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Throughlines offers a variety of freely accessible teaching materials to help you incorporate premodern critical race studies into your teaching. Specifically designed for use in higher education, the materials on Throughlines include lectures, pedagogical approaches, exemplar syllabi, classroom discussion models, an annotated bibliography and more.

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Video
Madeline Sayet

Indigenizing Shakespeare Movement

Many Native artists have found ways to reimagine Shakespeare, bridging communities to illustrate the importance of Indigenous language revitalization, Native art, and storytelling.

When you think of Shakespeare in America, most people's first mental picture isn't of Native peoples. Why not? If you think of Shakespeare in any other country, your mind draws an image that combines the peoples of that land and Shakespeare. But here, Native peoples have historically been erased from the theater narrative, while Shakespeare has been touted as its epitome. British culture is mythologized as our theatrical heritage, and Shakespeare is the most produced playwright on these shores. His plays are widely taught in US schools, and for hundreds of years, Native students have been required to engage with Shakespeare. Meanwhile, the American government made Native arts illegal for long periods of history. None of this is by accident, of course. Shakespeare's work is used as a part of colonizing systems on these lands. Native people have as much right to interpret Shakespeare through their cultures as anyone else. Putting so much value on a single artist's work is dangerous when we could have many voices that represent all of us in the circle. Shakespeare is at its best when everyone is allowed to decide what interests them and how to interpret it through their own perspectives. Many Native artists have found ways to reimagine Shakespeare, bridging communities to illustrate the importance of Indigenous language revitalization, Native arts, and storytelling. Here are a few examples: 1923. Amidst the residential school system that was taking Native children from their homes and forcing them to attend boarding schools where they were beaten for speaking their own languages, there is a story of possibility. At Haskell Indian School in 1923, two Native teachers, Ella Deloria and Ruth Muskrat Bronson put on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the students. Esther Horn, who played Hermia in that production, wrote that her teachers “had the unique ability to weave Native culture into the non-native curriculum, empowering students and their cultures.” In 2004, Tlingit Macbeth, produced by Perseverance Theater and Sealaska Heritage in Juneau, was directed by a non-native, but had an all-Alaskan Native cast, artists, and translators, weaving Tlingit language, song, dance, and philosophy into the production. It was spoken in both Tlingit and English, with the English being used for moments in which characters behaved more ambitiously and individualistically instead of focusing on community. Since then, Perseverance has produced many Tlingit plays by Tlingit playwrights with Native directors and designers. In 2012, grappling with language loss and reclamation in New York City, I directed my first production, set in my people's Northeastern homelands, centered on the post-colonial reimagining: What if Caliban could get his language back? This production of The Tempest began with a prologue in Mohegan spoken by Ariel, setting up the play as a story of something that happened a long time ago, with the settlers leaving at the end of the play, leaving us our world, and the need to heal it. Unlike Tlingit, which still has elders who are fluent speakers, my Mohegan nation lost our last fluent speaker in the early 1900s, so our language revitalization project could not yet translate a whole play, but beginning with a Mohegan prologue allowed me to imagine an alternative world without colonizers here, a world in which our language was used once more. At the same time in 2012, the only American representation in the World Shakespeare Festival in London was a production performed by white actors in redface. Major funding was still going toward white performers embodying stereotypes of Native peoples, instead of going toward Native artists. In 2013, while touring Shakespeare to Native villages in Alaska, the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater was asked, "why aren't you telling our stories?" So, with Gwich'in artist Allan Hayton (who also worked on Tlingit Macbeth), they co-conceived a Gwich'in production of King Lear, Lear Kehkwaii, re-imagining Lear in 1800s Alaska. He played the role of Lear as an elder, concerned about what's being passed down to the next generation. In 2015, they also did a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which included Gwich’in, Tlingit, and Yupik languages. In 2015, the Instead of Redface Movement launched in response to several major redface productions, which was still at that point, the dominant representation of Native people in American stages. Native Voices at the Autry in LA produced Randy Reinholz's adaptation of Measure for Measure, Off the Rails, set in the Indian Boarding School system, examining the horrors and corruption of those spaces. In 2017, Off the Rails became the first Native play produced at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, opening a path for more Native plays to be produced in the future seasons. From 2014-2016, the Native Shakespeare ensemble at Amerinda (American Indian Artists, Inc.) created two urban Indian productions. First, a production of Macbeth, where the witches represented colonialism. The play also questioned what it meant for Macbeth to drop the eagle feather -- failing the good leadership Duncan wanted to pass down. The second was The Winter's Tale, examining intergenerationality, Indigenous futurism, matriarchy, extraction, and the role of the seasons. In 2019 and 2021, the South Dakota Shakespeare Festival had Native directors lead their productions of Midsummer and Othello, actively recruiting native actors from many nations who also led workshops in the community. Director Tara Moses adapted Othello to exist in a world post-full Indigenous sovereignty and full Black liberation, but where the lingering effects of colorism in society still had to be grappled with. In 2022, Iāsona Kaper, a graduate student in the University of Hawaii Manoa's graduate program in Hawaiian theater, adapted Twelfth Night into Hawaiian and also created a new work that explores the intersection between Julius Caesar and Hawaii's political landscape during the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Whether including Indigenous languages or adapting works to include a Native writer's voice in English, these Shakespeare productions can only be built in Native-empowered spaces. Despite the original colonial intentions that forced Shakespeare on Native peoples, these productions say: our languages are equal to or more complicated than Shakespeare's. There's more to these stories when they are put in conversation with ours. Often, when Native-centered re-imaginings of Shakespeare's plays are produced and performed, it makes theaters want to learn more about Native stories, and they're more likely to produce Native plays in future seasons. Applying Indigenous philosophies to Shakespeare's works has changed the future of theater and made space for a wider spectrum of Native theater across the nation. In performance today, what's most important is not what the text meant hundreds of years ago, but what it means to the communities who interact with it now.

Shakespeare is at its best when everyone is allowed to decide what interests them and how to interpret it through their own perspectives. Many Native artists have found ways to reimagine Shakespeare, bridging communities to illustrate the importance of Indigenous language revitalization, Native art, and storytelling. Whether including Indigenous languages or adapting works to include a Native writer’s voice in English, these Shakespeare productions can only be built in Native-empowered spaces. Despite the original colonial intentions that forced Shakespeare on Native peoples, these productions say our languages are equal to or more complicated than Shakespeare’s.

Early Modern
Performance
Shakespeare
Indigeneity
RaceB4Race Highlight
Eduardo Ramos

Academic complicity in racist medievalisms

Eduardo Ramos examines whiteness in medievalism and its connection to medieval studies. Scholars in the field today have a responsibility to address the “sins” of their academic forefathers.

