Shakespeare, Race and Gender seminar

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, 2024

Premodern critical race studies, long intertwined with Shakespeare studies, have broadened our understanding of the definitions and discourse of race and racism to include not only phenotype, but also religious and political identity, regional, national, and linguistic difference, and systems of differentiation based upon culture and custom. This chapter argues that race and gender are social practices that evolve over time, in each other’s presence, and in different social spaces. To correct the early modern studies’ tendency to privilege narrative texts, this chapter uses global and performance studies methods—as critical tools that are designed to capture transformative cultural practices—to highlight embodied significations of transness. The chapter concludes with a reflection on pedagogical implications of multidisciplinarity. Providing critical tools to understand atypical bodies, trans studies solidifies critical race studies’ support of minority life experiences. Critical race methods, with their attention to the social production of hierarchies, can also help trans studies address its often-unacknowledged whiteness.

Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance, 2015

She is co-editor with Agnieszka Rasmus of Images of the City (2009) and Against and Beyond: Subversion and Transgression in Mass Media, Popular Culture and Performance (2012). She specializes in Renaissance drama and the relationships between literature and contemporary popular media in the context of cultural studies. Her research interests include the areas of cultural materialism, feminism, gender studies, and queer theory.

Renaissance Quarterly

also models how particular poetic forms (e.g., the quatrain or the couplet) furnished mechanisms for argumentation and thinking. In advocating for critical accounts that consider how "representations shift in meaning over time" (135), Harrison's essay supports Griffin's suggestion that the "early modern history play" merits consideration as a distinctive generic category. By attending to Henry V 's habit of announcing its approaches to history, Griffin complicates contemporary purchase on any past to demonstrate drama's role in forcing us to rethink the "intelligibility" of the past, whether recent or remote. Munro resituates Beaumont's play-including original and recent stagings-by showing how its most obtrusive characters are also its most modish cultural critics, fluent in conventions culled variously from theater's "current output" (145) to popular romance's "familiar poetic archaisms" (147). Lara Dodds's essay on Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam works to craft terminology out of a reading of the play's "complex temporal effects" (194). Her careful parsing of discrete kinds of temporalities available in different story lines within the play supports an account of counterfactuals that showcases how imagined, invented, and competing temporalities supply resources for communicating affective response. Her compelling argument surpasses her taxonomy (the splicing of "narrative" and "passionate" counterfactuals), but the explicit conceptual framing provides a useful guide, sometimes elusive in other contributions to the volume. Still, this intriguing collection of essays works both to begin and to extend a valuable conversation, and indeed offers provocative sketches toward "analytic models for future investigations of permutations unplumbed" (6).

Shakespeare's White Others Front Matter, 2023

Examining the racially white “others” whom Shakespeare creates in characters like Richard III, Hamlet, and Tamora – figures who are never quite “white enough” – this bold and compelling work emphasizes how such classification perpetuates anti-Blackness and reaffirms white supremacy. David Sterling Brown offers nothing less here than a wholesale deconstruction of whiteness in Shakespeare’s plays, arguing that the “white other” was a racialized category already in formation during the Elizabethan era – and also one to which Shakespeare was himself a crucial contributor. In exploring Shakespeare’s determinative role – and strategic investment in identity politics (while drawing powerfully on his own life experiences, including adolescence), Brown argues that even as Shakespearean theatrical texts functioned as engines of white identity formation, they expose the illusion of white racial solidarity. This essential contribution to Shakespeare studies, critical whiteness studies, and critical race studies is an authoritative, urgent dismantling of dramatized racial profiling.

Theater, 2002

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, 2021

This essay 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.

Shakespeare at the Crossroads of Race, Language, and American Empire, 2022

The words and works of William Shakespeare have divided Americans along the lines of race, language, partisan politics, and social class since the founding of the American experiment – a division that continues to the present day. When Shakespeare is performed within the United States, ghosts haunt each production – the ghosts of the African slave, the indigenous American, the European colonist, and the countless immigrants who built a country with their blood, sweat, and toil and died on American soil. Whether attended to or not, the presence or absence of Black, White, or Indigenous bodies in American Shakespearean casting, the inclusion or exclusion of languages other than English in the dialogue spoken, and the new forms of signification that have emerged from Shakespeare’s plays through restagings at various (and, frequently, critical) moments in American history, place Shakespeare firmly at the crossroads of race, language, and American empire. This dissertation examines the audience reception of multilingual/multiracial adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello and Macbeth in the United States, from the colonial period to the present, with three intentions: (1) to increase understanding around the ways Shakespeare’s plays have been translated, adapted, or appropriated to address the topics of race, language, and American imperialism; (2) to unpack some of the practical strategies used by theatrical practitioners when staging Shakespeare’s plays to create a dialogue with American audience members around some of the most fraught subjects in our current political moment; (3) to gather and analyze audience reception data on how multilingual/multiracial Shakespearean adaptations are being received by a diverse sample of American audience members from around the United States and how those adaptations affect audience perception of Shakespeare’s plays.

2015

Centuries after his own lifetime, William Shakespeare dominates the Western canon and I would also like to thank my brothers for always asking, "What are you doing this weekend?" even though they knew the answer was, "Thesis." I would like to thank my best friend, Erin Franklin, for remaining my best friend during this trying time. I sincerely thank Professor Jillmarie Murphy, my thesis advisor, for her support, encouragement, and positive energy. I cannot put in to words how wonderful she is, but I am certain the other thesis classes were robbed.

What role did identification play in the motives, processes, and products of select post-colonial authors who "wrote back" to William Shakespeare and colonialism? How did post-colonial counter-discursive metatheatre function to make select post-colonial adaptations creative and critical texts? In answer to these questions, this dissertation proposes that counter-discursive metatheatre resituates post-colonial plays as criticism of Shakespeare's plays. As particular post-colonial authors identify with marginalized Shakespearean characters and aim to amplify their conflicts from the perspective of a dominated culture, they interpret themes of race, gender, and colonialism in 'Othello' (1604), 'Antony and Cleopatra' (1608), and 'The Tempest' (1611) as explicit problems. This dissertation combines post-colonial theory and other literary theory, particularly by Kenneth Burke, to propose a rhetoric of motives for post-colonial authors who "write back" to Shakespeare through the use of counter-discursive metatheatre. This dissertation, therefore, describes and analyzes how and why the plays of Murray Carlin, Aimé Césaire, and Derek Walcott function both creatively and critically, adapting Shakespeare's plays, and foregrounding post-colonial criticism of his plays. Chapter One analyzes Murray Carlin's motivations for adapting Othello and using the framing narrative of 'Not Now, Sweet Desdemona' (1967) to explicitly critique the conflicts of race, gender, and colonialism in 'Othello.' Chapter Two treats why and how Aimé Césaire adapts 'The Tempest' in 1969, illustrating his explicit critique of Prospero and Caliban as the colonizer and the colonized, exposing Prospero's insistence on controlling the sexuality of his subjects, and, therefore, arguing that race, gender, and colonialism operate concomitantly in the play. Chapter Three analyzes 'A Branch of the Blue Nile' (1983) as both a critique and an adaptation of 'Antony and Cleopatra,' demonstrating how Walcott's framing narrative critiques the notion of a universal "Cleopatra," even one of an "infinite variety," and also evaluates Antony as a character who is marginalized by his Roman culture. The conclusion of this dissertation avers that in "writing back" to Shakespeare, these authors foreground and reframe post-colonial criticism, successfully dismantling the colonial structures that have kept their interpretations, and the subjects of their interpretations, marginalized.