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Articles
“‘Obscured by Dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” by Margo Hendricks
Hendricks’s essay delves into the racial identities discussed in Midsummer, mainly through the mixed identities of Bottom and the voiceless changeling Indian boy that Titania adopts. She asserts that, until the elements of race and colonization are examined in performances of the play, “productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may be destined to rehearse endlessly a racial fantasy engendered as part of imperialist ideology.”
“Re-’turning’ Othello: Transformative and Restorative Romance,” by Dennis Austin Britton
Author Dennis Austin Britton argues that Othello builds on religious and romantic tropes of the early modern period. He examines Iago’s cruelty against Othello through the lens of religious identity and the genre of romance. Britton proposes that Iago attempts to strip Othello of his Christianity and re-“turn” him to “what is presumably his prior Muslim faith,” which acts as a kind of reversal from Shakespeare’s source text for the play.
NOTE: to support researchers during COVID-19, JSTOR is providing free read-online access for up to 100 articles *per month* until December 31st, 2020. Just sign up on the site!
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Listen
Podcast: “Teach Him How to Tell My Story: Shakespeare and Blackface.” Interview with Ian Smith and Ayanna Thompson. Shakespeare Unlimited: 50.
Shakespeare Unlimited Podcast Series, published June 14, 2016, by the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Scholars Ayanna Thompson and Ian Smith (both of whom are featured elsewhere on this list) are interviewed for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. They discuss Smith’s argument that the famous handkerchief in Othello was dyed black, and what that can tell us about both Othello and practices of blackface on the Elizabethan stage.
Recording of Margo Hendricks’ opening lecture for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s “Race and Periodization” symposium, entitled “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race.”
Margo Hendricks’s engaging and informative talk takes a bit of a different angle than the rest of the works on this list – rather than analyzing Shakespeare or history directly, she focuses on discussing the world of Shakespearean studies and the problems she currently sees in scholarly discussions of race in the early modern period. She centers this discussion around the distinction between premodern race studies (PRS) and premodern critical race studies (PCRS) – in short, the difference between performative wokeness in race studies and an activist’s discussion of systemic oppression in race studies.
Listen on Folger >>
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Do you know of any other great works of Shakespeare scholarship by black and ethnic minority authors we can add to this list? Please let us know in the comments section below!
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