shakespearean universality. I argue that the sketch – which follows two Renaissance Moors, Lashawnio and Martinzion, who attend Shakespeare's Othello – suggests that Shakespeare may find the limits of speaking for “all people” when depicting black masculinity. Yet the sketch's twist ending helpfully proposes the transformative potential in Shakespeare for more effective, authentic representation. @ProfKFH from journal abstract
-----. ""Not a Moor Exactly": Shakespeare, Serial, and Modern Constructions of Race." Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 1 (Spring, 2016): 30-50,172.
This essay looks at the hit podcast Serial “to demonstrate that myriad issues, such as language, religion, appearance, and descent, often play pivotal roles in modern constructions of race. Considering the possibility of race in Renaissance texts can only provoke better, more thoughtful engagements with "iconic" literary works as well as potentially related pop-cultural texts” @ProfKFH #PCRS
Costa, Néka Da. “Positionality and Performance: Staging Antony and Cleopatra for South
African Schools in the Context of Decolonisation Imperatives.” Shakespeare in
Southern Africa, vol. 33, Institute for the Study of English in Africa, 2020, pp. 15–33.
Costa decribes the ideological complexities of putting on Antony and Cleopatra in South African schools in the context of pushes for decolonization and more broadly discusses actively working for social justice in the arts. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Courtney, Krystyna Kujawińska. “Othello in Poland, A Prevailingly Homogenous Ethnic
Country.” The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, edited
by Christy Desmet et al., Routledge, 2020, pp. 243–53.
Courtney “presents ‘post-racial’ theatrical adaptations of Othello in Poland,” an ethnically homogenous country in which theatre tends to reflect the nation’s social and political climate (p. 243). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Cox, Emma. "Reconciling Shakespeare and Indigeneity in Australia: Star-Cross'd
Communities and Racial "Tempests"." Australasian Drama Studies, 2004, pp. 78-95.
From abstract: “Two performances presented in Brisbane, Australia, in 1999, in which William Shakespeare and indigeneity converge are examined…. It is argued that both performances examine racial prejudice and create narratives of reconciliation and co-operation between indigenous and Euro-Australians, both onstage and off.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Della Gatta, Carla, “Shakespeare, Race, and ‘Other’ Englishes: The Q Brothers’s Othello: The
Remix,” in Shakespeare Survey, Special Edition on ‘Re-Creating Shakespeare’, Vol. 71 (2018):
74–87.
Della Gatta writes a genealogy of hip-hop Shakespeares. She looks closely at the Q Brothers’
Othello: The Remix and the responses to the adaptation that were based on reading, and ´
mis-reading race.
Demeter, Jason M. “Shakespeare and Civil Rights: Rhetorical Universalism.” The Arden
Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice, edited by David Ruiter, Bloomsbury,
2021, pp. 94–108.
Demeter describes how black civil rights activists subversively used the rhetoric of Shakespearean universality to challenge white supremacy. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
---. “‘To Appropriate These White Centuries’: James Baldwin’s Race Conscious
Shakespeare.” The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation,
edited by Christy Desmet et al., Routledge, 2020, pp. 59–68.
Demeter writes that Baldwin was able to appropriate Shakespeare in a way that was race-conscious and undermined the notion of Shakespearean universalism by doing so by emphasizing multiplicity and employing Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Desmet, Christy, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Emma Jacobson, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation. Routledge Literature Handbooks. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020.
This wide-ranging volume contains many essays that cover appropriations by BIPOC creators as well as on race and appropriation. Table of Contents can be seen here. @ProfKFH
Dickinson, Peter. “Duets, Duologues, and Black Diasporic Theatre: Djanet Sears, William
Shakespeare, and Others.” Modern Drama, vol. 45, no. 2, Summer 2002, pp.
188-208.
Abstract: “Building on Joanne Tompkins' suggestive reading of how metatheatrical devices like images of onstage rehearsal and plays-within-plays operate counter-discursively, in much postcolonial drama, to "unfix the colonial authority" signified by William Shakespeare, in this paper I want to examine how playwright Djanet Sears's equally metatheatrical "Harlem Duet" simultaneously displaces Shakespeare's "Othello" and re-places that text with/in a chorus of other literary voices.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Galland, Nora. “Mapping Violence onto the Body of the ‘Other’ in Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999).”
Cahiers Élisabéthains, Apr. 2022, doi:10.1177/01847678221092793.
From abstract: “In Julie Taymor's film Titus (1999), … the Roman nation is both violated and violent. Taymor exposes the audience to different kinds of violence – intrafamilial, political, sexual, as well as revenge, infanticide, and racism – all of which are mapped onto characters who are othered by race, ethnicity, gender, or posthumous banishment. This article aims at exploring the relationship between othering and violence in the construction of nationhood. The one who others, the author contends, is also othered, because of the cycle of violence at stake in the film.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Gillen, Katherine. “Shakespeare Appropriation and Queer Latinx Empowerment in Josh
Inocéncio’s Ofélio.” The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global
Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet et al., Routledge, 2020, pp. 90–101.
Gillen writes that Josh Inocéncio appropriates Shakespeare for queer Latinx empowerment in the play Ofélio. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Goodman, Daniel R. ""The Uncontrollability of Real Things": Operation Shylock, Sabbath's
Theater, and Philip Roth's Falstaffian Theology of Judaism." Philip Roth Studies, vol.
16, no. 2, 2020, pp. 39-59,118.
From abstract: “Roth's greater use of Shakespeare in the later stages of his career - greater in the dual senses of frequency and engagement - can be ascribed, this article argues, to Roth's growing involvement with Jewish identity and human mortality.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Gordon, Colette. "’Painted Blind’: Dressing and Addressing ‘Colorblind’ Ideology in a South African and an American Dream." Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 39 no. 4, 2021, p. 595-615. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/852587.
Gordon discusses how race and class are important in two productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – one American and one South African – despite their very different treatments of these factors. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing / @allo_nothing)
Espinosa, Ruben. “'Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue": Uneasy Assimilation and the
Shakespeare-Latinx Divide.” The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global
Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet et al., Routledge, 2020, pp. 48–58.
Espinosa writes that stereotypical portrayals of Latinx people in modern Shakespeares deepen a divide between Shakespeare and Latinx people, but that “hybrid political culture” can allow an “uneasy assimilation” of Shakespeare into Latinx cultures. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Fischin, Daniel. “‘Flipping the Turtle on Its Back’: Shakespeare, Decolonization, and First
Peoples in Canada.” The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global
Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet et al., Routledge, 2020, pp. 127–38.
Fischin writes that Shakespeare can be a useful tool for decolonization in First Nations self-representation, but that it is also a haunting, wendigo-like presence. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Flaherty, Jennifer. “Calibán Rex? Cultural Syncretism in Teatro Buendía’s Otra Tempestad.”
The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, edited by
Christy Desmet et al., Routledge, 2020, pp. 102–12.
Flaherty writes that Teatro Buendía’s Otra Tempestad uses The Tempest to explore colonialism and cultural and racial blending and offers a more positive, less antagonistic view of postcolonial revision that is common. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Green MacDonald, Joyce. Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. #PCRS
This book argues that modern Shakespearean adaptation is a primary means for materializing black women's often elusive presence in the plays, serving as a vital staging place for historical and political inquiry into racial formation in Shakespeare's world, and our own. Ranging geographically across North America and the Caribbean, and including film and fiction as well as drama as it discusses remade versions of Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Taming of the Shrew. @ProfKFH from publisher’s description
Hall, Kim F. “‘Intelligently Organized Resistance’: Shakespeare in the Diasporic Politics of
John E. Bruce.” Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare, edited by Hillary
Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman, Edinburgh U P, 2019, pp. 85–94.
Hall draws lessons from the black writer and activist John E. Bruce to envision ways of engaging with Shakespeare without upholding white supremacism and settler colonialism. Specifically, Hall argues for attaching our loyalty to the communities we mean to serve, rather than to institutionalized ideas about Shakespeare and literature. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. “On Yearning: Reading Itinerant Shakespeare.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 54, no. 1, Feb. 2020, pp. 97–104.
Recognizing the centrality of Shakespeare in the repertoires of nineteenth-century black orators, Hall “experiments with using the author's personal history to interpret an anecdote from actor Richard Berry Harrison's unpublished memoir in which he recounts Frederick Douglass performing scenes from Shakespeare's Othello” (from abstract). Hall concludes that black performances could be empowering and affirming for black speakers and listeners. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Hamrick, Stephen. "Antiracism in Othello Sketch Comedy, 1967-1999." European Journal of Humour Research, vol. 10, no. 1, 2022.