In August of 2017, hundreds of white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia for the Unite the Right rally. The gathering brought together members of various racist, antisemitic, and Islamophobic organizations active in the United States. The event began with a nighttime march in which white supremacists carried tiki torches and chanted racist slogans including “Jews will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil!” The racist rally continued the next day with increased violence. Many of the white supremacists at the rally bore medieval iconography including shields with the imperial eagle of the Holy Roman Empire and various runes. The initial response of some medievalists to the Unite the Right rally was shock that our “beloved” Middle Ages were so misused by white supremacists; but many other medievalists had been vocal about the relationship between racism and the medieval, in and out of academia, since before Charlottesville. White supremacists have long obsessed over the Middle Ages as an imaginary space into which to project a homogenous white society that serves as a rallying point for white nationalism. Unfortunately, very little has been done to counter this erroneous view of the medieval past. As Audre Lorde said, “Much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior.” Medieval Studies was born out of such a simplistic system of binaries. Early academia was unambiguously nationalist, and one of its goals was to establish the nation in question—be that England, Germany, France, etc.—as the good, the dominant, and the superior within the simplistic model of opposition outlined by Lorde. When racists appropriate the Middle Ages for their white nationalist agendas, they are participating in the program of early medieval studies. And when scholars do not acknowledge and respond to our field’s racist origins, we become complicit in racist medievalism. When faced with the often-lethal atrocities committed by white supremacists appropriating the Middle Ages, the first reaction of many scholars is to distance our field and our work from these hateful deeds. There is an impulse to shield ourselves from complicity. However, as Sara Ahmed, citing Fiona Probyn-Ramsey, points out, “complicity can be a starting point; if we start with complicity, we recognize our ‘proximity to the problems we are addressing.’” White supremacists can point to nationalist scholarship to legitimize their views, so in order to effectively counter them, scholars must address the racist work that has come out of the academy itself. Quick Aside Before launching into my main argument on modern appropriations of the Middle Ages, I’d like to take a moment to make a point that will seem obvious to many of you, but that cannot be overstated. The idea of an all-white, homogenous, medieval European past so often advanced by white supremacists is wrong. The people of the Middle Ages were not bound by the borders of modern nations. People moved around; they were interested in thoughts and ideas from other regions and cultures, and many people had fluid, or mixed, identities. In his Ecclesiastical history of the English People, Bede notes that five languages were spoken in Britain during his day, and he attests to people from three different continents being present in Britain as early as the seventh century. Our only eyewitness account of a pagan Scandinavian ship funeral is provided by Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a tenth century Arab diplomat who traveled from Baghdad to the upper region of the Volga River in modern-day Russia. The Normans, who traced their origin to the Scandinavians who settled in Frankia, were proud of their mixed heritage. During the 12th-century, Roger II, a Norman king of Sicily, patronized Muslim intellectuals at his court. One such Muslim scholar was al-Idrisi, a native of Ceuta or al-Andalus, who is most famous today for his geographical treatise the Kitab Rujār, on which this map is based. The twelfth century Jewish scholar Abraham ibn Ezra traveled from modern-day Spain to Italy, France, and England. Throughout the Middle Ages there was significant cross-cultural contact and engagement that was not violent. Nationalist Scholarship Much of the contemporary scholarship on medieval languages and literature relies on the foundation established by philologists of the nineteenth century. However, these philologists were not impartial observants of language. By and large, they were privileged men seeking to advance European nationalism at the height of imperialism, and their writing reveals their nationalist bias. As Haruko Momma has noted, Jacob Grimm, the influential German philologist, “treated language and culture as two mutually related manifestations of the psyche of the people” (Momma, 2013, 75). To argue for the greatness of a language was intertwined with arguing for the greatness of a nation or race. This dangerous conflation between language and people in a nationalist, and often hierarchical way, was not uncommon. Joseph Bosworth was an influential British scholar of Old English, perhaps best-known today for his dictionary of Old English and the chair named after him at Oxford that was held by JRR Tolkien. When Bosworth wrote his Elements of Anglo-Saxon Grammar published in 1823, one of his stated goals was to offer a grammar “formed on the true genius and structure of the original Saxon.” Early philologists working in Old English were invested in positioning the language and its history in an exalted manner. Language was one more way to underscore British dominance at the time of the British Empire. Britain was not alone in its construction and use of an Anglo-medieval past for nationalist ends. In 1849, Louis Klipstein published the first Old English reader in the United States titled Analecta Anglo-Saxonica. The reader was prefaced by an ‘Ethnological Essay’ in which Klipstein ‘states his purpose to trace the progress of the Germanic—and particularly the Anglo-Saxon—speech and race.’ María José Mora and María José Gómez-Calderón describe Klipstein’s essay as racial and nationalistic propaganda but note that it was well received in its own time. And Thomas Jefferson, who championed the study of Old English at the University of Virginia, referred to Americans as the descendants of Hengist and Horsa, the leaders of the Germanic invasion of Britain. These nationalist narratives constructed and projected an image of homogeneity onto the medieval past by suppressing the diversity evident in the primary sources, and much like today, its effects were felt beyond the academy. American settler expansionism was likened to the adventus saxonum, the Germanic settlement of Britain. As Mary Dockray-Miller has noted, “The cultural rhetoric of Manifest Destiny specifically defined ‘Anglo-Saxons’ as superior to enslaved and free Africans, Native American Indians, Mexicans, and numerous other groups defined as non-white.” In North America, the term “Anglo-Saxon,” based on an inaccurate narrative of a homogeneous medieval past, was used in an explicitly racial and racist sense to advance a nationalist agenda. Of course, racist, nationalist writing from nineteenth century intellectuals was not exclusive to the subject of Old English and early medieval England. In 1888, William Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon, an Icelandic scholar at Cambridge, published an English translation of the medieval Icelandic Vǫlsunga saga. In the preface to their translation, Morris and Magnússon describe the text as “the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks.” The saga is explicitly presented as a racial heritage shared by the British and Northern Europeans. The introduction to their translation, written by H. Halliday Sparling, takes an even more racist tone lamenting the “foreign influence” to the pagan traditions of “England, Germany, and the rest of Europe” resulting from an “influx of foreign blood.” The 1888 edition of Morris’ translation presents the Icelandic Vǫlsunga saga not so much as a cultural heritage of Iceland, but as a racial heritage of white Europeans in a manner determined by blood descent. Furthermore, in their distorted racialization of the text, Morris, Magnússon, and Sparling project backwards an idea of a white race that never existed in thirteenth century Iceland where and when the text was produced. Since the nineteenth century, and still very much to this day, “Vikings” have been held up as a sort of idol of racial and cultural purity by white nationalists. Like constructions of “Anglo-Saxonism,” constructions of “Vikings” have been deployed in the service of imperialism. William and Mary Howitt’s Literature and Romance of North Europe, published in 1852 as a history of the literature of Scandinavia and Iceland, presents the dominance of British Empire as linked to the Viking ancestors of the British people. However, when we consider medieval Scandinavia and Scandinavians, it is clear that racial and cultural “purity” was not a concern for them. Their interest in other cultures is evident in the goods and practices imported to Scandinavia even during the so-called “Viking Age.” Moreover, in the regions where Scandinavians had prolonged contact with other cultural groups, we have evidence of intermarriage and of Scandinavians adopting the local language as was the case in Normandy, Ireland, England, and modern-day Russia. Even in Iceland, a region where Sparling believed pagan traditions had been free of “foreign influence” and the “influx of foreign blood,” we find interest and engagement with the world beyond. The prologue to the Prose Edda, or Snorra Edda, the medieval Icelandic text on which much of our knowledge of Norse mythology is built, presents the Norse gods as coming from Troy in Turkey. In doing so, the Edda participates in a broader European tradition of linking national origins to Troy that goes back to ancient Rome, the subject of Virgil’s Aeneid. Æsir, the name of the main group of Norse gods, is said to mean that they were Asian, and while this is a folk etymology, it nevertheless illustrates that medieval Icelanders were interested in connecting themselves to the world beyond. Racist medievalism I would now like to turn to the issue of racist medievalism. Here I am using the term “medievalism” broadly to encompass everything from popular fiction across various media that adopts the aesthetic of medieval Europe for its setting, to the appropriation of medieval iconography by white supremacists. Popular medievalism has done more to shape people’s idea of the Middle Ages than the actual medieval writings and artifacts that have survived to this day. No one has had a greater influence on the popular medievalism of the Anglophone world than JRR Tolkien. Though best known today as the author of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was an influential scholar in his own day. His essay “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics” is credited with revolutionizing scholarly criticism on the Old English poem. However, as Dorothy Kim has noted, Tolkien “interpreted Beowulf for a white English audience” (Kim, 2019). Tolkien says of Beowulf, “it is in fact written in a language that after many centuries has still essential kinship with our own, it was made in this land, and moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and land, it must ever call with a profound appeal” (Kim, 2019). Though lacking the overtly racist tone found in the prefatory material to Morris and Magnússon’s translation of Vǫlsunga saga, Tolkien’s words share in their nationalist sentiment, and this sentiment carried over into his fiction. In the courts of medieval Europe, someone seeking knowledge might find Jews, Christians, and Muslims from Europe, Africa, and Asia. In Tolkien’s fictional council of Elrond, we find humans, dwarves, hobbits, elves, and even a wizard; they just all happen to look like white men. While the ideas expressed by these early academics and intellectuals are outdated, they continue to haunt medieval studies and to fuel racist medievalism to this day. They popularized the image of medieval Europe as a homogenous white space. Furthermore, early scholars and intellectuals writing on medieval Europe presented the period and region as racial heritages both that established inherent greatness, and from which to launch political and imperial campaigns. It is no wonder then, that, as Mary Rambaran-Olm has pointed out, medieval texts like Beowulf are popular suggested reading on white supremacist sites like Stormfront. It is not an accident that white supremacists are appropriating medieval iconography for their movement. Early medieval studies laid the groundwork for them to do precisely that. It is easy for academics to ignore the connections between appropriations of the Middle Ages and the rapid spread of white nationalism happening around the world. But to ignore the connection is dangerous. Medieval iconography provides an appealing aesthetic for white nationalist recruitment and propaganda. Variations on the ethel rune, signifying homeland, have been used by white nationalist movements since the Nazis. Images of crusaders are often made into online memes that call for Islamophobic violence. And in the U.S., white nationalists frequently appeal to Vinland when trying to establish the legitimacy of a white ethno-state in the continent. Vinland is the name given by Scandinavians to the land they encountered west of Greenland around the year 1000. The story of Vinland is preserved in Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga. Both texts make it clear that the attempts to settle Vinland were short-lived failures, but white nationalists continue to rally behind the fantasy of “American Vikings.” That fantasy is dangerous because those who believe it can use it to legitimize violence. In Portland, Oregon on May of 2017, a white supremacist, who had posted “Hail Vinland!!!” on social media, harassed two young women, one of whom was wearing hijab, yelling at them to leave the country. When other people intervened, he stabbed three of them, murdering two. Sadly, this is not an isolated incident of a white supremacist obsessed with the Middle Ages carrying out murderous violence. On March of 2019, a white supremacist terrorist attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing over fifty people and wounding dozens more. The gear the terrorist used during the attacks was covered in writing including at least eighteen references to the Middle Ages and the Crusades. White supremacists frequently point to the Crusades to justify their Islamophobia. This is facilitated by limited approaches to history like those of simplistic opposition critiqued by Lorde in the quote provided earlier. These approaches are not only limiting, they produce a distorted image of the past. As Tamar M. Boyadjian notes, control over Mediterranean cities frequently switched hands “even within the same ethnoreligious group, despite the historical representation of the Crusades by a majority of Western scholars as battles purely between Christianity and Islam.” Medievalists have the tools and knowledge to correct white nationalist misinformation and misuse of the medieval past, and as educators it is our responsibility to correct these falsehoods. As Sierra Lomuto has argued, “When white nationalists turn to the Middle Ages to find a heritage for whiteness—to seek validation for their claims of white supremacy—and they do not find resistance from the scholars of that past…our complacency becomes complicity.” White supremacists’ narratives and ideas about the Middle Ages are built on misinformation and falsehoods. As educators, and as the inheritors of a field that facilitated racist appropriations of the past, medievalists must dispel frameworks that reduce differences to simplistic oppositions that justify, if not encourage, violence. The issue of racist medievalism is neither distant nor abstract. Racist appropriations of the Middle Ages continue to develop alongside current events, and as I have noted, they can embolden white supremacists to heinous concrete actions. As political tensions between the US and Iran built up in recent weeks, Crusader imagery online has increased. This is something that medievalists should not ignore. Our field laid the groundwork for politicized, racist appropriations of the Middle Ages, and we have a responsibility to respond to it. I would like to invite you, as academics, to acknowledge our proximity to the issue of racist medievalism, to critically consider and critique the more off-putting aspects of the work on which our fields were built, and to explore how we can do better. Discussion questions • What are some ways that academics can respond to racist medievalism? • How might established academic practices uncritically reproduce or perpetuate the erroneous views of earlier intellectuals? • In an age when information travels faster than ever, how much responsibility do academics have to operate outside of traditional academic spaces?

Sins of the Father: Academic Complicity in Racist Medievalisms | Watch the full talk

Presented by Eduardo Ramos at Appropriations: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2020

Eduardo Ramos examines whiteness in medievalism and its connection to medieval studies. He discusses how academia’s early nationalistic, and at times overtly imperial, interests suppressed evidence of diversity during the Middle Ages to construct a homogenous white Europe that informs popular medievalism like The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). Furthermore, by presenting texts like Beowulf (pre-11th century) and Vǫlsunga saga (13th century) as some sort of white heritage, early scholars and translators facilitated the appropriation of medieval Germanic symbols by white nationalist movements. Scholars in the field today have a responsibility to address these “sins” of their academic forefathers.

Medieval
Literature
Poetry
Essay
Scott Manning Stevens

The resources of sovereignty on Caliban’s island

Close reading opportunities to engage students in discussions of sovereignty and self-determination in Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Despite the debates around the geographic location of Shakespeare’s imagined island in The Tempest, that play has always spoken to countless readers living under the legacy of European colonialism. There are clear links to the literature of exploration, encounter, and conquest whether it be the account of a shipwreck in Bermuda, the embedding of passages from Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals,” or passing references to European interactions with North Africa.  

The play considers alterity, the dispossession and subjugation of a Native inhabitant in his homeland, and the fear of miscegenation, even as it may also be a more abstract meditation on the power of art, the imaginary, and theater. In teaching The Tempest through this lens, I would focus on our first encounter with Caliban in act 1, scene 2. Prospero calls for his ‘slave’ Caliban and demands he come out of his dwelling; Caliban responds:

I must eat my dinner.  
This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother,  
Which thou takest from me. When thou camest first,  
Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me  
Water with berries in't, and teach me how  
To name the bigger light, and how the less,  
That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee  
And show'd thee all the qualities o' the isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:  
Cursed be I that did so!  


The scene enacts in miniature a European contact narrative beginning with Prospero’s assertion of Caliban’s baseness. Caliban responds in anger to Prospero’s demands for his labor, saying that he is eating his meal, and then bursts out with an impassioned tirade against Prospero for dispossessing him of his birthright, his island home. Caliban recounts the first encounters with the shipwrecked Prospero and his small child, when they were friendly to Caliban and treated him well. They shared their foodways and knowledge with him and he in turn showed them the island’s resources. Caliban knew from experience where to find potable water and which lands were fertile. He shared that vital knowledge for surviving in his homeland with the newcomers, to his detriment. Once enslaved by Prospero’s magic, Caliban lives in a bond servitude on which his masters become dependent.

How like the various encounter narratives we find in the early modern European archive. Vulnerable European explorers were frequently dependent on the hospitality of the Indigenous peoples of the lands they visited. But if those same explorers found themselves at advantage, through superior weaponry or due to the impact of the pathogens they carried, or a combination of the two, they rarely lost the opportunity to claim hegemony over the land and suzerainty over the native population.  

In the passage above, Caliban recounts how Prospero and Miranda taught him their language, including their names for the sun and the moon, with the implication their nominative system is somehow the more correct one. While teaching The Tempest, you might consider assigning a reading of Thomas Hariot’s account of his interaction in 1585 with the Algonquian peoples of the Atlantic coast of what is now North Carolina as a comparison. After demonstrating the use of various technological instruments he brought, including telescopes, magnifying glasses, and magnets, Hariot claims the Natives considered the objects to be made by the gods, who clearly favored the English, because these tools were beyond their comprehension. Hariot’s technology is analogous to Prospero’s magic and we witness Prospero threaten to use that magic to physically torture Caliban for his insolence.

Caliban is robbed of both his freedom and his land. The relationship of Indigenous peoples to their home territories is an essential part of their identities. Many Indigenous cultures recount their autochthonous beginnings, emerging out of the land itself. Or others who come from the skyworld to the earth are the cause of it becoming a habitable place. Their relationship to the land is one defined as much by obligations to it as their rights of ownership over it. For Indigenous peoples, their duty is to determine what course is best for themselves on the land: in exercising that duty they are demonstrating their sovereignty. Thus, their self-determination of the collective wellbeing is at the center of their autonomy, rather than the wielding of power over a specific territory. Caliban loses his sovereignty when others take away his authority over his own land after he has shared the best ways to live in that environment.  

Caliban’s tragedy is redoubled in act 2, scene 2 when he mistakes the drunken castaway Stephano for a god and the man’s liquor for a divine brew. Caliban, to Stephano, says:

I’ll show thee the best springs. I’ll pluck thee berries.
I’ll fish for thee and get thee wood enough.
A plague upon the tyrant that I serve.
I’ll bear him no more sticks, but follow thee,
Thou wondrous man.   


While written for comic effect no doubt, the scene has tragic resonances when we consider how alcoholic spirits were often used as a weapon of conquest in actual negotiations between Europeans and Indigenous people who were unfamiliar with alcohol. In his inebriated state, Caliban once again offers to share the bounty of his home isle in order to gain alliance with Stephano against Prospero’s tyrannical usurpation. The bond Caliban has enjoyed with his environment and the delights of the island’s ethereal music seem doomed to be ruptured by colonial intrusions. When he loses that bond, he loses his sovereignty.

Early Modern
Literature
Indigeneity
Shakespeare
Reading list
Madeline Sayet

Indigenous Shakespeares

Selected readings to contextualize Shakespeare and indigeneity in your classroom.

Blackhawk, Ned. The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023.

Darby, Jaye T., Courtney Elkin Mohler, and Christy Stanlake. Critical Companion to Native American and First Nations Theatre and Performance: Indigenous Spaces. London: Methuen, 2020.

Grier, Miles P. "Staging the Cherokee Othello: An Imperial Economy of Indian Watching." The William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2016): 73–106.

Hughes, Bethany. "The Indispensable Indian: Edwin Forrest, Pushmataha, and Metamora," Theatre Survey 59, no. 1 (January 2018): 23-44.

Hughes, Bethany. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. New York: NYU Press, 2024.

Nesteroff, Kliph. We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

HowlRound articles

Hayton, Allan. "Healing Stories from Naa Kahidi Theatre.” HowlRound Theatre Commons. 21 August 2018.

Hubbard, Robert. “The Ills We Do, Their Ills Instruct us So’' Indigenous Futurism and the South Dakota Shakespeare Festival." HowlRound Theatre Commons. 25 July 2022.

Hughes, Bethany. “Off the Rails: Look at Shakespeare, See a Native Play.” HowlRound Theatre Commons. 22 January 2018.

Nagle, Mary Kathryn. “Native Voices on the American Stage: A Constitutional Crisis.” HowlRound Theatre Commons. 22 February 2015.

Starbard, Vera. “Alaska Native Theatre Comes of Age.” HowlRound Theatre Commons. 18 August 2018.

Sayet, Madeline. “Interrogating the Shakespeare System.” HowlRound Theatre Commons. 21 August 2020.  

Plays and creative works that could be read with or instead of Shakespeare

Pigeon by Dillon Chitto

Pueblo Revolt by Dillon Chitto

Wings of a Night Sky/Wings of Morning Light by Joy Harjo

Hamlet: El Principe de Denmark by Tara Moses  

Othello by Tara Moses

Death of a Chief by Yvette Nolan  

Off the Rails by Randy Reinholz

Whale Song by Cathy Tagnak Rexford

Where We Belong by Madeline Sayet  

Devilfish by Vera Starbard

Coming Soon: Methuen Anthology of Native American Drama (Estimated 2026).  

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Indigeneity
Video
Chouki El Hamel

What is the "curse" of Ham?

The curse of Ham myth is rooted in some of the nascent formations of race and racism. This story—its revisions and retellings—continues to shape a set of beliefs about the inferiority of Black people, which persists in our world today.

The only thing that the Bible says is that, when Noah was drunk and then his son Ham saw him naked, Japeth and Shem covered the nakedness of their father. They were blessed because they did the right thing according to Noah. But Ham did the wrong thing, so he was cursed. But actually it's not him who was cursed, but his children: the Canaan people were cursed. The curse, for some reason, would be manifested or transferred as an act of slavery or servitude. They would be servants in the house of Japheth and Shem. That’s all there is. There’s no Blackness. There are no nations. There are no racial classifications in it at all. Scholars at the time existed in the Middle East area: in Palestine, in Iraq, and in Israel. These thinkers tried to figure out the peoples of the earth, the populations. They divide them according to the Bible, because that was the framework. And the people that don’t fit the somatic norm, the image of themselves, are different. Different, and sometimes different with the qualification that they are inferior. They thought: these people, if they're different, it's because of the curse. And Blackness was basically associated with the curse. In the Talmud, the scholars of that time talked about color. They say clearly that Ham was cursed and his children became black because of the curse, that they became degenerates. The Quran came: it has nothing about this. In the entire Quran, there is nothing about race at all, or racial divisions, or the story of Ham. These biblical stories? They're not mentioned. The verses in the Quran offer moral points. They serve some cause: something has to happen in order for the Quran to be revealed. For most of those moral points, they are not going to have a story, like the narrative in the Bible or the stories in the Talmud. When the scholars in Islam were trying to build, to establish the narrative for Islam, they drew some from the Bible, but the Bible does not say everything. In the classification of races, they had to go through Abrahamic traditions. And most of those scholars belonged to Abrahamic traditions. One of them was called Wahb Ibn Munabbih, who died around 730. He was a person of the book, probably a Jew or Christian, and he was versed in the Abrahamic traditions in classifying the races. He's the one who introduced, from the Talmudic traditions, the notion of the Hamitic myth in Islamic literature. And what he said is that Ham was once a beautiful person, and then God cursed him to become black, and his face ugly. The word ugly and the children of Ham are then associated with the people of Sudan, in Africa. Tabari, also at the beginning of the 10th century, used the Hamitic myth to classify races. He mentions that the Semites: the Arabs, the Persians and the Byzantines, are the good race. And the others, the Hamites, are not the good race. Ibn Hawqual who wrote The Geography of the Earth, also in the 10th century, mentions the Hamitic curse. Ibn Hawqual went to Morocco. He didn't go to Sub-Saharan Africa but was almost there. And he probably encountered Black people. He not only talks about children of Ham as cursed, Black, and servants of other races, but he also mentions that people of the “Black race” have no civilization and are not worth mentioning. We talk about race before race. That makes me think of Hegel. Hegel said, oh, why should you be bothered with Africa? It doesn't have any history. Egypt, yes, but Egypt is not Africa. And the North Africans are not Africans, and that Africa proper has nothing to talk about. They don't belong to human civilization. Ibn Hawqual in the 10th century already said that. And Hegel was around 1800. There are a lot of parallels, but in time they're so far away. And that proves, you know, that talk about race was well elaborated in the Middle East and North Africa long before Europe had any conception of it.

From the Bible to the Talmud, from The Faerie Queen to The Merchant of Venice, from Toni Morrison’s Sula to Adult Swim’s The Boondocks, the curse of Ham mythology is an undying and deeply rooted part of our contemporary consciousness, manifesting itself in literature, film, politics, and popular entertainment. But what is the “curse" of Ham and how did it take shape? How has it molded our understanding of race and why is it still with us today?

Ancient
History
Religion
RaceB4Race Highlight
Joyce Green MacDonald

Finding Black women in Shakespeare

Joyce Green MacDonald traces ways early modern texts and genres process the classical past and how that construction of the past is made known in the present.