Abstract: “Despite Shakespeare’s rejection of comic, racist stereotypes in Othello, minstrel shows offered racist blackface caricatures of slaves and others of African descent that filtered through British Music Hall and Variety to television sketch comedy. Analyses of twenty-five screened appropriations of Othello provide a cultural history of racism for 1967-1999. The article recovers an antiracist tradition overlooked in comedy studies.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Hokama, Rhema. “Shakespeare in Hawai‘i: Puritans, Missionaries, and Language Trouble in
James Grant Benton’s Twelf Nite O Wateva!, A Hawaiian Pidgin Translation of
Twelfth Night.” Multicultural Shakespeare : Translation, Appropriation, and
Performance, vol. 18, no. 1, 2018, pp. 57–77,
https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.18.05.
Hokama argues that, “[u]sing historical models of Protestant identity and Shakespeare’s original text, Benton explores the relationship between pidgin language and social privilege in contemporary Hawai‘I” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Hornback, Robert. "Black Shakespeareans Vs. Minstrel Burlesques: ‘Proper’ English, Racist
Blackface Dialect, and the Contest for Representing ‘Blackness,’ 1821-1844."
Shakespeare Studies, vol. 38, 2010, pp. 125-160.
From abstract: “A key issue in the history of racial representation was the contest between black and white Americans (and Englishmen, too) for representing and constructing both what "blackness" and "Shakespeare" meant in precisely the period in which minstrelsy developed…. Prior investigations of the representation of blackness have overlooked the degree to which literary blackface dialect and the foolish, misspeaking minstrel stereotype emerged in response to black Shakespeareans ... claiming Shakespeare as part of their American cultural heritage while using representation in order to affect perceptions about blackness. In one way or another, Shakespeare's language came to be implicated in a high-stakes contest for representing blackness in nineteenth-century America.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Ick, Judy Celine. “Otelo, Intercultural Spectatorship, and Ocular Proof.” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2011, pp. 129–48. https://doi.org/10.1353/atj.2011.0018.
Abstract: “Is intercultural Shakespeare always apprehended at first sight? This essay explores the related notions of spectacle and spectatorship in intercultural/Asian Shakespeare and argues for an understanding of interculturality beyond presentational spectacle or obviously visible relocation. Ricardo Abad's production of Othello (Otelo, Ang Moro ng Venecia, Tanghalang Ateneo 2008) challenges conventional notions of a play's location by deliberately obscuring visual cues of cultural specificity. Instead, it locates the play within the aesthetics of the Philippine komedya and allows for the emergence of a culturally disposed vision of the play in which the fact of its interculturality emerges not from the visually represented onstage locus but from the audience's habitus or a cultural subjectivity that shapes its reception. Otelo underscores the vital role of spectatorship as an element in the production of the intercultural and makes a case for the idea that interculturalism is only created or completed by audience response.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Iyengar, Sujata. “Woman-Crafted Shakespeares: Appropriation, Intermediality, and Womanist Aesthetics.” In A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan, 2d edition, London, Blackwell-Wiley, 2016, pp. 507-19.#PCRS
Abstract: This chapter looks at the intermediated presence and absence of Shakespeare in works by African American women writers. It begins by defining some key terms, appropriation, intermediality, intersectionality, womanism, and woman-craft. The chapter offers some future directions for research with concise examples of what different kinds of intermedial analysis might look like within the study of Shakespeare and in contemporary feminist criticism surrounding Shakespeare, particularly with regard to Othello. It then relates a partial history of three centuries of African American women's appropriations of Shakespeare, from Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison. The chapter concludes with a close reading of Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric in order to suggest that this work intermediates Shakespearean playtext and transforms Othello into feminist, intersectional, intermedial art. While the whole volume talks back to Othello, elsewhere Rankine offers a directly intermedial response to the play. (SI)
---. “Intermediated Bodies and Bodies of Media: Screen Othellos.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Tragedies, edited by Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 588-606. #PCRS
Abstract (Author’s own, from Humanities Commons): Screened performances screen out the qualities of ‘liveness’ – immediacy, unpredictability, ephemerality, spatial proximity, danger – to varying degrees according to their media, contexts, and audiences. As Philip Auslander has argued, ‘liveness’ itself is intermedial; in order to characterize a performance as ‘live,’ we contrast it to a ‘mediatized’ version of itself and to seek in it an imagined, lost ‘authenticity.’ Laurie Osborne suggests that ‘Shakespeare thrives now through the creative use of intermedial performance differences’ (in the case she discusses, through the interplay among multi-season television series, festival performance, and repertory theatre). This essay investigates race and intermediality in bodies of media: Othellos on film, television, web, and Shakestream, the hybrid format that broadcasts ‘live’ stage performances of plays in cinemas worldwide. I will aim to show that, while these performances assert their status as ‘new media,’ the way they represent other media reinforces what Schröter calls ‘ontological intermediality.’ Moreover, these bodies of media and mediatized human bodies threaten to screen out the lived experience of race for performers and audience. (SI)
Iyengar, Sujata, and Lesley Feracho. “Hamlet (RSC, 2016) and Representations of Diasporic Blackness.” Cahiers Elisabéthains 99.1(2019):147-160. https://doi.org/10.1177/0184767819837738 #PCRS
Abstract: In 2016 Paapa Essiedu, a British actor of Ghanaian ancestry, starred as Hamlet in Simon Godwin’s lauded Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production, set in a post-colonial African state whose non-specificity nonetheless irritated some reviewers. We contend, however, that the production mixed multiple referents of blackness (Eastern African, West African, Caribbean, South African, 1970s African American) in order deliberately to create an imaginary post-colonial domain where these different kinds of diasporic blackness engaged with each other through the figure of Hamlet and his art. (SI)
Jackson, Russell. “Questions of Racism: The Merchant of Venice and Othello.” The
Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, edited by Russell Jackson,
Cambridge U P, 2020, pp. 149–60.
From abstract: “This chapter considers the treatment of ethnic and cultural identity in adaptations of two plays in which they are an integral element, The Merchant of Venice and Othello. Complex characterization is in danger of being short-circuited by unconscious bias, pulling audiences back to racial stereotypes, dehumanizing Shylock and Othello despite the efforts of well-intentioned filmmakers.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Joubin, Alexa Alice et al.. “‘Deconstructing Compulsory Realpolitik in Cultural Studies: An Interview with Alexa Alice Joubin,’ American Journal of Chinese Studies 28.2 (October, 2021): 115-130.” American Journal of Chinese Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, American Association for Chinese Studies, Oct. 2021, pp. 115–30. hcommons.org, https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:42051/.
From abstract: “This interview with Alexa Alice Joubin draws on new perspectives on cultural exchange in her book, Shakespeare and East Asia ..., which promotes treatment of Asian performing arts as original epistemologies rather than footnotes to the white, Western canon, and theory. We also present her latest thinking on multidisciplinarity.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. “Global Shakespeare Criticism beyond the Nation State.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman, 423-40. Oxford U P, 2017. (Esp. “Are We Post-Racial Yet,” starting page 428. The chapter is freely available here: https://mla.hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:18155/)
Abstract: “To move global Shakespeare studies beyond the more limiting scope of nation-state and cultural profiling, I would like to propose we consider a number of critical concepts as methodology. These concepts critique the limitations of cartographic imagination, and connect the performance site to spaces of knowledge production: (1) the site of performance and the myth of global Shakespeare; (2) diaspora and racial tensions; (3) art in post-national space; (4) the ethics of quoting Shakespeare and world cultures; and (5) the production and dissemination of knowledge through archives.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Joubin, Alexa Alice. “Others Within: Ethics in the Age of Global Shakespeare.” The Routledge Handbook to
Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet et al., Routledge,
2020, pp. 25–36.
Joubin discusses unethical Shakespeare-related appropriation that uses “others” as means to an end and ethical Shakespeare-related appropriation characterized by reciprocity and mutual respect. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. “The Paradox of Female Agency: Ophelia and East Asian Sensibilities.” The Afterlife of
Ophelia, edited by Kaara L. Peterson and Deanne Williams, Palgrave, 2012, pp.
79–100. [Freely available online here:
https://www.academia.edu/22668783/_The_Paradox_of_Female_Agency_Ophelia_a
nd_East_Asian_Sensibilities_in_The_Afterlife_of_Ophelia_ed_Kaara_Peterson_and
_Deanne_Williams_New_York_Palgrave_2012_pp_79_100]
Joubin examines the ideologies informing different ways Ophelia has been represented in East Asian versions of Hamlet. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. “‘Romeo and Juliet, Allegory, and the Ethnic Vocabularies of History.’
Shakespeare Studies 46 (2008): 6-19.” Shakespeare Studies, vol. 46, Shakespeare
Society of Japan, 2008, pp. 6–19. hcommons.org,
https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:15743/.
Abstract: “Readings of literary texts are always shaped by a reader’s particular location and knowledge, but those locations are themselves defined by their histories. Romeo and Juliet has inspired new sets of allegorical vocabularies of history in locations without confrontations with the English heritage in colonial contexts. Why is the reading of a canonical text often said to authorize a meaning different from what it literally says when read cross-culturally? How do allegory and local histories develop and intersect on stage? As an integral part of the cultural practice of narrativizing local history, allegorical interpretation plays an important role in creating a sense of semiotic referentiality for theatre works that cater predominantly to audiences in local markets. This article examines two productions of Romeo and Juliet in Taiwan and southwestern China (in the forms of Taiwanese opera, gezaixi, and Yunnan flower lantern opera, huadengxi) characterized by their decidedly local networks of signification.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. “Yukio Ninagawa.” Brook, Hall, Ninagawa, Lepage: Great
Shakespeareans, vol. 18, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pp. 79–112. hcommons.org,
https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/mla:865/.
Joubin discusses the Japanese Shakespearean Yukio Ninagawa and how “[h]is stage works thrive in the contentious space between cultures” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Kemp, Sawyer K. "Two Othellos, Transitioning Anti-Blackness: A Dialogue with Skyler Cooper." Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 39 no. 4, 2021, p. 651-665. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/852590.
Abstract: “This essay grows out of an interview with actor, director, and activist Skyler Cooper. In Livermore Shakespeare Festival’s 2019 season, Cooper was fêted as the first transgender man to play the role of Othello, but it was actually his second time in the part. Cooper had previously performed a butch lesbian version of Othello in Impact Theatre’s 2005 production. In dialogue with Cooper’s account of the two roles, this essay posits that Cooper’s unique lived experience and performance history illustrate the intersections of gender, race, and trans identity both in Othello and in the contemporary American landscape. Although both characterizations represent cisgender interpretations of Othello as male and female, respectively, this essay engages critical race studies and transgender theory to argue that within and across these productions we can read a third interpretation: a transgender and transmasculine Othello whose experience of racist interpersonal violence, microaggressions, and gaslighting speaks to a contemporary Black transmasculine perspective that is often forgotten or ignored.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing / @allo_nothing)
Khomenko, Natalia. “From Social Justice to Metaphor: The Whitening of Othello in the
Russian Imagination.” Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and
Performance, vol. 23, no. 38, 38, 2021, pp. 75–89.
https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.23.05.
Abstract: “Othello was the most often-staged Shakespeare play on early Soviet stages, to a large extent because of its ideological utility. Interpreted with close attention to racial conflict, this play came to symbolize, for Soviet theatres and audiences, the destructive racism of the West in contrast with Soviet egalitarianism. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, however, it is not unusual for Russian theatres to stage Othello as a white character, thus eliminating the theme of race from the productions. To make sense of the change in the Russian tradition of staging Othello, this article traces the interpretations and metatheatrical uses of this character from the early Soviet period to the present day. I argue that the Soviet tradition of staging Othello in blackface effectively prevented the use of the play for exploring the racial tensions within the Soviet Union itself, and gradually transformed the protagonist’s blackness into a generalized metaphor of oppression. As post-collapse Russia embraced whiteness as a category, Othello’s blackness became a prop that was entirely decoupled from race and made available for appropriation by ethnically Slavic actors and characters. The case of Russia demonstrates that staging Othello in blackface, even when the initial stated goals are those of racial equality, can serve a cultural fantasy of blackness as a versatile and disposable mask placed over a white face.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Klett, Elizabeth. "’Who Gets to Tell the Story?’: Adaptation and Juxtaposition in Two Dance Versions of Othello." Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 34, no. 4, 2016, pp. 601-626.
Klett examines appropriation and the treatment of race in two dance adaptations of Othello. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Knowles, Ric. “Othello in Three Times.” Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere?,
edited by Diana Brydon and Irena R. Makaryk, U of Toronto P, 2002, pp. 371–94.
From volume introduction: “...Knowles examines three Canadian rewritings of Othello: the regional and populist Cruel Tears, a country opera by Ken Mitchell and Humphrey and the Dump Trucks (1985); Anne-Marie Macdonald's feminist Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) (1990); and Djanet Sears's interventionist Harlem Duet (1997), suggesting a
changing relationship over three decades with Shakespeare and constructions of gender, race, ethnicity, and class in Canada” (p. 37). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
MacDonald, Joyce Green. “Border Crossings: Women, Race, and Othello in Gayl Jones’s
Mosquito.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 28, no. 2, 2009, pp. 315–36.
MacDonald discusses Gayl Jones’s use of Othello in her novel Mosquito and “argues that the tragedy informs Mosquito's deep concern with the erasure of deeply drawn borders between cultures, nations, races, and registers of language. The novel reorients readers' understanding of the play, inviting us to imagine its significance to the construction of the identities of African American women, rather than primarily of African American men, as has been the focus of much nationalist recuperation of this Shakespearean text” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Markov, Plamen, et al. “Migrant Othello in Bulgaria (2020): Professor Plamen Markov in
Conversation with Boika Sokolova (University of Notre Dame, London, UK) and
Kirilka Stavreva (Cornell College, USA).” Shakespeare’s Others in 21st-Century
European Performance: The Merchant of Venice and Othello, edited by Boika
Sokolova and Janice Valls-Russell, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 258–68.
Markov, Sokolva, and Stavrava discuss Markov’s production of Othello, which incorporated the Ibo and Turkish languages to stage a play focused on issues related to migration. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Maxwell, Lynn. “‘Shakespeare for All Times and Peoples’: Shakespeare at Spelman College
and the Atlanta University Center.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 54, no. 1, Feb.
2020, pp. 66–73.
from abstract: “Despite the frequent association of Shakespeare requirements with a conservative agenda, both Herndon and Du Bois imagine possibilities for powerful politics in the performance and study of Shakespeare. Reading these two texts together suggests that teaching, studying, and performing Shakespeare might still be powerful politics at black institutions.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Mendoza, Kirsten N. "’I am content’: Race, Seduction, and Performances of Consent in The Hollow Crown." Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 39 no. 4, 2021, p. 617-635. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/852588.
Mendoza “proposes that claims of ‘colorblind’ casting detract from the social justice potential of Shakespearean adaptations” and shows that “it is precisely through recognizing the history inscribed on bodies, especially through racial difference, that contemporary performances have the potential to challenge audiences to confront ingrained forms of discrimination and the legacies of privilege and of violence we have inherited” by demonstrating how a race-conscious reading of The Hollow Crown “prompts audiences to think critically about women’s consent in the midst of civil war and imperial conquest, and helps viewers to realize how seduction narratives have cultivated white male privilege by dignifying subjugation and validating the vulnerability and dispossession of others” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing / @allo_nothing)
Modenessi, Alfredo Michel. “‘You Say You Want a Revolution?’: Shakespeare and Mexican
[Dis]Guise.” The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation,
edited by Christy Desmet et al., Routledge, 2020, pp. 37–47.
Modenessi discusses the problematic and unethical elements of a production of Much Ado set in the Mexican Revolution. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Newstok, Scott. “How to Think Like Ira Aldridge.” The Cambridge Companion to
Shakespeare and Race, edited by Ayanna Thompson, Cambridge U P, 2021, pp.
175–89.
From abstract: “This essay surveys seven of Ira Aldridge’s strategies for succeeding on the nineteenth-century stage: educate; emulate; circulate; nominate; innovate; disseminate; elaborate. Such strategies can still inspire us, students, performers, scholars, artists, teachers, and innovators alike.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Nikolić, Zorica Bečanović. “Drags, Dyes, and Death in Venice: The Merchant of Venice
(2004) and Othello (2012) in Belgrade, Serbia.” Shakespeare’s Others in
21st-Century European Performance: The Merchant of Venice and Othello, edited by
Boika Sokolova and Janice Valls-Russell, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 89–107.
Nikolić discusses how a Serbian production of The Merchant of Venice and a Serbian production of Othello each use the play’s exploration of otherness to address otherness in the local, post-Yugoslav context. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Rhymes, De’aris. "2020 Vision: Race, Performance, and Diversity in a Post-2020 America." Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 39 no. 4, 2021, p. 559-575. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/852585.
From abstract: “In this article, I survey the anti-racist practices, or lack thereof, that some Shakespeare theater companies have implemented during the COVID-19 crisis. I also explore the challenges that come along with these changes and how these challenges affect performances of Shakespeare’s plays. While 2020 proved that Shakespeare theater companies have the potential to create an anti-racist environment, I argue that this change is only possible if theater companies create safe spaces to listen to and accommodate theater-makers of color.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing / @allo_nothing)
Rivlin, Elizabeth. “Shakespeare for Use and Pleasure: Elizabeth Nunez’s and Terry
McMillan’s Middlebrow Fiction.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 54, no. 1, Feb.
2020, pp. 19–26.
Abstract: “This essay investigates how Elizabeth Nunez's Prospero's Daughter (2006) and Terry McMillan's How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996) engage with Shakespeare. By taking a middlebrow approach that emphasizes readers’ use of and pleasure in Shakespeare and that aims to cultivate an inclusive multiracial readership, Nunez and McMillan show that black readers can lay claim to a Shakespeare that they participate in (re)defining. While Nunez's novel frames Shakespeare's political uses within pleasurable genres of contemporary popular fiction, McMillan suggests that she and her readers can remake Shakespeare, the name of her heroine's love interest, into a figure associated with pleasure.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Sakoeska, Aleksandra. “Estranged Strangers: Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Shylock and Othello
in African Tales after Shakespeare (2011).” Shakespeare’s Others in 21st-Century
European Performance: The Merchant of Venice and Othello, edited by Boika
Sokolova and Janice Valls-Russell, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 69–88.