On Tuesday, I thought I knew I was going to say in my talk today, but then I heard Professor Haley’s impassioned and inspirational opening paper about Blackness and classicism and was moved to throw out most of what I’d written and start over. Those who know my work know that I’ve always been interested in how early modern texts and genres process the classical past, so as to make themselves known in the present through the honored resources of the ancient world, and to borrow sone of that gravity and dignity for themselves. Ben Jonson assures us that at its best, poetic imitation, in the hands of the right modern poet, will let him connect himself to some favored ancient author, “and so. . . follow him, till he grow very he, or so like him as their copy may be mistaken for the principal.” Writers who proved themselves capable of the “exactnesse of Studie” necessary to grasp the essence of a previous poem or a poet would then be free to demonstrate that they could reproduce “the matter, and Stile” of these ancient cultural artifacts, “with elegancie,” in their own works, and thus close the gaps of time and distance and memory between ourselves and what we want to identify as our intellectual and cultural origins. It didn’t occur to me until much later how vast some of those temporal and spatial gaps can be, and how difficult it can be to traverse such uncharted space. Neither did I understand how much depends on that word “we,” on who your companions were as you followed authors and texts and modes back into the past, and on what the politics and social practices of reading were that bound you together on your journey. I grew up in a family of poor Black strivers in Louisville, the youngest daughter of two migrants from Selma, Alabama who had barely finished the sixth grade. The soundtrack of our house was jazz and Beethoven and soul music, and our parents encouraged us to read anything we wanted. One of my earliest memories is of pulling our house’s only bookcase over on top of myself when I was trying to reach my older sisters’ copy of the high school literature anthology that included Macbeth. I started writing about race in Renaissance drama very early in my academic career, partly spurred on by the vibrancy of Black American popular culture in the 1990s, when I was professionally starting out, as well as by the decade’s stirring roll call of Black female firsts—Mae Jemison flying into space, Toni Morrison winning the Nobel Prize, Serena Williams’ first Grand Slam, Carole Moseley Braun’s election to the US Senate, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. I didn’t see anything inconsonant about thinking of all my pasts—I am my parents’ daughter, a Black southerner, an amateur Shakespearean, a trained Shakespearean—as working together, mutually aiding each other and me as we followed Jonson’s journey back toward Shakespeare and what lay even farther backwards beyond him. Starting out, I expected that the nimbleness and associative pleasures that marked my own beginnings as a Shakespearean would carry over into my new professional communities. I was largely wrong. My Shakespearean “we” wasn’t the same as the “we” that dominated the field at the time, and my journey to the past was not the same journey Jonson assures us will arrive at its intended destination, if only we work with enough “exactnesse of Studie” and apply the right aesthetic measure of “elegancie” to conceal our hard work. I had no doubt that I would find Black women in the early modern classical framing that interested me, but as I began my project, I soon encountered a problem I couldn’t quite name at first. Using familiar tropes and allusions to foundational texts and historical moments was supposed to be a means of proclaiming culture’s continuity, as though the global events unfolding in Shakespeare’s lifetime—the first English transatlantic slaving voyage in 1564, the foundation of a permanent colony in the new world in 1607—had all happened before. But they hadn’t. Classically minded writers in this colonial world had to figure out how to negotiate passage from the past to the present in ways that far exceeded figuring out which ancient writer they wanted to imitate. They would have to learn how to represent new geographies, new economic practices, and especially (for my purposes here) new relations between races within the frame of their chosen author or style. Anything but orderly and linear, as Jonson’s good-student model of reading has it, evolution from past to present didn’t just bring texts and genres and forms into the present, but also the ideologies those forms had been used to mediate, the histories they had been called on to organize. I finally began to realize that the problem of finding Black women in the imitative literary practices of this early colonial world was that they themselves, their stories, their voices, had been lost in the void of the middle passage. The vastness of Atlantic space as well as the passage into a new kind of race-based global economic order formed a kind of dead zone that no poetic practice or even the most joyful and exploratory readers’ practice could easily cross, much less renew. What we see happening in the example of 17th-century colonial classicism I’m going to talk about here is a moment of crisis for imitative practice, especially when it came to accounting for the presence of Black women and of interracial sex in the colonial world. We know, for example, that almost incomprehensible acts of physical violence, psychological abuse, starvation and, especially for female slaves, rape defined the process of enslavement that began during the passage westward across the Atlantic. Denigrated to the status of mere “flesh,” in Hortense Spillers’ usage, the bodies of female slaves became a ground for demonstrating their complete “absence from a subject position” through the very tortures to which they were subjected. Reading and disseminating the records of the tortures that slave women suffered can paradoxically result in obscuring their lives even further, rendering them historically visible as only the objects to which their enslavement reduced them. The archive of their suffering uses its power to morally anonymize its records of how people were turned into things. Historians like Jennifer L. Morgan and Marisa Fuentes and Jessica Marie Johnson are showing us how to read these muted archives of slavery oppositionally, against and outside the interests of those who assembled and normalized and preserved the records of this dehumanization. But I’d like to suggest here that we early modernists, or at least those of us who have a classical bent to their interests, may be well-equipped to continue this work because so much new world plantation discourse comes to us through the classical resources that poets like Jonson idealized. Saidiya Hartman has noted how often stories of the violation of sexual taboos that constituted such an essential part of the display of masters’ absolute power over the people they enslaved were littered with the “brutal Latin phrases” their educated British authors reflexively turned to. It is in slave culture’s Latinisms that we can see how wayward and inconsonant the classical past’s influence on the present can be. Thomas Thistlewood, who was once the overseer of a Jamaican plantation called Egypt, used Latin in his diary’s accounts of his rapes of female slaves: “Cum Flora, a congo, Super Terram among the canes, above the wall head,” he wrote, “About 2 a.m. Cum Negroe girl, super floor, at north bed foot.” On July 2, 1770, he whipped a young Congo girl named Sally for stealing food, and the next day he raped her “sup terr” (“on the ground”). While Thistlewood’s Latin had devolved to the level of a convenient record-keeping shorthand, the language served a very different function for Richard Ligon, when he began his three-year sojourn in Barbados in 1647. Better-born than Thistlewood—his cousins included the Berkeley and Gorges families, who produced an early governor of colonial Virginia and the original recipient of the charter for the Province of Maine—Ligon showed the social functions of a classical education when his patron Sir Thomas Modyford wrote a letter of thanks in Latin to the island’s governor, a Padre Vagado, for getting the English expedition out of a jam caused by a treacherous Portuguese guide. The Padre tried his best to respond in proper written Latin, but, as Ligon sardonically noted, he “fell the two bows short, substance and language; and though his Quarrel were to us, yet he revenged himself on Priscian, whose head he broke three or four times in his letter.” Priscian was the 5th-century Latin grammarian whose Institutes of Grammar had long been considered the leading authority on the language. His joke about the Padre’s poor Latin thus at least partially draws on a sense of deep-seated authority that he, an educated, well-connected gentleman, possessed, and that the mysterious Padre—whose family consisted “of a Mulatto of his own getting, three Negroes, a Fiddler, and a Wench”—did not. Ligon’s late Renaissance classicism is allusional, allowing him to speak from within a community of the properly acculturated and comfortably inserting him into a line of historical descent that equips him to name the relationships around him and to decipher the strange new world he is about to enter. Moved by the sight of Barbados’ magnificent royal palms, which could grow to a height of nearly 200 feet, he remarked that “If this earth were beautiful, smooth, and large enough, it might be called the Pedestal to that Corinthian Pillar, the Palmetto Royal.” The explosion of fronds at the top of a royal palm reminds him of the highly ornamented capital of a Corinthian pillar as he reduces the lush Barbadian landscape to the status of a stage setting for the classically inflected grandeur his description imposes on it. Unfortunately, Barbados’ dense forests and the songbirds they hosted were all gone within 25 years of Ligon’s arrival, cut down to clear land for planting sugar cane. Ligon’s History smoothly appropriates such violent deforestation to its invocation of ancient forms, but it encounters more difficulty when it tries to understand Barbados’ people and the relationships he can have with them within those pre-existing frames of reference. A group of “pretty young Negro Virgins playing about” a well strike him as “Nymphs” whose graceful beauty would challenge the skill of Durer or Titian to portray accurately. The sight of them has somehow yanked him backwards from his own time and thrust him into an Arcadian glade while he thought he was on his way to a tropical settlement; time and history blur. Ligon had earlier been impressed by the “Majesty” and natural elegance of Padre Vagado’s beautiful “black Mistress,” but he insists that these young nymphs affected him even more powerfully. An older woman might “counsell and perswade” a gentleman into offering his love, but “young fresh Beauties” like those at the well “force, and so commit rapes upon our affections”. The word “rapes” jumps off the page here, knowing what we know about Black women’s lives in the early Caribbean. However, Ligon uses the word in an expansive, oblique sense that refers backward to its Latin meaning of taking something (or someone) by force more than it does to the sexual violation that formed so much of the fabric of plantation life. His use also strips the word of much of the gravity it carries in Roman accounts of imperial origin. Ovid’s Fasti tells us that the Sabine men’s decision to attack Rome in retaliation for their daughters’ having been lured to the city through deceit and then seized as wives by the city’s founders was “the first time did a father wage war upon his daughters’ husbands.” In attacking, the Sabines’ fathers would be compounding a violation of their own rules of family connection because “now the ravished brides could claim the style of mothers also, and yet the war between kindred folks kept lingering on.” In this classical account, rape has an afterlife that will shadow the reproductive future that Romulus and his followers believed they had guaranteed by kidnapping the Sabines. Because of the way they believe sex operates in civil order, the Sabines’ fathers must now recognize the men who kidnapped and raped their daughters as “kindred,” whether they want to or not. In comparison, the notion of raptus that Ligon invokes denudes the act of its sorrow, both in Roman history and in the history of his own time. His story paints him as the victim who will be figuratively instead of literally carried away, and the girls as smiling aggressors who don’t intend him any real harm. They have not resorted to violence; no one has been abducted or coerced into placating their rapist by fear for their children’s fates. Instead, he and not these Black girls have been carried away. A willing victim of their charm, he gives them what trinkets he has about him, and offers them strong English spirits, which they dilute with water before they drink. He knows they wanted to speak with him; “they wanted neither wit nor discretion, to make an answer”. Even though they pulled themselves into “the modestest postures that could be” after accepting his gifts, he could tell by their “wanton smiles and jesticulations” that they wanted to increase their acquaintance with him. But they did not speak. He stands before them, drink in hand, suspended in desire. Unlike Thistlewood, Ligon never writes about his actual sex life. To be sure, he even seems to retract his insistence on the attraction between him and the group of Black girls at the well, explaining that he had written under the influence of their powerful allure, and of the extravagance of the tropical landscape that hosted them: “the place being extream beautifull and lovely, could not but secretly harbour in it the Spirit of Love, a passion not to be governed.” The girls at the well belong to an order of nature in which desire is immanent; they effortlessly embody it and aim it at his vulnerable heart. Anyway, people shouldn’t take him too seriously because “[T]he Iland, being a place of very little or no traffick, could not afford much of discourse.” He was only joking, he says, in a rhetorical move that’s taken on new life in contemporary politics as defenders of reactionary or racist statements insist without evidence that the speaker clearly didn’t mean it. Here, Ligon withdraws his implication of cross-racial sexual contact almost as soon as he makes it. The Black nymphs at the tropical well implicitly offer themselves, but Ligon declines their advances, after presenting himself as a sure and willing participant in the courtship dance they initiate. He is their sexual victim—perhaps not an unwilling one, but the object of their assertive desire nonetheless. What this Arcadian fantasy tells us is the degree to which, even at this early point in British settlement of Barbados, the notion of slave women’s natural wantonness has achieved an ideological life of its own that works to excuse the ways in which white men act on their own desires. A conviction of enslaved women’s innate immodesty and their exclusion from normal orders of civic or even human status will enable the sexual terror that helped slave cultures proclaim and sustain white supremacy, and we see some of this later in Ligon’s work. But even at the middle of the 17th century, we can see how deeply the belief in Black women’s sexual aggression was inscribed into stories about colonial desire, displacing white men’s predation and entitlement onto them. I know that my title promised you a talk about finding Black women in Shakespeare. As a girl Shakespeare nerd raised in a world of Black possibility, I assumed that I would find Black women in Shakespeare, having grown up on stories about real-life heroes and rebels like Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer, watching Barbara Jordan in the Watergate hearings and Angela Davis on trial and Shirley Chisholm running for president. I didn’t. So, I started reading. Since I was very interested at the time in works dealing with Rome’s imperial encounters with Africa and the east, I found myself looking for Renaissance stories about Sophonisba, the Carthaginian noblewoman who committed suicide rather than be taken prisoner and forced to walk in a Roman triumph (she is a major character in Petrarch’s late 14th century epic Africa). I read and reread the Aeneid, especially book four (emphasized in Shakespeare’s grammar school education), where Aeneas consummates his great love for Dido, Carthage’s queen, and then breaks both their hearts by leaving her to continue his mission to found an empire greater than Troy. I read any number of plays about Rome’s encounters in Egypt, with their shifting love/political triangles: Cleopatra/Caesar/Pompey, Caesar/Cleopatra/Antony, Cleopatra/Antony/Octavius. I read and reread and am still reading Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, set on that path by the same kind of scorn that Professor Haley expressed for critics and scholars who tried to evade or dismiss the possibility of Blackness manifesting anywhere in one of their sacred texts by insisting that the Egyptian queen was really Greek. Reading these Renaissance tales of African empire, I thought I would find Black women in the texts and the period I loved. But the more reading I did the more obvious it became that my assumption was wrong. Instead, what I found was that Sophonisba and Dido of Carthage (in modern-day Tunisia) and Cleopatra of Egypt were all explicitly described as white—ivory-skinned and golden-haired, and I began to wonder why. Regardless of what ancient Carthaginians or Egyptians might have looked like or how they described themselves, why were my texts so insistent on physically describing all these women as white? Why had even the possibility of their Blackness--or at least that they were not white—been made to disappear? But as Fred Moten reminds us, “Disappearance is not absence.” Even though so few Black women appear onstage in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, even in the classically set texts where we might expect to find them, they are still called on to do all kinds of work furthering the symbolic logic of his plots: they are there, and they matter, even though they don’t physically appear. Blackness and Black femininity were necessary to make whiteness visible, as I intuited when I realized that the literary vogue for descriptions of white female virtue overlapped with the appearance of ethnographic descriptions of Black female degradation. The selective management of the classical archive is another means through which Black female subjects were reproduced for the purposes of empire and of the race-based slavery which supported it. I believe that in the century after Ligon, classical imitation reaches the end of its utility as a tool for this re-presentation of the place of Black women in the ancient world. “Museums,” poet Robin Coste Lewis tells us, “are invisible graveyards,” crammed with the “broken, defaced, unseen” bodies of Black women reduced to decorative traces: “we are everywhere.” Perhaps our knowledge of how classical literatures and texts and forms permeate Renaissance literature, as common and unremarked-upon for us now as the manifestations of Roman and Greek dominion Professor de Monteiro described her students discovering all around them in post offices and high schools and city halls, can become a tool for us to find and excavate the Black presences that have been deliberately lost.

Finding Black Women in Shakespeare | Watch the full talk

Presented by Joyce Green McDonald at Politics: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Joyce Green MacDonald traces ways early modern texts and genres process the classical past, and how that construction of the past is made known in the present, through honored resources of the ancient world. In particular, she emphasizes that classical and early modern texts can become tools for excavating Black presences that have been deliberately lost. Through Richard Ligon’s eyewitness account in Barbados (1647) and Thomas Thistlewood’s eyewitness account in Jamaica (1748-1786), Black women’s innate modesty and exclusion from normal orders of civic or human status converts them to objects. Building upon Ben Jonson’s notions “exactness of study” and the “poetic imitation a modern poet creates,” Green MacDonald argues that while Black women are not often visible in Shakespeare’s plays and his contemporaries', disappearance does not mean absence.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Reading list
Scott Manning Stevens

Reading the Doctrine of Discovery

Reading suggestions for a deeper dive into the centuries of jurisprudence for stealing Native lands set by an obscure early modern religious decree.