“...Sakowska views Krzysztof Warlikowski’s African Tales after Shakespeare in the context of the sensibilities, stereotypes and prejudices in twenty-first-century Poland. Through a theoretical approach deriving from Zygmunt Bauman, the essay discusses the radically reduced mélange of The Merchant of Venice, Othello and King Lear, supplemented with other modern texts and stark, shocking visual effects, which result in a ‘multi-focal exploration of identity’. Warlikowski deconstructs stereotypes of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, age and disability to confront Polish and international audiences with universal examples of marginalization. By conjoining three iconic outcasts – Shylock (the Jew), Othello (the black man), Lear (the debilitated old man) – the production simultaneously de-historicized the characters and challenged the audience’s perceptions of the ‘normal’ strange" (Description from Lawrence Gunter’s section introduction, pp. 25-26). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Seeff, Adele. “Inheriting the Past, Surviving the Future.” The Routledge Handbook to
Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet et al., Routledge,
2020, pp. 161–70.
Focusing on uses of multiethnicity, Seeff discusses three South African Shakespeare productions that the author feels “exemplify performance styles intended to signal to a global audience an ‘authentic’ South African Shakespeare performance and an integrated South African identity” (p. 163). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Sokolova, Boika, and Kirilka Stavreva. “Refracting the Racial Other into the Other-within in
Two Bulgarian Adaptations of Othello.” Shakespeare’s Others in 21st-Century
European Performance: The Merchant of Venice and Othello, edited by Boika
Sokolova and Janice Valls-Russell, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 49–68.
The authors discuss how recent Bulgarian productions of Othello have used the play and Othello the character in order to address classed and gendered forms of otherness within the post-communist Bulgarian state. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Sosnowska, Dorota. “The Dark Continent: «African Tales by Shakespeare» and the
Experience of Transitional Community.” Pamiętnik Teatralny, vol. 70, no. 3, Oct.
2021, pp. 73–97. https://doi.org/10.36744/pt.815.
Sosnowska analyzes Shakespeare’s African Tales, a Polish theatrical production that “blend[s] Shakespeare with J. M. Coetzee and adapting motifs from Eldridge Cleaver and Jonathan Littell, also introduced soliloquies by Cordelia, Desdemona, and Portia written for the play by the Lebanese-Canadian writer Wajdi Mouawad, as well as visual quotes from Art Spiegleman’s Maus and a host of other references” with the intention of “be[ing] a study of otherness rooted in the reality of contemporary Polish society, relevant to that domestic context while being universally comprehensible” (p. 75).
Swindall, Lindsey R.. The Politics of Paul Robeson's Othello, University Press of Mississippi,
2010.
From description: “Swindall examines the historical and political context of acclaimed African American actor Paul Robeson's three portrayals of Shakespeare's Othello in the United Kingdom and the United States. …. The Politics of Paul Robeson's Othello maintains that Robeson's development into a politically minded artist explicates the broader issue of the role of the African American artist in times of crisis. …. Swindall thoughtfully uses Robeson's Othello performances as a collective lens to analyze the actor and activist's political and intellectual development.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Thompson, Ayanna, Farah Karim-Cooper, and David Sterling Brown. "’Unicorns and Fairy Dust’: Talking Shakespeare, Performance, and Social (In)Justice." Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 39 no. 4, 2021, p. 537-558. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/852584.
From abstract: “In a provocative conversation about race, education, performance, social justice, gender, and more, Thompson and Karim-Cooper think through some of the urgent questions confronting the worlds of the academy and the theater, and they also reflect on their respective professional experiences. Moreover… they offer their perspectives on the changes that need to be made in order for theaters on both sides of the Pond to become equitable, antiracist spaces that include, and provide equal support for, all artists, not just those who are white (and male).” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing / @allo_nothing)
Trivedi, Poonam. “Fooling Around with Shakespeare: The Curious Case of ‘Indian’ Twelfth
Nights.” The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, edited
by Christy Desmet et al., Routledge, 2020, pp. 113–23.
Trivedi examines several recent U.K., U.S., and Canadian productions of Twelfth Night that set the play’s action in either colonial or postcolonial India. Investigating this phenomenon of “Indian” Twelfth Nights, Trivedi examines how the productions relate to the context of the neo-colonialism and orientalism that are symptomatic of globalization. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Vanhoutte, Jacqueline. "Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus and the Petrarchan Tradition." Texas
Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 59 no. 2, 2017, p. 234-267.
Abstract: “Venus reconfigures the Western view of love pioneered by Ovid, adapted by Petrarch, and perpetuated by Shakespeare and others. Parks appropriates this tradition to dismantle its gendered models of agency, which she shows influenced modern scientific thinking. If Venus is about a black woman whose venerean corpse is dissected by the white men who love her, it is also by a black woman who resurrects the venerable corpus of the dead white men she loves. Ultimately, Parks returns to premodern poetry because it allows for creative interventions precluded by modern modes of knowing.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Wilburn, Reginald A. “Milton’s Early Black Sisterhood.” Milton Studies, vol. 54, no. 1, 2013,
pp. 259–90.
Wilburn analyzes early appropriations of Milton by black women writers for their works’ operant theories of reception and intertextuality. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Willan, Brian. "Whose Shakespeare? Early Black South African Engagement with
Shakespeare." Shakespeare in Southern Africa, vol. 24, 2012, pp. 3-24,88.
Willan describes how Black South Africans historically engaged with Shakespeare. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Woodford-Gormley, Donna. "Race and Revolution in Tomás González’s Othello Adaptations: “Of the Cannibals that each Other Eat”." Shakespeare in Cuba. Springer, 2022.
Rap/Hip Hop and Shakespeare/Renaissance
General Hip/Hop Rap Scholarship
Hip Hop and Appropriation -- scholarship
Hip Hop and Appropriation--Artworks
General Hip/Hop Rap Scholarship
Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew.” In The Hip Hop Reader, ed. Timothy Francis Strode. Pearson Longman, 2008: 117–29
This widely reprinted essay is a reading of the infamous 1990 2 Live Crew obscenity trial and key to Crenshaw’s articulating intersectionality for a broader public audience. @ProfKFH
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise : Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994.
This feminist examination of rap situated rap as an object of critical study. She makes clear the political challenge of rap and the political roles of black women in rap culture. She also outlined the cycle of white appropriation: first white vilification and challenge to its status of an artform, then re-appropriation of black musical traditions. @ProfKFH
Hip Hop and Appropriation--Scholarship
Barnes, Todd Landon. ‘Hip hop Macbeths, “Digitized Blackness,” and the Millennial Minstrel: Illegal Culture Sharing in the Virtual Classroom’, in Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson eds., Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (New York, 2010), pp.161-72.
Barnes “examine[s] the strange effects of local, culturally specific pedagogical practices fusing Shakespeare and hip hop which—like the music itself—have been cut, copied, pasted, and practiced outside of what was once their “proper” domain” (from abstract).
Della Gatta, Carla. “Shakespeare, Race, and ‘Other’ Englishes: The Q Brothers’s Othello: The Remix,”in Shakespeare Survey, Special Edition on ‘Re-Creating Shakespeare’, Vol. 71 (2018): 74–87.
This essay closely examines the Q Brothers’ Othello: The Remix and the perception of people of color as translators and adapters of Shakespeare. Also addressed are OSF’s Play On! Initiative and the genealogy of hip hop Shakespeares.
Lanier, Douglas. “Minstrelsy, Jazz, Rap: Shakespeare, African American Music, and Cultural Legitimation.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1, no. 1 (2005): 1–29.
Lanier argues “that mid-century jazz adaptations of Shakespeare serve as an ambivalent middle-term between Shakespearean minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, where the relationship between Shakespeare and African American music was first codified, and contemporary hip-hop, where musicians have reclaimed Shakespeare as a minor yet symbolically significant point of reference for African American music.”
O’ Neill, Stephen. “‘It’s William Back from the Dead’: Commemoration, Representation, and Race in Akala’s Hip‐Hop Shakespeare.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, vol. 16, no. 2, Oct. 2016, pp. 246–56.
O’Neill argues that the hip-hop artist Akala does much of the kind of anti-racist engagement with Shakespeare that has been modeled and advocated by scholars like Ayanna Thompson and Ruben Espinosa.
Wetmore, Jr., Kevin J. ‘”Big Willie Style” Staging Hip hop Shakespeare and Being Down with the Bard’, in Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., and Robert L. York eds., Shakespeare and Youth Culture (New York, 2006), pp.147-70.
Wetmore surveys uses of Shakespeare in hip-hop and uses of hip-hop in presenting Shakespeare’s works. Wetmore considers the racial politics of combining Shakespeare and hip-hop and discusses the role that signifyin(g) can play in negotiating topics connected to this issue.
Hip Hop and Appropriation--Artworks
Amar Stewart, Hip Hop Royalty. This collection by Black British artist Amar Stewart features famous Hip-Hop artists dressed as 17th century nobility. @ProfKFH
Frazer, Simon. “Rappers Outgun Shakespeare in Vocabulary War of Words; Nearly 400 Years after His Death, William Shakespeare’s Works Seem a World Away from Hip Hop. But a New Yorker Has Sought to Compare Shakespeare’s Apples with Rap Music’s Oranges by Analysing Who Has a Larger Vocabulary. Perhaps Surprisingly, the Colourful and Creative Use of Words by Some Rappers Leaves Them Streets Ahead.” In AM - Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Sydney. Sydney, Australia: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2014.
Is it Appropration? Is it scholarship? Maybe a little of both. When Matt Daniels started his token analysis of original words in hip hop, he began by comparing their production of neologisms with Shakespeare’s. See his interview @ProfKFH
Choreographer Lorenzo “Rennie” Harris created Rome & Jewels, a mixture of Shakespearean verse and original rap, for his Philadelphia based dance company, Rennie Harris Puremovement, in 2000. @ProfKFH
11. Pedagogy
This began with resources recommended by Holly Dugan, Dorothy Kim and Reginald Wilburn from their Shakespeare Association of America workshop “Teaching the Premodern in a Time of White Supremacy.” Those are indicated by (DKW). Others have been added
Akhimie, Patricia, “Cultivating Expertise: Glossing Shakespeare and Race,” in “Race
Before Race: Premodern Critical Race Studies,” ed. Ayanna Thompson, special
issue Literature Compass 18.10 (2021), 10 pp.
Abstract: “Tracing connections between research methodologies and classroom practices in the study of Shakespeare and race, this essay argues for the importance of offering students’ opportunities to build and demonstrate expertise. The essay discusses the use of a glossary exercise in classes on race and early modern literature, and the learning objectives for such courses. Finally, the essay offers a critique of such courses as commonly structured and suggestions for new directions in teaching race in literature from this period.”
Akhimie, Patricia, “Teaching Guide for ‘Cultivating Expertise’” in “Race Before Race:
Premodern Critical Race Studies,” ed. Ayanna Thompson, special issue
Literature Compass 18.10 (2021), 2 pp.
Teaching guide for entry above.
Della Gatta, Carla, “Bilingual Shakespeares as a Pedagogy of Ethics,” Teaching Shakespeare Magazine, Special Edition: “Shakespeare, Race, and Pedagogy,” 2024. 16-17.
Thompson, Ayanna. “The Chasm Between.” Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table
Initiative, edited by Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, Routledge, 2019.
Thompson discusses audience and casting considerations for Shakespearean performance “and how educational settings can more fully prepare young people to discuss racial difference in performance” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Race in the historical past
Chakravarty, Urvashi and Ayanna Thompson. "Race and Periodization: Introduction." New
Literary History, vol. 52 no. 3, 2021, p. v-xvi. doi:10.1353/nlh.2021.0017.
The authors discuss how the articles in this special issue on race and periodization engage with race and the premodern, concluding, “The structure of this special issue itself may invoke a periodizing logic…. But in thinking in genealogical, transnational, and transtemporal frameworks to propose new ways into—and out of—the hold of periodization, our hope is that this volume and the multiplicity of approaches it models will provoke a new understanding of, and conversation about, the potential of critical race studies to reframe our reckoning with the past” (p. xvi). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Dorothy Kim, “Race,” Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, ed. Ruth Mazo Karras (forthcoming) (DKW)
Lopez-Jantzen, Nicole. "Historiography, Periodization, and Race: Italy between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Europe and Africa." New Literary History, vol. 52 no. 3, 2021, p. 469-487. doi:10.1353/nlh.2021.0022.
Abstract: Periodization is inherently political and bound up with racial ideas. Following Kathleen Davis's model for the analysis of feudalism and secularism, this essay asks how race governs the politics of time.1 Understanding the racial logic behind the construction of Italian history in the premodern and modern periods can help us to understand and challenge those categories and logics, thereby destabilizing the ancient/medieval/modern divides. Older concepts of periodization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography divided the ancient world from the Middle Ages, juxtaposing Romans with foreign barbarians as well as with Africans. This essay will first analyze the historiographical category of late antiquity, arguing that the construction of the Lombards, a post-Roman group who ruled much of Italy in the sixth- through eighth- centuries, played a fundamental role in Italian self-definition beginning in the nineteenth century. Finally, this essay examines the use of the concept of Romanitas (Roman-ness or romanità, or the political and cultural values spread by Romans throughout their empire) in modern Italian scholarship and politics to demonstrate that shifts in its conceptualization suggest that the desire to create a white Italian identity was tied to Europe and had devastating effects on those excluded.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
R. Wilburn, “Phillis Wheatley and the ‘Miracle’ of Miltonic Influence,” Milton Studies 58 (2017): 145-165 (DKW)
Wilburn examines Phillis Wheatley’s poetic engagement with Milton and describes her as a seminal figure in an African American literary tradition of revisiting Paradise Lost to reflect on African origins and the traumas of the Middle Passage. (description added by Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Student Resistance
Bloom, Gina, and Lauren Bares. “Play to Learn: Shakespeare Games as Decolonial Praxis
in South African Schools.” Shakespeare in Southern Africa, vol. 34, Jan. 2021, pp.
7–22, doi:10.4314/sisa.v34i1.2.
The authors argue that “removing Shakespeare from the curriculum is not the only or even the best solution for countering the violent legacies of colonialism and apartheid” in South African secondary education and assert “that a more effective decolonial approach would be to change the way Shakespeare is taught in schools by cultivating horizontal, instead of hierarchical, dialogue within classrooms and between secondary educators and Shakespeare scholars. The authors describe their own horizontal collaboration to produce … a series of lesson plans and assignments centred on scenes of violence in the Shakespeare set works. …. The article contextualises the project in terms of Practice as Research (PAR) methodology while offering preliminary findings from the programme's implementation in Cape Town schools” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
De Barros, Eric L. “Teacher Trouble: Performing Race in the Majority-White Shakespeare Classroom.” Journal of American Studies 54.1 (2020): 74-81.
from abstract: “…this essay explores its challenge to black teacher–scholars in the majority-white classroom. Rethinking The Merchant of Venice as an educational play, with Portia and Shylock performing as nontraditional teachers, I develop the concept of “teacher trouble” from Judith Butler's “gender trouble” to reflect personally on the perils and liberatory potential of antiracist performative strategies.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Demeter, Jason M. “African-American Shakespeares: Loving Blackness as Political
Resistance.” Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare, edited by Hillary Eklund
and Wendy Beth Hyman, Edinburgh U P, 2019, pp. 67–75.
Demeter discusses the challenges which he has encountered and which other teachers must consider when trying to use Shakespeare for antiracist pedagogical ends. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Erickson, Peter. “Bending Toward Justice: From Shakespeare’s Black Mediterranean to August Wilson’s Black Atlantic.” The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice, edited by David Ruiter, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 60–73.
Erickson examines connections between Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Shakespeare’s Othello to explore the idea of an arc of social justice that is continuous across historical contexts. Erickson argues that discussions of race require education that crosses cultural barriers. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Kyoko Kishimoto, “Anti-racist pedagogy: from faculty’s self-reflection to organizing within and beyond the classroom,” Race Ethnicity and Education 21.4 (2018): 540-554. (DKW)
Kishimoto identifies three components to effective anti-racist pedagogy: incorporating the relevant topics into the curriculum, teaching from an anti-racist pedagogical stance, and doing anti-racist organizing on campus and in the local community. Kishimoto also argues that faculty must be self-reflective and cognizant of their own positionalities. (description added by Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Charles Mills, “White Ignorance,” Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (SUNY Press, 2007): 11-38. (DKW)
Mills describes “white ignorance” as an element of white supremacy and as a thoroughly false conception of people of color (as inferior) in the minds of white people. Warning that white ignorance can be harmful to both people of color and white people, Mills hopes to combat white ignorance’s distortions of reality by raising awareness about it. (description added by Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
O’Malley, Susan Gushee. “Reading Shakespeare in the Heterogeneous Classroom.” Radical
Teacher, vol. 58, no. 58, 2000, pp. 16–20.
From abstract: “Describes one college professor's teaching practice that enables diverse students to bring their own personal and cultural background to bear upon Shakespeare's plays, thus helping them develop their readings of the plays. Her approach involves decentering Shakespeare and encouraging students to read the texts critically from their own cultural perspective. Analyzes difficulties and limitations of such an approach.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Ramsoondur, Angela, and Sheila Wong Kong Luong. “Looking for Shakespeare: The Global
and the Local in Mauritian Shakespeare Adaptation and Classroom Practice.”
Shakespeare in Southern Africa, vol. 34, Jan. 2021, pp. 35–43.
doi:10.4314/sisa.v34i1.5.