Cavedon, Matthew P. From the Pope’s Hand to Indigenous Lands: Alexander VI in Spanish Imperialism. Leiden: Brill, 2023.

Miller, Robert J. Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg. Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Miller, Robert J. “The Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny,” Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians, eds. Susan Sleeper-Smith, et al. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.  

Patricia Seed. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.  

Williams, Robert A., Jr. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourse of Conquest. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Early Modern
History
Indigeneity
Video
Ian Smith

Race in Hamlet: The violent Black man myth

Rather than try to tell a sociological story about the "violent Black man" myth, we can examine one instance of this racial mythmaking in a widely studied, influential literary forebear: Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Race in the modern era has seen the circulation of the violent Black Man stereotype that has been promoted through his criminalization in the “War on Drugs,” his overrepresentation in mass incarceration, and the deprivation of his life in extrajudicial shootings. Too often the recurrent theme and justification is that the Black Man poses a threat, so criminalization, imprisonment, and death are offered as modern prevention strategies. How did we get here? Rather than try to tell a sociological story, let us examine one instance of this racial mythmaking in a widely studied, influential literary forbear: Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamlet introduces the loaded word “Moor” when he contrasts his murderous uncle Claudius to his deceased father whom Hamlet mourns. Showing his mother two pictures, Hamlet asks scornfully, “Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed/ And batten on this Moor?” (3.4.66-67). While the word “moor” can refer to landscape, it is also the most used early modern term for a person of African origin. And Hamlet artfully contrasts Claudius, “this Moor” to the “fair mountain” that was his father, the black and white pairing underscoring the central moral and plot tension in racial terms. Importantly, when Hamlet speaks of Claudius as a Moor, the association is meant to indict his uncle for murder. In so doing, Hamlet confirms the popular racial bias, evident in many early modern plays, that he has internalized about black men as agents of wicked, violent acts. In this moment, Hamlet’s moral disdain for Claudius takes a pivotal turn that redefines their history of animosity in terms of racial outrage. We can now fully grasp Hamlet’s dilemma. Early in the play, Hamlet’s father’s ghost reveals Claudius’s duplicity in masterminding the royal assassination, with the added demand that Hamlet take revenge and, in turn, kill Claudius. Hamlet, is left in doubt, wondering whether he should trust the ghost or fear it as a malign spirit. However, if, as we have seen, Hamlet associates murder with blackness, he is now quite desperate, knowing that obeying the ghost might make him the very thing he despises: an unjust killer or, in his own mind, a homicidal “Moor,” a murderous black man. Hamlet’s famous delay, therefore, is not simply a philosophical or moral matter; it is rooted in Hamlet’s conscious participation in a racial ideology that threatens to reposition him on one side of the black-white divide. Now, we shouldn’t take Hamlet’s whiteness for granted. In fact, Hamlet calls attention to his delay in avenging his father’s murder by criticizing himself as a coward only to colorize cowardice as white, pale, and sickly. In his famous “To be or not to be,” soliloquy, Hamlet confesses, “Thus, conscience does make cowards of us all,/ And thus the native hue and resolution/ Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” (3.1.83-85). Cowardice diminishes. It saps mental resilience and drains the hue or color from a healthy body, making it appear anemic, feeble, and pallidly white. For a prince known for his long, reflective monologues, Hamlet’s self-indictment suggests that his criticism extends across the play to identify a perceived weakness racialized as white. This sickly cowardice can only be corrected by its opposite, a form of blackness-as-action that deepens the conundrum he faces. As a result, we can better understand the significance of Hamlet’s request to the troupe of traveling actors, for it intersects with the racial dilemma of his own non-action. Hamlet requests a performance featuring an avenging, blood-thirsty Pyrrhus arriving in Troy to murder king Priam as retaliation for the slaughter of his father, Achilles. Hamlet is clearly drawn to the avenging son narrative, but the racial significance of this affinity has been too long overlooked. Shakespeare pointedly paints Pyrrhus as black in striking contrast to the classical literary tradition to which the warrior-son belongs. To reinforce his identification with Pyrrhus, Hamlet recites the lines describing the combatants hidden in the Trojan horse, among them, “The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms/ Black as his purpose, did the night resemble” (2.2 443-44). And as if to forestall the skepticism of modern critics, Shakespeare expands the description, using the word “complexion” to complement “arms” in order to foreground Pyrrhus’s physical body, that “Hath now this dread and black complexion smeared/ With heraldry more dismal” (2.2.446-47). Hamlet, we discover, has been a fan of this acting company, and the specific request for a little-known scene from their repertory explains his attempt to come to terms with being a man of violent action that, in his mind, is the equivalent of becoming black. Hamlet is an early example of the deeply troubling conflation of blackness and violence that has all too easily assumed currency in the modern era. In the late nineteenth century, the fiction of the docile plantation slave, living in happy servitude, gave way to the myth of the violent black predator as a reaction to black emancipation, whose criminalization would justify imprisonment, and, over time, result in today’s mass incarceration. The consequences of the violent Black Man myth for the health and life of racialized black persons are dire as we become instant targets to be neutralized before we threaten. However, the closing scene of Hamlet, with its cast of dead bodies strewn across the stage, undercuts the racial disinformation that drives Hamlet’s behavior. Black persons in the drama did not commit this wretched slaughter; white men did. Shakespeare critiques the fact and tragedy of white violence that, as we have seen with Hamlet, would prefer to use blackness as its cover and political mask.

Race in the modern era has seen the circulation of the violent Black man stereotype that has been promoted through his criminalization in the “War on Drugs,” his overrepresentation in mass incarceration, and the deprivation of his life in extrajudicial shootings. Too often the recurrent theme and justification is that the Black man poses a threat, so criminalization, imprisonment, and death are offered as modern prevention strategies. How did we get here? Rather than try to tell a sociological story, we can examine one instance of this racial mythmaking in a widely studied, influential literary forebear: Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Activity
Kim F. Hall

The unessay

Kim F. Hall assigns the unessay to have students tackle an intellectual knot outside the constraints of the usual college essay.

This unessay assignment is often the final assignment in Kim F. Hall’s "Black Shakespeares" course.  

As you may know, the word “essay” means “attempt.” Usually, this is an attempt at understanding something that is complex and explaining that complexity. Similarly, the unessay is your attempt at tackling an intellectual knot outside the constraints of the usual college essay or research paper. Your unessay should deeply and critically engage with the topic of the course; while you are welcome to move between past and present, there should be some substantive engagement with the premodern. However, your texts, interpretation and analysis of premodern materials do not have to cover topics that we have discussed in class. The pedagogical purpose of the unessay is to create opportunities for you to pursue the things that arouse your intellectual curiosity and to explore them in any medium that suits you, which includes music, art, poetry, animation, sewing/stitching, drama, short film, etc. Whatever form your unessay takes you will write a paratextual statement that explains the relation of your unessay to the class and the interpretive and creative choices that you made.

You will be graded on the depth of your analysis and engagement with your choice of topic as well as the effort that you put into the unessay. The "unessay" was originally formulated by Professor Paul O'Donnell, who notes, “In an unessay you choose your own topic, present it any way you please, and are evaluated on how compelling and effective you are.” One way to think about the unessay for this class is to consider the question: How can I best convey my interest in the subject to other students and scholars?

Your unessay should include

  1. A title
  2. A clear focus
  3. Some attention to issues raised by scholarship in the field (talk to me! use those lightning review notes!)
  4. A paratextual statement that outlines your focus and goals for the project
  5. NOTE: I'd like a paragraph description of what you might like to do (which can be your interests thus far, etc.) and for you to make an appointment to talk about it by [DATE]. 
Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
RaceB4Race Highlight
Reginald A. Wilburn

Milton and anti-lynching reform

Reginald A. Wilburn analyzes James Weldon Johnson’s anti-lynching poem “Brothers – American Drama” (1916) and its intertextual references to Milton.

I'm honored and humble to be before you today to talk a few things about James Weldon Johnson and John Milton. Who would think John Milton, by way of Paradise Lost, would make an intertextual presence in an anti-lynching poem by James Weldon Johnson? How and why does Milton function there? That Milton can be seen operating as a poetics of intertextuality in Johnson's "Brothers—American Drama" attests to an ongoing tradition where African American writers test and testify with the 17th century poet well beyond the close of the 19th century. In Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature, I chronicle and analyze this tradition as produced by major writers, the likes of Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, and Sutton E. Griggs. By the dawn of the 20th century, a new tradition of intertextuality that tropes and engages with Milton and Black writing, emerges. For instance, Milton can be seen reverberating as a peculiar trope in racial-passing novels by Charles Chestnutt and Pauline Hopkins. James Weldon Johnson adds to this tradition with his 1916 poem, "Brothers—American Drama." While the poem largely qualifies as an anti-lynching poem, with closet drama tendencies, a subtext of race-mixing nuances of poetic meaning unifies the work with Chestnutt and Hopkins' novels and others by Harlem Renaissance writers Jessie Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston. 

On James Weldon Johnson's Milton and a Sinful Poetics of Anti-lynching (Re)form | Watch the full talk

Presented by Reginald Wilburn at Poetics: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2023

Reginald Wilburn analyzes James Weldon Johnson’s anti-lynching poem “Brothers – American Drama” (1916) and its intertextual references to Milton. Johnson, born in 1871, was the first African American professor hired at New York University and the lyricist for “Lift Every Heart and Sing.” Wilburn highlights the Miltonic features in “Brothers” that work as intertextual bookmarks, demonstrating how the poem draws on collateral knowledge that is part of the history of Black appropriation that “chokes and engages” with Milton. Wilburn describes how Johnson’s use of unrhymed blank verse, his subtitle, and his creation of a drama not meant to be performed all reference Milton and create a stinging indictment of lynch culture.

Early Modern
Literature
Poetry
Video
Larissa FastHorse

The real work of centering Indigenous voices

In 2023, Larissa FastHorse, Micheal John Garcés, and Ty Defoe collaborated to produce For the People, the first ever full-length Native American production at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They share their insights on how institutions can reorient to honor and center Indigenous communities.