Abstract: “This article considers manifestations of both global and local Shakespeares in Mauritius. It starts with Dev Virahsawmy's Shakespeare adaptations -- Toufann (1991) in particular -- as a well-known point of reference, placing the globalisation of Shakespeare in a localised (Mauritian) space into perspective via a discussion of language and context. The authors then reflect on the use of YouTube in the teaching of Shakespeare in undergraduate classes at the University of Mauritius, with selected adverts and music videos exemplifying a new 'mash-up' form of Shakespeare. Both Shakespeare and YouTube are carriers/channels of culture; while Shakespeare remains an emblematic figure, however, tertiary level classroom practice challenges the notion that his works are 'timeless' and 'universal'.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Ruiter, David, editor. “The Shakespeare and Social Justice Interviews.” The Arden
Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 25–44.
After a short introduction by Erin Coulehan on the power of a focus on Shakespeare and social justice to create change, this chapter presents a series of short interviews with a variety of Shakespeare practitioners about creating socially just change through the deconstruction of social hierarchies within contexts and institutions that have traditionally upheld them. Topics include immigration, race, and youth experience with Shakespeare. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Thompson, Ayanna, and Laura B. Turchi. “Active Shakespeare: A Social Justice Framework.” The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice, edited by David Ruiter, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 47–59.
Rejecting the teaching of Shakespeare as universal, Thompson and Turchi argue that Shakespeare should be taught in the context of social justice so as to remain relevant to students and the particulars of their own real lives. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Billings, Timothy James. “Caterwauling Cataians: The Genealogy of a Gloss.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 1, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 1–28.
Billings recounts a history of competing claims about the meanings of Shakespeare’s two uses of the word “Cataian” and then “reopen[s] the unsolved case of the Cataian as a site of cultural fantasy by sketching the nearly three-century-long genealogy of its glossing tradition in annotations, lexicons, and translations, in order to demonstrate how the ahistorical conflation of Cathay and China has allowed generations of annotators to project contemporaneous attitudes toward the Chinese back onto Shakespeare's text” (p. 6). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Britton, Dennis Austin. “Ain’t She a Shakespearean: Truth, Giovanni, and Shakespeare.” Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology, edited by Cassander L. Smith et al., Springer International Publishing, 2018, pp. 223–28.
Abstract: “Following in the tradition of Sojourner Truth’s famous address “Ar’n’t I a Woman?,” Dennis Britton asks if Nikki Giovanni might be considered a Shakespearean. His essay recovers Giovanni’s commentary on the cultural purchase of Shakespeare and uses it to expose and challenge the implied white male identity of the Shakespeare scholar.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Burton, Jonathan. “The Reinventions of Race in Thomas Heywood’s The Four Prentices of
London.” Renaissance Drama, vol. 48, no. 2, Sept. 2020, pp. 183–205.
Burton argues that recursion, within early modern race studies, to a limited set of “race plays” perpetuates a warped and incomplete understanding of race and the early modern period. Burton analyzes the treatment of race in Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Chakravarty, Urvashi. “Spirited Away: Race, Slavery and Childhood in Early Modern
England.” Literature Compass, vol. 18, no. 10, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12644.
From abstract: “This essay explores the insidious but persistent desire to affix whiteness to modes of bondage and to argue for an original ‘white slavery’ located in early modern forms of traffic, indenture and forced transport. This essay aims to recover the genealogy of this belief, beginning with one of its conceptual origins: the practice of ‘spiriting’ in the seventeenth century. … This study attends to the trajectory of discourses of slavery written on and in the body to explore the histories of both a contemporary and an insistently current investment in frameworks of ‘white slavery’, as it attempts to discover the early modern frameworks for the legibility of race and slavery as they were co-articulated ‘before’ the supposed ‘emergence’ of either.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Christofides, R. M. “Hamlet Versus Othello: Or, Why the White Boy Keeps Winning.” Shakespeare, vol. 17, no. 1, 2021, pp. 6–14.
Abstract: “This article examines the role of race in Shakespeare studies and, by extension, English Literature. The traditional view of Hamlet as a universal paradigm for humanity can be seen as a symptom of institutional racism. Unpicking the assumptions of whiteness that underpin this racialized discourse, I propose a new definition of “Hamletism” as a disciplinary instance of institutional racism that elides the everyday legacies of Empire and slavery in teaching and research. This racialized discourse places Othello outside a centre silently assumed to be white. However, Othello offers a global paradigm for humanity as common and powerful as Hamlet's. It is a paradigm that has been marginalized by the insidious forces of “Hamletism” – a white, middle-class discipline that takes Hamlet to be the most accurate representation of human subjectivity because of his whiteness.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Coles, Kimberly Anne. “‘Undisciplined’: Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Urgency of
Scholarly Activism.” Criticism, vol. 63, no. 1–2, 2021, pp. 55–62,
https://doi.org/10.13110/criticism.63.1-2.0055.
Abstract: “This essay argues that in the negotiation of their own power and privilege, early modern English women were crucial to the development of the English strategies of racialization that licensed chattel slavery and English empire. This is to challenge how we frequently understand racial constructions—not, as is so often thought, as instruments for the powerful to maintain their prominence but more often as tools for the powerless to gain distinction. This reorientation of our perspective on the early modern period already has a long and visible history in England and the Anglo-Americas. In considering the construction of race and racism in early modern England, this essay also tries to make sense of the critical strategies that ignore the complicity of early modern Englishwomen in this construction and that instead render this history invisible once more.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall, “’A New Scholarly Song’: Re-Reading Early Modern Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1 (2016):1-13. (DKW) See annotation above.
Espinosa, Ruben. "Traversing the Temporal Borderlands of Shakespeare." New Literary
History, vol. 52 no. 3, 2021, p. 605-623. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nlh.2021.0028.
Abstract: “This essay seeks to disrupt temporal distance to consider what an Anzaldúan perspective of Shakespeare contributes to the powerful conversations that premodern critical race studies have engendered. By drawing on what I term the temporal borderlands of Shakespeare—a borderlands rich with varied critical approaches and cultural products from which to consider the boundaries of periodization that demarcate, define, and inform strategies of race making—I offer an intervention that unsettles the critical frameworks that have, for far too long, reinforced the white rage and linguistic violence that sustain Shakespeare's white capital.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Grier, Miles P. “The Color of Professionalism: A Response to Dennis Britton.” Early Modern
Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology, edited by Cassander L. Smith et al.,
Springer International Publishing, 2018, pp. 229–38.
Abstract: “Responding to Britton’s address, Miles Grier argues that the most effective way to shift the standpoint of the implied white male figure of the Shakespeare scholar is to train our critical attention on the temporal boundaries that permit specialization in a period called “early modernity.” Rather than entertaining accusations that scholars of color conduct parochial or otherwise distorted work, he considers how scholars invested in whiteness might feel when race studies poses a disorienting relocation of period markers. He concludes that an engagement with the social analyses bequeathed by non-Europeans may cause us to revise the names and durations of eras—as well as the shape of time’s movement.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Haresnape, Geoffrey. "Biko, Shakespeare and Black Consciousness." Shakespeare in
Southern Africa, vol. 25, 2013, pp. 99-106,117.
Abstract: “This essay falls within a recognizable sub-field of Shakespeare studies: critical writings on "Shakespeare and race" or "race in Shakespeare." Steve Biko, the influential Black Consciousness writer and an iconic martyr for his death at the hands of apartheid authorities, has tended to be neglected within this sub-field. Haresnape redresses that omission by invoking Biko's way of thinking in his widely disseminated and widely quoted book, "I Write What I Like" (1978), and then by applying that thinking to selected Shakespearean dramatic texts. In the final section, Haresnape shows that Shakespeare's texts suggest surprising additional ideas about Black Consciousness that find an affirmative response in Biko's own work. It may be concluded that the oblique strategies of Shakespeare's playtexts and the engaging directness of Biko's intellectual explorations in "I Write What I Like" lead us by different routes to the same views on Black Consciousness.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Hendricks, Margo. "Coloring the Past, Considerations on Our Future: RaceB4Race." New Literary History, vol. 52 no. 3, 2021, p. 365-384. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nlh.2021.0018.
From abstract: “This essay … is a thought piece, a forward-facing reflection on the public humanities. It is also autobiographical in certain respects, since I am an academic who once struggled to find a place within the academy but no longer do. Thus, this meditation/mediation has two parts. Part One is retrospective: a look back at my place in an effort to decolonize my professional relationship to the academy and the discipline where my intellectual efforts are housed, the field of early modern English literature and culture (where I once landed not fully by choice). Part Two is a letter to and for Black, Indigenous, Peoples of Color (BIPOC) colleagues and allies.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
----. “Foreword.” Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, ACMRS Press, 2022, https://asu.pressbooks.pub/race-and-affect/.
Henricks discusses the past of premodern critical race studies and orients the book Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature toward the field’s future. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Little, Arthur L., Jr. "Re-Historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespearean
Property." Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 67 no. 1, 2016, p. 84-103.