Transcript for “The real work of centering indigenous voices with Larissa FastHorse, Ty Defoe, and Michael John Garcés” Larissa FastHorse : They've never had a native-written show in the history of the Guthrie, and so they said: “You need to commission and fully produce a show now. You've done two of these short form things: you really need to commit.” So the three of us, Ty and I, were co-writers, and Michael was the director. And we all continued the community engagement process together for several years. Ty Defoe: Doing a play like that: it was like figuring out the organizing, it was trust-building, it was finding the framework. So I felt like it kind of wove itself together in a particular kind of way. It was nice collaborating with these two, because it's like working with your family, it's like working with your friends. And it's all in service of telling that story and all in service of the community we want to serve. And so our ethic was very much aligned in working on a piece like that. Larissa FastHorse : There were some really beautiful institutional changes that happened with it. Our first day of rehearsal was gorgeous. We walked into the lobby of this quite cold building and there were all these native women, and urban spirits, and elders. In the first hour, the first day of rehearsal, there are a lot of rituals where generally the artistic director talks and then the director talks, and the players talk, the creative team talks, and there are presentations, and it's all somewhat formal. Michael John Garcés: The story I tell myself, which I think is close to accurate, is that in the 60 years of the Guthrie, in every first rehearsal, the first person to speak has always been the artistic director of the Guthrie, who has always, I believe, been male. You can guess their background. And if not that person, then their designated person because they were out of the country or something like that. Larissa FastHorse : First the Dakota elder spoke, and then the Ojibwe elder spoke, and then they smudged everybody. It was over an hour before the indigenous part was done. Michael John Garcés: It was a real message sent to the entire staff and the entire community of the Guthrie of what our process was going to be. And it really started us off on an amazing foot, I thought. Larissa FastHorse : I think people talk a lot about centering indigenous voices. They literally did. You know, there's a difference between saying "we're going to give space to" and centering. And so what we're trying to do is center indigenous voices. The way that first day went beyond giving a full hour, and all of the staff's time, is to say there's no parameters. No one tells them ... Michael John Garcés: ... How long to speak, or what to say. Larissa FastHorse : It was really beautiful. And in the corner another Dakota woman was making medicine bags for everybody. It was such a great example, like you were saying, for the whole staff and the production team to see: this is what it means. It means there's no limits. It's not that you fit within what we do. We're going to fit within what you do, and if there's time we'll do our thing too. Michael John Garcés: I think the artistic director there, Joe Haj, has been doing a great job, trying to take this ocean liner and somehow break its momentum and move in a different direction. I do think the work that Indigenous Direction has done there over the years set us up for that moment. That was years of creating a context -- where the organization that is pretty rigid and sees themselves as the example for the rest of the country really is how regional theater should be -- was able to shift what is a really important thing for them. The artistic director saying the first words is a big deal to them. As the Director, I got a whole long email explaining to me what was going to happen that day, how and why. That was the one they always send out. It wasn't a message being sent to me, it was what I got in my little package that they sent me. And I thought: Wow, that it was pretty intense. It was very specific. So it's really ingrained, and for them to say, we're going to shift this in a different way, and not center that voice, was powerful. Ty Defoe: Working with the team, it's like right: 500 years of extraction, of exploitation. Instead to have one hour of protocol of the land, where we were doing this theater piece? We were like, let's see if they can do this. Putting some of these theories into practice. And that was the moment. That was the moment of truth. Larissa FastHorse : And then I'd say also, before that though, the set design, for instance, was really an act of resistance. Michael John Garcés: Oh my gosh, so much. Tanya Orellana was our set designer. Larissa FastHorse : They commissioned local artists to create murals for the set. And it was interesting how something that seems so easy, isn’t. There is no system that allows that to happen at the Guthrie. It is a union house. So there's no system for two indigenous women to collaborate and create these wall murals. And then how do they get paid? And then who owns them, and who paints them? It was layers and layers of white supremacy culture. Someone has to paint the set and design what that looks like. And we couldn't have two local native women do it: it was wild how much work it took for you and Tanya. Seeing that set when you walked in was an act of indigenous resistance. Michael John Garcés: Very much. The set was acknowledged by some people at the theater: you walk in the space and it feels like a different thing is happening here. It was pretty radical; it was pretty great. Just the set: it almost felt like we'd done our work when the set was up. Larissa FastHorse : I would say two other big impacts you could see was with the audiences. Not only were there hundreds and hundreds of native people: everyone could get a free or a really cheap ticket. Every elder got five free tickets (any native elder that asked). Then huge groups were brought in from all these different communities. And we did a lot of work with the front of house and ticketing to make sure the experience felt indigenous. Families could come in the way they can, and children were welcome: we live in intergenerational families. And you know, it's interesting how just being able to allow people to exist, with space? How much work it takes: an incredible amount of work, and so many meetings, and so much drama. What happened was beautiful and everyone was fine. The white patrons were fine; the native patrons were fine. Michael John Garcés: They were definitely worried about how the experience would be if we were going change how house management worked. What was that going to do to quote unquote their patrons. And that is institutional resistance, right? In changing that conversation altogether, we had several meetings with their entire house staff, which is humongous-- it's a giant building that is hard to move around. They have lots of ushers, they have all kinds of house management staff. They're used to a sense of: we are dictating, there are rules for how one behaves in the theater space. You don't shush people, you don't talk during the show. You don't do this, you don't do that. We were like, none of that is going to work. Someone said, well, you know, we have to police people. And we said we are going to take that verb out of the conversation altogether. And I had to say: no policing, especially post 2020 Minneapolis. Let's just take policing right on out. And it was interesting, because everybody was like: Oh. And talked about that. At the end of the day, all we were asking people to do is: Don't be policers. Be welcomers. Just be welcomers: just say, welcome. We're glad you're here. Do you need any help? Can I do anything for you? Larissa FastHorse : That was radical. Michael John Garcés: Many others came up to us and said, I love my job so much now: this is fun to do. Because I don't have to feel like I'm somehow the hall monitor, the enforcer. We're really glad you're here. And people are glad to be here. Can I do anything? No? Great. Join the show. It was so awesome. It definitely changed people's experience and yet we didn't get a lot of complaints from their more conventional patrons. Ty Defoe: It also made the art more vibrant too. Not everyone was agreeing, when folks came to see the piece itself: this was made for that indigenous particular community. We had people laughing in moments, from the community, and that was really, really wonderful to hear. And other people were laughing at other moments too. It was really interesting and cool to see the cacophony of voices that would come to this, about a community coming together. There was a moment where there was a young person, a little girl, running down the aisle. A little toddler, trying to reach these beautiful plants that were on the stage because we had a huge rainstorm actually happen on stage. No one stopped her from reaching that plant. Things like tone-policing a space can feel really violent. People go to the theater and they fall asleep all the time. And they're snoring and no one wakes them up. So: this should be a place where people can exist.

Collaborators Larissa FastHorse, Michael John Garcés, and Ty Defoe discuss what ‘centering’ Indigenous voices really looks like. In this conversation, these three theater makers reveal how institutions and their structures can mean well, while failing to acknowledge the power differentials their institutional perimeters create.  

The institutional norms of theater, not unlike those of higher education, require self-reflection and revision in order to foster inclusive spaces. If we are to ‘center’ Indigenous voices, or any other voices from marginalized community, we must reflect on the way our institutions have created obstacles for and the erasure of BIPOC communities.  

Centering these voices calls to a 500-year history of extraction—a history and present that should not go unacknowledged as we work to create inclusive and just futures.

Early Modern
Performance
Indigeneity
Essay
Ian Smith

Racialized skin in Shakespeare

The necessity of excavating and exposing the forms of whiteness that both drive the cliché of race and offer students opportunities for more sharply defined social critique and self-interrogation.

Skin persists today as the most recognizable, prominent, though not reliable, social marker of race. Distinguishing among skin colors is more than denoting difference; it is a reminder of the role skin plays in the structure and organization of human hierarchies. As such, skin not only places some persons on the lowest tiers of society, but it also relegates them to the bottom rung of estimated human worth. That is, skin is a decisive factor in who counts as human; who is deserving of humane treatment, justice, and freedom; who gets to exercise the full rights of citizenship and belonging.

Much of the western politics of skin derive from histories of Black enslavement, so that skin is grafted onto the narrative of justifying human forced labor at the very moment when that Black humanity is being vigorously and brutally denied. But skin, as the literary evidence makes clear, also has a racial prevalence in Shakespeare’s time, even while religion and language were also operative racializing factors. The history of racialized skin, therefore, has a longer history, predating the Enlightenment, the high-water moment of the western, imperial, plantation economy.

Locating racialized skin in Shakespeare’s time also prompts the inquiry: whether the Ottoman imperial threats emanating from North Africa influenced the defensive rhetoric of white superiority embedded in the racialized stage character, the “Moor,” the theater’s denigrated, non-Christian, Black person mostly identified with the North African principalities.

Pedagogies of skin

This brief description lays out the importance of meeting the pedagogic challenge in introducing the early modern dimension of the history of skin. As always, making the topic accessible is critical, so drawing on existing student knowledge is helpful. In this instance, students have been encouraged from their high school education to think of literary analysis as grounded in variations on “appearance and reality,” a bifurcating epistemology that values “reality.” It is the companion to the cliché, “Don’t judge a book by its cover” that, similarly, asks us to look beyond the material surface toward human virtues within.

Reminding students of this trope, therefore, must be followed by the exploration of how and why “appearance and reality” is not typically applied to skin in literary analysis in a society where “appearance” has acquired inordinate social meaning. It is easy enough to find many examples from early modern drama that deploy the term “Moor” to highlight skin color as a way of circumscribing the being and essence of Black people. In Peele, Rowley, Shakespeare, and others, we find multiple instances of defamed Blackness to target and paint not just the individual, but Black people seen as a group of unacceptable, constitutionally different, and dangerous persons.

A distortion of the humanist tradition

We may now place this information within a larger intellectual and historical frame to expand the analysis and propose new claims from what might have appeared initially to be just a simple premise. Premodern societies inherited the Silenus as a figure that embodied the “appearance and reality” proposition but with a signal difference: if applied as consistently as inherited in the western humanist tradition, the logic of racialized skin undergoes a serious challenge.

Presented in Plato’s Symposium (215 BCE) to de-emphasize the social value of appearance, the Silenus is an unappealing statuette on the outside that when opened reveals a beautiful, even golden interior. The Silenus argues for internality—intellect, wisdom, virtue, morality—the intangible human reality that one cannot see on the surface, in a manner that intersects with Desdemona’s poignant commentary on her perception of her Black husband: “I saw Othello’s visage in his mind.” The Silenus persists over millennia, also showing up, for instance, in François Rabelais’s prologue to Gargantua.

Had western humanism remained true to its ethical course, Black skin would not be the logical endpoint of human value. It is the distortion of this humanist tradition, the surrender to the imperative of power, greed, and the capital in human flesh, that has delivered to us this corpse of our own immoral making. Facilitating student understanding of this deliberate rupture in the western humanist tradition, one in which they are still educational consumers, will require excavating and exposing the forms of whiteness that drive the cliché of race and offer students opportunities for more sharply defined social critique and self-interrogation.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Syllabus
Adam Miyashiro

Comparative medieval literatures

Originally designed as a response to British and French imperial projects in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, postcolonial theories have posed challenges to the medieval and broader premodern world.

This course considers the field of postcolonial theory and its relevance to medieval literature. Postcolonial theory has dramatically reshaped the fields of literary criticism, history, philosophy, and cultural studies over the past thirty years. Originally designed as a response to British and French imperial projects in Africa, Asia (including the Middle East), and the Americas, postcolonial theorists have posed challenges to the medieval and broader premodern world, asking whether this form of inquiry can be used to understand how European identity had been defined against that which was considered not European. We will consider these and other questions, including contrapuntal readings of the Crusades, constructions of race, religious and linguistic difference, and a reconsideration of categories such as Eastern/Western, Muslim/Jew/Christian, and modernity and periodization. 

Course readings

The following books are required for the course:

The Song of Roland. Trans. Glyn S. Burgess. Penguin Classics, 1990.

The Song of the Cid (Penguin Classics) A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text. Trans. Burton Raffel. Penguin Classics, 2009.

Smith, Zadie. The Wife of Willesden. London: Penguin, 2021. 

Heller-Roazen, Daniel, and Muhsin Mahdi, eds. The Arabian Nights. Trans. Husain Haddawy. W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.

Niane, Djibril Tamsir, and G. D. Pickett. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Revised Edition, Pearson College Div, 2006.

Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale. Vintage, 1994.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Ed. Wayne A. Rebhorn. Critical edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

Stoneman, Richard, and Pseudo-Callisthenes. The Greek Alexander Romance. Reprint edition, Penguin Classics, 1991. 

Medieval
Literature
Transnational studies
RaceB4Race Highlight
Justin P. Shaw

Othello and Barbary's blues

Justin P. Shaw is interested in how appropriation can mean theft as well as “making something new.” Using a framework of Black music and the history of appropriation of the Blues to shed light on Desdemona’s memory of Barbary’s song in Shakespeare's Othello, Shaw asks the question: where is the line between tribute and theft?

I like trees. I enjoy long walks in the park or along the canopy trail by my house in Atlanta. Trees offer. Trees give. They are soothing for the body, the soul, and the spirit. As a native Texan, I appreciate their shade in the summertime and the way that they hide and provide cover from the elements of the rain and the sun. Trees also have a long history of giving white people what they need. Newton's physics, Washington's apples, Lincoln’s logs, the porch around the big house in the chair rocking on it back and forth, back and forth as master’s wife oversaw her property. That same porch where probably right now on this very Saturday, 150 years later, some white couple is joining in holy matrimony willfully ignorant of the blood, sweat, and tears of my ancestors who cut down trees and laid those beams, but were unworthy to even be buried in caskets made from them. My ancestors who all too quickly became a strange fruit for white consumption, like Newton's apples and Washington's cherries. I want to talk today about lost voices, about stolen happiness. While I center on an excavation of Shakespeare’s play Othello, I branch out to a Lost Voices critique of the American cultural prerogatives that continually and persistently silenced, by way of appropriation, Black voices, Black art, Black emotion. I am largely interested in the ways that whiteness co-ops the beauty of Blackness at the expense of Black people, and I see early modern literature as just one sight of this theft. I also turn to our own practices in the academy of citation, of use, abuse, and attribution when it comes to Black, indigenous, and people of color, who as Ayanna Thompson truthfully told us yesterday, have always been here. Wesley Morris has an essay about the continual theft of Black music, an American tradition. In “Theft of Black Music,” a recent New York Times Magazine issue called “1619,” a timely anthology of essays collected around a conversation convened by Nikole Hannah-Jones featuring important critical work about the intertwined legacies and histories of race and democracy in the United States. [Although if someone wanted to have a conversation about race in 1619, they would have done well to make a pit stop at RaceB4Race for a soundbite...or ten.] In his essay, Morris writes, "Blackness was on the move before my ancestors were legally free to be. It was on the move before my ancestors even knew what they had. It was on the move because white people were moving it." He goes on, "Loving Black culture has never meant loving Black people, too. Loving Black culture risks loving the life out of it." As I sat down to write this talk, I toyed around with terms related to, apropos of, this year's conference theme of appropriations. Some of these terms came up yesterday in a series of brilliant lectures offered by my esteemed colleagues. While I consider the violence that the systems of whiteness—not just in America, but in premodern literature—sometimes happily enact upon communities of color, words like borrow, remix, adapt, plagiarize, ventriloquize, gentrify, assimilate, incorporate all circulate in my head. But I ended up with just one: theft. “Barbary’s Blues and the Theft of Happiness” attends to the song as what I see as a kind of early modern blues woman and its afterlives, revisions, recitations, and replacements. I read the so-called Willow Song in the way that scholars of later periods like Ralph Ellison interpret the blues. For Ellison, "The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness. To finger its jagged grain and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near tragic, near comic lyricism." The Willow Song is like an impulse, I suggest, that poetically preserves the painful details of Barbary's story, yet imagines a world that transcends the oppression and marginalization she perhaps experienced in the Brabantio household. It creatively safeguards a significant event in Barbary's life that humanizes her beyond enslavement and servitude and resists dominant ways of figuring Blackness as uncivilized, promiscuous, or idle. In early modern Europe, there is a long tradition of white people appropriating, destroying, or stealing Black art and ideas for their own emotional comfort, to make themselves feel more validated and more human. Perhaps whiteness as a system operates sadistically, that is, in deriving meaning from Black pain, curating a sense of relevance from Black erasure, cultivating a kind of happiness from Black sorrow. Couched in the verb appropriate are the ideas of ownership, possession, property, and some temporal distinction between what was yours, and what is now mine. It is putting an old thing to use in a new context, making something work for different purposes. A good modernist might claim to make it new. For example, the "it" being medieval and early modern texts and those from non-European context rendered available for examination. And the "new" being the call to cultivate them for modernist aesthetic tastes. As if the old needed to be remade, recast, represented, and clarified. But it's not inherently bad. The late Christy Desmet writes that, "The word appropriation implies exchange, either the theft or allocation of something valuable, or a gift." Thus, appropriation happens by intention, but never by accident. It is always active, never passive. You don't happen to appropriate; appropriation happens to you. Shakespeare is a chief appropriator, an expert in the art of theft and shady attribution. The basis of the plot for Othello was lifted from Cinthio's earlier Italian prose romance and melded to fit his then present English circumstances. The song in question and the character of Barbary were created, re-engineered, and are implanted precisely to provide deeper motivations for Desdemona's emotional reactions to the dramatic violence in the play when she recalls the image of Barbary as her mother’s maid. Shakespeare's Barbary was always meant to serve Othello's Desdemona. Appearing first in the 1620 folio text, Barbary’s song is usurped by a white Venetian woman. A woman who happens to be a member of the household that contracted Barbary’s labor, and the inheritor of the power cultivated by her family's participation in the exploitation of Black lives. Yes, Desdemona does cite Barbary, but only for her mother's maid to be relegated as a footnote in her own sad love song. Just because she may have been, as Peter Sellars thoughtfully claims, "raised by a Black woman," that doesn't mean that Brabantio's daughter has fully accepted or engaged with in the imagined world of the play: Black culture. Her proximity to Black people does not guarantee her access to Blackness. As she consumes Black stories, marries a Black man, and obtains, then loses, that black handkerchief, Desdemona remains on the outside, passively looking in at the Black culture she consumed so voraciously that she fetishizes. Just like the handkerchief moves because of white hands in the play, who exchanged it through questionable means, the Willow Song moves long after its passing of its curator and gains a different significance through white hands. While she may indeed be named Barbary, the practice of saying her name, as one current presidential candidate has promised to do, is but one step in what could otherwise be a much deeper commitment to transformative, social, and racial justice. The question we must all ask ourselves is: what are we going to do to honor the memories of those who've gone before us, especially those who've been stolen away in the night or in broad daylight? Like Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Muhlaysia Booker, and Atatania Jefferson, how do we press on when we ourselves have been complicit, even indirectly in the silencing of Black voices? Is it possible to both say her name and make it new, as a just and ethical practice of appropriation? Yes #citeblackwomen but engage with their work and do it in the text too. And when you do, ask yourself if you're doing it to boost others and highlight those voices who might otherwise get lost in Google’s algorithm or are you doing it to make yourself feel better, to check off your "I read my Black book for the year" box and move on with your celebrated scholarly life? So you read the RaceB4Race tweets, but what will you do when the conference is over? Back to the text. It is ironic to say her name in this case because we don't really know Barbary's name. We can only access her through Desdemona and really through Shakespeare’s imagination of a woman whose given name represents anything from a specific region to an entire continent. The gloss of her name in the recently revised Arden edition suggest that the name was a constant one—a common one for the time, but I like to think of her in the same way that we think of characters like Zanche in Webster's The White Devil or Zanthia in Marsten's The Wonder of Women. Zanthia, who features as Solphonisba's maid, is betrayed and arrested by her mistress's guards. Joyce McDonald argues that, "In the systematic removal, both the mistress and the villain, Syphax, step out—step out of their dramatic antagonism long enough to agree on the necessity for Zanthia's punishment." Her Black skin is criminalized in order to emphasize the figurative morality of Sophonisba's whiteness, which itself seems to be Marsten’s solution for the play's misogyny. Unlike with Marsten's and Webster's characters however, Shakespeare's Barbary is never truly able to employ her own voice and subjectivity beyond what we can conjure from the details that Desdemona provides. Kim Hall suggests that the name Barbary draws on "an early modern sense of Africa as a place not only of wonder and magic, but also of disorder and unruly sexuality." Located in northern Africa, Barbary was a place of a trade, a perceived safe zone for English travelers and merchants to conduct business. Like Cypress in the play functions to sustain the myth of Venice, the imaginary space of Barbary exists in the early modern imagination to serve English interest and to sustain English fantasies of security and sovereignty. Constructed as a safe place for English refuge, piracy, and play, Barbary is not only unruly but functions as an opportunity for English exploitation and mastery. Barbary is imagined as a safe space for white fragility to be coddled and for white mediocrity to flourish. Shout out to Koritha Mitchell for the wonderful article on that subject. The title of my talk today comes from a line in act 4, scene 3 of the play Othello where Desdemona recollects the sonic memory of Barbary. While I attempt to read the song through Barbary, Shakespeare’s audience would have likely heard the influence of English folk traditions more than any foreign associations. Moreover, some audiences would have never even heard or read the lyrics to the song, as the 1622 quarto omits the piece entirely, jumping from Desdemona's preface about Barbary all the way to her insistence that Amelia leave the bedroom. Nevertheless, in the folio text she recalls Barbary’s life through this song, Willow. I am interested in what Desdemona says and what she doesn't say about the woman on whom she remembers eavesdropping. I say eavesdropping, although you could say overheard, but I used the former intentionally because according to Desdemona, Barbary's only formal or legitimate relationship was with her unnamed an absentee mother. Thus, while tending to Desdemona was very likely a part of Barbary's role in the household, the text we are given suggests that whatever role Barbary played in young Desdemona's life, it was unofficial or unwarranted. You don't, after all, eavesdrop on something you were supposed to hear. Nevertheless, Desdemona hears this song over and over again. This song that Barbary supposedly used as a sleep aid, a coping mechanism for comfort amidst what some might see as a welcoming atmosphere but might just as well be a suffocating environment of white privilege. Desdemona’s fear of impending death and her bewilderment at her husband's behavior leads her back to the image of Barbary in the first place, an image that reminds her of the song, a piece of art that then gives her comfort during her own instability. The song provides the glue to hold together the fissures in fragile white subjectivity. She takes it from Barbary's cold dead hands and uses it to her own emotional ambition. To feel whole. But of course, she can't even remember and recite the song properly. The glue fails to give her the peace she requires and instead makes her even more anxious and frustrated. Though called on to serve her mistress even in death, Barbary fails in her continued role to manufacture and sustain Desdemona's happiness. Now if I could have a little creative license, I would like to consider now how Desdemona revives Barbary and Barbary recreates Desdemona (though not by choice) and furthermore crafts Shakespeare's play itself, a play on a play on words from what Sujata Iyengar calls "woman crafted Shakespeares," making it unique from its progenitors. How does Barbary's song curate a blues narrative about oppression, duty, and liberation that Desdemona misreads and transforms into a pop anthem for white feminine solidarity? For Angela Davis, blues women like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey – and I would also like to add Willie Mae Thornton, whose “hound dog” made Elvis a star – imagine the kind of love and desire in their blues lyrics that were incompatible with dominant ideologies that centered white, male, heteronormative relationships. Part of the resistance of the blues sung by women is its audacity to express emancipation, a kind of Black eudaemonic happiness through sexuality. As such, these songs offered a critique of the anti-Black systems that sought to discipline Black sexuality and romance while expressing a hope for a future that persisted in its liberation from those systems. While Desdemona only knew Barbary as her mother's maid, perhaps in a role like Emilia, Barbary had another life and this Song of Willow preserves and perseveres her "happy object" which, as Sarah Ahmed explains, "helps to safeguard a past under the threat of erasure." To read between the lines presented, we see that she was in love and this love, I believe, transcended her servitude because Black love knows no bounds. The text suggests that Barbary was in love with a man who could not love her back and who perhaps of this affair was "proved mad". The syntax is opaque. "She was in love and he she loved proved mad and did forsake her." It points to some obstacle standing in the way of their exercise of sexuality, the desire having been proven mad by some legal, medical, or political authority. As the story goes, the man for some reason abandoned her, thereby interrupting one form of melancholy: love, with a diagnosis of another: madness. As such, Desdemona's recounting presents a complex picture of the possibility of Black love as an inherently melancholic and damagingly irrational phenomenon. Barbary's melancholic love is thus marked as madness and threatens the social order of the household, but it's useful to Desdemona. Though Barbary reminds Desdemona of death and of love becoming madness, The Willow Song gives her a few more meaningful moments of life. Blues is about finding meaning in meaningless situations. It is a rejection of minstrelsy and a simple format that allows for infinite variation. Playing the blues was a way of getting rid of the blues, stomping it away. As the blues itself is notable for its capacity for turning hopelessness into hope or for revealing the hope within a hopeless situation, it is possible that Desdemona hears and desires this for herself, and takes the object of Barbary's happiness, one that includes her pain, and transcribes it as her own. The song most demonstrably conveys this transformative capacity through the image of trees. There are two trees in the song. While the willow comes in the refrain, the initial image painted is of a "poor soul" sitting and sighing beside a sycamore tree. The sycamore tree stands out among nondescript malleable stones, murmuring streams, and green willows that each work solely on a rhetorical level. This tree, however, operates both metaphorically and literally. There are two unrelated versions of the sycamore: one spelled with an A and another with an O. Medieval writers who noticed the many references to the sycamore in the Bible, such as in the famous Zacchaeus story, indiscriminately applied the label to many shade-giving trees found across England, including the taller sycamore with an A, which is an invasive species which itself was not native to Britain, a kind of botanical appropriation. While the two sound alike, the long spreading branches of the Afro-Asian sycomore fig the, one with the O, better resemble a weeping willow and provide much more shade in arid conditions compared to its homophonic cousin farther north. While the protagonist in the song may have well found a place to sit near the tall sycamore, especially if the imagined scene were set somewhere near England, she would have not found much shade there. Thus, the sycamore that the song identifies could very well invoke the shading sycomore, with an O, found much farther south. Through Desdemona, Shakespeare’s transformation and uprooting of the African sycomore to the more familiar naturalized European sycamore, with an A, not only whitens the natural landscape of the original folk ballad from which Shakespeare's song derives, but it also renders the natural imagery of the lyric ineffective at providing shade or communicating the melancholy of the poor soul. In other words, by placing the lamenting protagonist beside a sycamore with an A, Shakespeare transforms the uniqueness of Barbary’s blues into a common English ballad. Who knows what Shakespeare meant by his choice of tree. He's not an arborist, but perhaps something happened at the printing stage where, regardless of the original intent, the more common spelling with the A simply morphed into the willow tree of the song. To push this a bit farther, it could be part of Desdemona's appropriation to replace the foreign sycomore with one more familiar to European aesthetic tastes. Intentional or not, the replacement or the conveniently homophonic overlapping of the two is what Desdemona ends up doing with the song as a whole. It collapses on itself such that it no longer matters that Barbary sang the song, but that Desdemona, the main actor in the scene and the sympathetic character of the play, transforms it into something emotionally familiar, universal, and timeless. Her rendition threatens to lobotomize difference and subsume it under the guise of universality. What is it about this tree that welcomes the melancholic posture of sitting and the melancholic sound of sighing while also working to heal that pain? Like a hug that can make you cry and feel safe at the same time, the tree is a sight of grief and relief all at once. It functions as a place of both mourning and healing that ultimately comforts Barbary and offers her a restorative place of refuge. Trees are fascinating and majestic. In a way, I suppose they can make meaning out of meaningless situations. While they seem individual, they are comprised of communities. They hold stories, remind us of a past, and are resilient enough to carry those stories into the future. They signify family and generational networks of relation often stolen from Africans kidnapped and forcibly brought to these shores. This variation changes us: they invite sitting and sighing as much as they welcome celebration and dance. They can reveal as much as they conceal and like any art, they can be used and misused for all manner of things. They bear fruit, both strange and familiar, and invite us into a kind of refreshing newness while forewarning us to pause, speak, and acknowledge before moving forward.