Abstract: “Is Shakespeare or the Renaissance/early modern period white property? My asking about whiteness as a Shakespearean or early modern property is not just about the instrumentality of whiteness in the period but also about whether there’s a working assumption in the field, one of the “unspeakable things unspoken,” not simply that the early modern period isn’t about race but that it is also, as a field, white property. This essay seeks to make salient what it argues is a “white melancholia,” a whiteness signifying outside the bounds of race, operating in much of the critical resistance to Shakespeare and early modern studies. It attends especially to how New Historicism has shaped our understanding of early modern race and has obscured a thriving racial literacy in Shakespeare and the early modern period.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Marcus, Leah S. “Constructions of Race and Gender in the Two Texts of Othello.” Rethinking
Feminism in Early Modern Studies, edited by Ania Loomba and Melissa E. Sanchez,
Routledge, 2016.
Marcus points out that, since Shakespeare’s works have been instrumental in upholding racial and gender inequality, so is the editing of those works. Focusing on Othello, Marcus argues for taking on an anti-racist feminist stance to read against oppressive editorial decisions instead of accepting them as neutral or objective. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Ndiaye, Noémie. “Rewriting the Grand Siècle: Blackface in Early Modern France and the
Historiography of Race.” Literature Compass, vol. 18, no. 10, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12603.
Abstract: “This essay critiques the French cultural aversion to racial thinking which has resulted in the absence of race as a theme and analytic in French historiographic practices, especially in relation to the ancien régime. This essay argues that focusing on 17th century theater and performance culture, especially on baroque ballets and their oblique representations of Blackness and slavery through blackface, reveals a long national history of racism against Black people. This essay is a call to rewrite as an age of race-making a period often construed as a cultural and literary golden age that still plays a central role in definitions of French heritage and identity today.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “Introduction,” Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012), 1-19. (DKW)
Smith describes the imbrication of research (and western regimes of knowledge more broadly) with colonialism and explains its consequently troubled and harmful relationship to indigenous peoples and ways of knowing. (description added by Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Thompson, Ayanna. “Afterword: Me, The Faerie Queene, and Critical Race Theory.”
Spenser Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021, pp. 285–90.
Thompson suggests that it has taken so long for Spenser studies to have a serious and sustained focus on race because of how “the racecraft of Spenser studies conceals the affiliation of its racism and inequality. The afterword explores these issues, and points toward future directions” (from abstract). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Thomson, Ayanna, and Jeffrey Cohen. "Premodern Race Studies in Academic Country
Clubs." Postmedieval, vol. 11, no. 2-3, 2020, pp. 338-344.
Abstract: “This piece offers Ayanna Thompson’s confession about her training in early modern studies and a window into what it takes to master premodern critical race studies. In dialogue with Thompson’s confession, Jeffrey Cohen explores the origin of the groundbreaking #RaceB4Race symposium, sponsored by the Arizona Center for Medieval Studies (ACMRS) on the ASU campus in Tempe for the first time in January 2019.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Wilburn, Reginald A. “Getting ‘Uppity’ with Milton; or Because My Mom Politely Asked: ‘Was
Milton Racist?’” Milton Studies, vol. 62, no. 2, 2020, pp. 266–79.
Abstract: “This article serves as a wake-up call for more early modern critics to pursue a new cultural mode of literary criticism in Milton studies. In examining select racialized moments in Milton’s works, the author acknowledges the present moment as an acceptable time for responsibly and forthrightly interpreting race and blackness as a metalanguage and intertext of marginalizing Otherness throughout the canon of one of English literature’s most revered poets. The author contends that unorthodox receptions of Milton by black authors such as Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison can help to theorize race in Milton’s writings.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Andrea Gibbons, “The Five Refusals of White Supremacy,” in American Journal of Economics and Sociology Vol 77.3-4 (2018): 729-55, 733. (DKW) [Trigger Warning: it includes graphic descriptions of racism and an image of a lynching.]
Gibbons describes five ways white people maintain their ignorance about white supremacy. (description added by Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Akhimie, Patricia. “Racist Humor and Shakespearean Comedy,” The Cambridge
Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Ed. Ayanna Thompson. Cambridge UP, 2021, 47-61 @pakhimie #PCRS
Written with undergraduate readers in mind, this essay examines the pervasive use of racist humor in Shakespeare’s comedies through stereotypical characters, exoticism, scapegoating, and ethnic slurs. While we may consider the ways in which Shakespeare’s comedies at times question or critique racist attitudes, ultimately the essay encourages readers to acknowledge and to wrestle with the racist language of the plays. The essay offers readers tools with which to identify and analyze racist humor in Shakespeare’s comedies, and to understand the role of racist humor in the social construction of race and the production of stigmatized groups. Keywords: Racist humor, comedies, racism, stereotype, ethnic slurs, exoticism, scapegoat, race
Dadabhoy, Ambereen. “Skin in the Game: Teaching Race in Early Modern Literature.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching. (Forthcoming 2020)
This article explores the risks of teaching and not teaching race and the material consequences of suggesting that race is confined to so-called “race plays.” Dadabhoy rehearses several pedagogical strategies she employs in her classroom to call attention to all forms of racialization, including the construction and maintenance of whiteness. @DrDadabhoy
De Barros, Eric L. “‘“Shakespeare” on His Lips’: Dreaming of the Shakespeare Center for
Radical Thought and Transformative Action.” Teaching Social Justice Through
Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, edited by Hillary Eklund
and Wendy Beth Hyman, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 206–14,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvrs912p.24.
De Barros discusses using the complexity of Shakespeare’s language to encourage students to think critically about racialization and other ethics and social issues related to the text. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Della Gatta, Carla. “Confronting Bias and Identifying Facts: Teaching Resistance Through
Shakespeare.” Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance
Literature Matters Now, edited by Hillary Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman, Edinburgh
University Press, 2019, pp. 165–73,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvrs912p.20.
The author “present[s] a pedagogy that engages Shakespeare plays as key tools for teaching students how to recognize evidence that confuses facts, feelings, and opinions” (p. 165) in order to combat racism and other kinds of bias. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Desai, Adhaar Noor. “Topical Shakespeare and the Urgency of Ambiguity.” Teaching Social \ Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, edited by
Hillary Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp.
27–35, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvrs912p.6.
Desai discusses teaching Shakespeare in a way that encourages engagement with social issues such as racism, rather than valorizing Shakespeare or his works. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility,” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3.3 (2011): 54-70. (DKW)
Dunn, Damaris, and Bettina L. Love. “Antiracist Language Arts Pedagogy Is Incomplete
without Black Joy.” Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 55, no. 2, Nov. 2020,
pp. 190–92.
Abstract: “With good reason, antiracist language arts pedagogy is focused on dismantling the racism that is deeply ingrained in the field of language arts. here, Dunn and Love argue that centering the arts in antiracist approaches to English language arts means centering Black joy, and they push us to create ELA education ‘where Black folx can imagine, dream, create, resist, and take up space.’” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Espinosa, Ruben. “Beyond The Tempest: Language, Legitimacy, and La Frontera.” The
Shakespeare User: Critical and Creative Appropriations in a Networked Culture,
edited by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes, Springer International Publishing,
2017, pp. 41–61.
Espinosa employs borderland epistemologies to examines the relationships between Shakespeare, Latinx people, and white cultural dominance in the United States. Espinosa focuses on Latinx students’ engagement with Shakespeare and writes that YouTube provides an environment where these students can engage with Shakespeare in novel and affirming ways. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Gillen, Katherine and Lisa Jennings. “Decolonizing Shakespeare?: Toward an Antiracist,
Culturally Sustaining Practice.” The Sundial. November 26, 2019.
https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/decolonizing-shakespeare-toward-an-antiraci
st-culturally-sustaining-praxis-904cb9ff8a96
Gillen and Jennings describe strategies they have used to do antiracist and decolonial pedagogy in the Shakespeare classroom.
Grady, Kyle. “Why Front?: Thoughts on the Importance of ‘Nonstandard’ English in the Shakespeare Classroom.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Culture, and Composition, vol. 17, no. 3, 2017, pp. 533–40, https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3975639.
Drawing on experiences with African American Vernacular English and teaching Shakespeare, Grady writes that welcoming vernacular Englishes in the Shakespeare classroom encourages participation and makes possible important insights on Shakespeare’s writing. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Hall, Kim F. “Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender.” Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 4 (1996): 461–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/2870958.
“Hall suggests that a focus on beauty in Renaissance texts can be an important avenue for bringing issues of race and whiteness into the early modern classroom. She argues that a focus solely on minoritized subjects risks colluding in racial inequality: ‘Any discussion of race must deconstruct whiteness and not focus just on minoritized people-a practice with which students are familiar, if not comfortable. Concentration on the "other" raises issues of race but may not be antiracist since it does not necessarily engage issues of power.’” #PCRS
Iyengar, Sujata. “Decolonizing Milton and Spenser Through Diasporic Interpreters.” RSA Paper; self-published on Humanities Commons, http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/8t6b-xp26 #PCRS
Abstract (HCommons): Describes and provides examples of modules and assignments for a sophomore Brit Lit survey and an upper-division poetics class that responded to student demands for a more racially diverse canon. Includes a brief discussion of Lucius Henry Holsey, enslaved worker on the UGA campus, who claimed to have learned to read from Milton's Paradise Lost and a few other texts. (SI; hope it’s ok to include here.)
Harbin, M. Brielle, Amie Thurber, and Joe Bandy. “Teaching Race, Racism, and Racial
Justice: Pedagogical Principles and Classroom Strategies for Course Instructors.”
Race and Pedagogy Journal 4.1 (2019): 1-27. (freely available online here:
https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/rpj/vol3/iss2/1/)
from abstract: “Through the use of narrative inquiry, five researchers explored the personal and professional barriers faced by White faculty engaging in anti-racist educational practices in the college classroom. …. Findings revealed the ongoing barriers in teaching anti-racism ideals and the discussion provides strategies and an emerging model for incorporating intentional anti-racist pedagogy into the classroom.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Iyasere, Solomon O. “Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello to a Group of Multi-Racial Students.”
Shakespeare in Southern Africa, vol. 16, Jan. 2004, pp. 59–63.
Iyasere describes using diverse students’ subjective attitudes surrounding Othello and race as a tool rather than an impediment to teaching the play. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Joubin, Alexa Alice, and Lisa S. Starks. “Teaching Shakespeare in a Time of Hate.” Shakespeare Survey 74: Shakespeare and Education, edited by Emma Smith, 2021, pp. 15–29. Shakespeare Survey. Open access.
The authors “examine new theories and praxis of listening for silenced voices and of telling compelling stories that make us human. Elucidation of our Levinas-inspired theories of the Other is followed by a discussion of classroom practices for in-person and remote instruction that foster collaborative knowledge building and intersectional pedagogy. The moral agency that comes with the cultivation of ethical treatment of one another can lead to political advocacy. Special attention is given to race, gender and the exigencies of social justice and remote learning in the era of the global pandemic of COVID-19 (2019 novel coronavirus disease). The new normal in higher education, which is emerging at the time of writing, exposes inequities that were previously veiled by on-campus life and resources. Even as they are cause for grief and anxiety, the inequities exposed by COVID-19 can spur change for the better” (n.p.). (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Loomba, Ania. “Teaching Shakespeare and Race in the New Empire.” In Teaching
Shakespeare: Passing It On, ed. G.B. Shand, 160-80. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009.
Loomba discusses the work of getting her American students to become aware of the historical and ongoing intertwining of Shakespeare with colonialism and racism. Loomba discusses the role of Shakespeare and academia in her own experiences of racialization and advocates actively opposing longstanding oppressive and discriminatory elements of the field. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Metzger, Mary Janell. “Shakespearean Tragedy, Ethics, and Social Justice.” Teaching Social
Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, edited by
Hillary Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp.
115–23, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvrs912p.15.
Metzger describes teaching Shakespeare’s tragedies with ethical philosophy to encourage students to think about topics including epistemic justice. In particular, Metzger discusses using this strategy with Othello to historicize racialization and examine systematized injustice. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Alistair Pennycook, Discourses of Colonialism, 51-54 (offered as a model for reflecting on personal history and critical whiteness). (DKW)
Pillay, Ansurie. (2021) Talking Back to Shakespeare in a South African Lecture-room:
Engaging in Critical Conversations about Resistance, Changing English, 28:3,
286-295, DOI: 10.1080/1358684X.2020.1855415
Abstract: “In this paper, I reflect on a series of lectures, underpinned by the principles of critical pedagogy, when engaging with Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Working with student teachers in a South African School of Education, I used a talk-back design to enable students to talk back to the canon and open the dialogue about resistance. I used hot seating, teacher-in-role and written work and found that students were able to set the agenda for interrogating and resisting forms of knowledge usually deemed worthy. I understood that using a dialogic platform enabled the students to identify different forms of knowledge and it allowed them to understand that all texts are socially constructed, are of a time, reflect an agenda, and need to be interrogated and resisted, if necessary. I found the talk-back design important in enabling democratic participation as students designed their own counter-discursive responses as they confronted the canonical imperatives.” (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Thompson, Ayanna. Blackface. Routledge Object Lessons, Routledge, 2021. #PCRS
We could put this book under any of these categories, but I’m adding it here under pedagogy because I found it absolutely invaluable when teaching Othello to my own students this semester and trying to explain why, as Ben Okri says, “If Othello did not begin as a play about race, history has made it so.” Thompson pithily and personally breaks down the categories dubbed “exhibition and mimesis” by Dympna Callaghan in her germinal essay “‘Othello was a white man’” and shows readers how blackface (and brownface: she uses the same term for both, a movement with which I agree) denies to those thus represented both agency and even “authenticity.” (SI)
Thompson, Ayanna. “An Afterword About Self/Communal Care.” Teaching Social Justice
Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, edited by Hillary
Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 235–38,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvrs912p.27.
Thompson reflects on Shakespeare and social justice pedagogies.
Thompson, Ayanna and Laura Turchi. Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-
Centered Approach. Bloomsbury, 2016.
Thompson and Turchi focus on Shakespeare pedagogy that rejects notions of universality and instead works toward more just teaching and learning. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Walker, Jessica. “Appropriating Shakespeare for Marginalized Students.” The Routledge
Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet et al.,
Routledge, 2020, pp. 206–16.
Walker argues that teachers can appropriate Shakespeare for the use and benefit of students from marginalized groups by centering the experiences of those students. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Young, Sandra. “How Have Post-Colonial Approaches Enriched Shakespeare’s Works?”
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, edited by Ayanna
Thompson, Cambridge U P, 2021, pp. 254–67.
Focusing on The Tempest, Young argues that Shakespeare can be used to antiracist, anticolonial pedagogical ends when approached through the lens of postcolonial theory. (Bridget M. Bartlett, @allo_nothing)
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. See also The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
Anzaldúa describes how Chicanx people exist in borderlands – neither wholly American nor wholly other.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W.Norton, 2006.
Appiah argues for thinking of oneself as a world citizen as an ethical position for overcoming divisions and living in relation to others.
-----. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
from publisher’s website: “Adopting a broadly interdisciplinary perspective, Appiah takes aim at the clichés and received ideas amid which talk of identity so often founders. Is “culture” a good? For that matter, does the concept of culture really explain anything? Is diversity of value in itself? Are moral obligations the only kind there are? Has the rhetoric of “human rights” been overstretched? In the end, Appiah’s arguments make it harder to think of the world as divided between the West and the Rest; between locals and cosmopolitans; between Us and Them. The result is a new vision of liberal humanism — one that can accommodate the vagaries and variety that make us human.”
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014.
Bonilla-Silva describes the how color-blindness perpetuates racism and inequality.
Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991):1241–1299.
Crenshaw describes how forms of oppression intersect for women of color and other people with multiple marginalized identities.
Da Silva, Denise Ferreira. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
from publisher’s website: “Rejecting the view that social categories of difference such as race and culture operate solely as principles of exclusion, Denise Ferreira da Silva presents a critique of modern thought that shows how racial knowledge and power produce global space. Silva proposes that the notion of racial difference governs the global power configuration because it institutes moral regions not covered by post-Enlightenment ethical ideals.”
Dayan, Colin. The Law Is A White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Focusing on topics including slavery and incarceration, Dayan interrogates how law constructs identities and determines who is considered human.
Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race theory: An Introduction. New York University Press, 2001.
Delgado and Stefancic explain CRT as a concept and as a field.
Fields, Barbara and Karen Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. New York : Verso, 2012.
Fields and Fields argue that racism produces the idea of racial difference and argue that America has failed to actually reach a post-racial era because Americans have not adopted an effective way to discuss inequality.
Hall, Stuart. “Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities.” The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain. Ed. Wahneema Lubiano. New York: Pantheon, 1997.
The other essayists in this volume discuss ways that race informs modern society and white supremacism in the United State. In this chapter, Hall identifies resonances and parallels from throughout the Black Atlantic.
Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
Holland examines how race functions in the context of desire and the erotic in order to account for the overlooked quotidian reality of most racism.
Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the U.S. from the 1960s to the 1990s. New York & London: Routledge, 1994.
In this book, Omi and Winant argue that race is an “organizing principle” in U.S. society, shaping social dynamics, institutions, and personal experience in America.
Razack, Sherene, Malinda Smith, and Sunera Thobani, eds. States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2010.
Challenging claims that Canada is a multicultural, socially just society, the essays in this volume investigate the lasting legacies of racism and imperialism within Canada and beyond.
Roberts, Dorothy. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York: The New Press, 2011.
Detailing how the myth of race as a biological category informs contemporary science and medicine, Roberts argues that this fiction perpetuates racial inequality.
[a]Read this when doing the 'Premodern Critical Race Theory' module.