‘A Song of Willow’: Barbary’s Blues and Theft of Happiness in Early Modern England | Watch the full talk

Presented by Justin P. Shaw at Appropriations: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2020

Justin P. Shaw is interested in how appropriation can mean theft as well as “making something new.” He discusses multiple layers of appropriation in his talk, from Shakespeare’s use of an older play (Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio’s “Un Capitano Moro” written in 1565) as the basis of the plot of Othello, to Desdemona’s “consumption” of Barbary’s song for her own comfort. Using a framework of Black music and the history of appropriation of the Blues to shed light on Desdemona’s memory of Barbary’s song, Shaw asks the question: where is the line between tribute and theft?

Early Modern
Literature
Appropriations
Shakespeare
RaceB4Race Highlight
Vanessa I. Corredera

PCRS and appropriation studies

Vanessa I. Corredera explores ways of productively understanding racial representations in premodern critical race studies and in adaptations.

I want to begin with a brief word of gratitude. I want to acknowledge all the unseen labor that goes into even something like a talk -- family, friends, people who take care of children, who pick up your life when you have to exit it for just a few days. Mentors and colleagues who will read things for you and give you feedback. And so I'm just thankful to every person who couldn't be articulated in a footnote, including students who proofread this and gave me some feedback. I also want to thank the amazing pre-modern critical race scholars who paved the way for the work that we're doing here today. I'm here today because my scholarship focuses on two areas I was told I could not do. What Margot Hendricks aptly named pre-modern critical race studies and Shakespearean appropriation. The former, they warned me, was too passe’, a conversation long over. People cautioned that the latter would not be a strong area for a job market that unbeknownst to them would soon crash anyway. Naively, I did not realize I was proposing to work at the cross-section of two areas considered to be niche, compared to historical archival work such as the history of science, the history of the book, the usual suspects of scholarly inquiry in the field Since the mid-2000s when I started graduate studies and especially since the 2010s when I graduated, both of these subfields have become more prominent with pre-modern critical race studies especially galvanized and authorized in recent years by institutions such as the Folger, SAA and Shakespeare's Globe to name but a few. Yet, despite these advances, pre-modern critical race studies and Shakespearean appropriation studies still feel the effects of their former sidelining. Scholars may focus on one or the other, but not often on both, at least not until after tenure (the second bookbook, right?). To continue acting as if either of these areas merits limited attention affirms even tacitly that only particular subfields count as proper scholarship and that only certain subfields are related to race. By ceding this ideological ground, we risk sidelining productive intersections that emphasize, rather than obscure, the relationship between the pre-modern, modern, and race. As Toni Morrison reminds us, “A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only ‘universal,’ but also ‘race-free’ risks lobotomizing that literature…” How do we lobotomize not only literature but our field when we do not place pre-modern critical race studies and appropriation studies in dialogue with one another, thereby limiting how we understand racial representation in both? Today I provide very brief answers that I hope lead to fruitful discussion by proposing two simple premises: appropriation studies need premodern critical race studies, and pre-modern critical race studies need appropriation studies. I turn to two Shakespearean appropriations, which I discuss in my in-process book (if you're interested) to explore these premises with you. Premise one, appropriation studies need pre-modern critical race studies. By this statement, I mean that scholarship on literary appropriation must engage with pre-modern critical race studies, as do appropriations themselves. Without the theoretical interrogative disruptive engagement with race modeled by pre-modern critical race studies, appropriations, the field and the objects, will fail to consider thoughtfully how the pre-modern and race speak to each other. Indeed, they will ignore the topic entirely or provide facile engagements with race that to mass audiences, usually white audiences, may look something like race work that may reify stereotypical racist thinking instead. The Q Brothers’ adaptation, Othello: The Remix, exemplifies precisely this approach to race, demonstrating how crucially appropriations need pre-modern critical race studies. The 90-minute production debuted as a US entry in the Globe to GlobeGlobe-to-Globe Festival, and subsequently ran twice at the Chicago Shakespeare theater and again, off Broadway. The production's second song exposes the Q Brothers' anxiety over audience reception regarding their hip-hop Shakespearean retelling when they rap: "Now I know what you're thinking / ‘Hold on just a minute. That's a tragedy. Yep / But there's comedy in it." Clearly the Q Brothers conceived of themselves responding to traditional theatergoers disinclined to their project, because they use low-status Black-associated hip-hop to explore high-status, white-associated Shakespeare. As a result, brothers Jeffrey and Gregory Qalyum deploy a toothsome version of hip-hop that reflects its appropriation by the white-run music industry. This decision creates a colorblind approach to both hip-hop and race by stripping away the exploration of race inherent in Othello and hip-hop. By referencing colorblindness herehere, I expand upon scholarly considerations of Shakespeare colorblind casting. I use colorblind instead to mean the creation of a racial narrative that manifests a blindness toward color, specifically in this case Blackness as anything more than a mere symbol of identity instead of a crucial factor motivating and reinforcing systemic injustices. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva identifies colorblind racism as a new racism that replaced the kind seen in the Jim Crow era. Instead of arguing for Black people's biological inferiority, whites now "rationalize minorities' contemporary status as a product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and Blacks’ imputed cultural limitations." Especially salient for a discussion of Othello: The Remix is the way that hip-hop becomes affected by colorblind borrowing that mirrors America's broader racial dynamics. Jason Rodriguez notes how the type of colorblind ideology outlined above affects white youth's interactions with hip-hop. Because they disconnect racial identity from their cultural consumption, they take "the racially coded meanings out of hip-hop and replace them with colorblind ones for their own purposes." This white consumption of hip-hop, stripped of its racial elements reflects the genre's history. Scholars agree that the history of hip-hop has been influenced and altered by the desire for a colorblind form of the genre. MK Asante, Jr. recounts hip-hop's political beginnings, explaining, “although West African in its derivation, hip-hop emerged in the Bronx in the mid-seventies as a form of aesthetic and sociopolitical rebellion against the flames of systemic oppression.” As hip-hop artists sought commercially viable careers with the major record companies in the late 1980s and early nineties, however, they experienced “censorship through intimidation, budget cutting, refusing to advertise or allow airtime and via other legal channels, which resulted in a restriction of the sociopolitical voices of commercially viable artists.” Consequently, as Tricia Rose explains, "party political Afrocentric and avant-garde forms of rap were driven out of the corporate promoted mainstream." Hip-hop's history thus reveals the erasure of the "link between Black music and the politics of Black life," leaving in its stead a version of the genre often critiqued for its emphasis on materialism, sexism, homophobia, and racial characters, but enthusiastically consumed by white youth culture because of these very qualities. The Q Brothers craft an appropriation of Othello that reflects this colorblind engagement with hip-hop. According to Othello, The Remix’s character description, Othello has escaped the pitfalls of the ghetto he was raised in (with ghetto here functioning as coded language for the Black inner city). This socially mobile rap persona fits within the personal narratives articulated by real life MCs, including the Notorious BIG, 50 Cents, and the rappers directly inspiring the remix’s Othello, Jay-Z and The Game. In the song, “Never Coming Down,” Othello explores the familiar hard-knock life. He explains, “I never knew my pops; Mom's as a junkie,” then asserts that he was raised in the streets as a child of the ghetto, filled with people smoking rocks. On these streets, either you “slang crack” or “you got a wicked jump shot.” This depiction inhabits the tense space of many hip-hop personas. On the one hand, inviting a gritty exploration of socioeconomically marginalized African American voices, on the other, invoking American stereotypes about Black communities and the families within them. Yet most rappers, especially male rappers, create an entire ouevre in which to craft a counter-narrative that contextualizes their seemingly stereotypical backgrounds. Indeed, Imani Perry contends that rappers often adopt “thug mimicry,” embodying American stereotypes of Black masculinity. But they do so to indict white supremacy by critiquing “the sociological conditions, poverty, police brutality, and joblessness that contributed to his or her becoming this person.” Unfortunately in Othello, The Remix, Othello does not provide the sociologically informed alternative interrogation of his drug-addled upbringing. For example, when Othello asks, “who can I trust now?” his crew and he respond, “more money, more problems,” quoting the title of the Notorious BIG's 1997 posthumous hit single, “More Money, More Problems,” which celebrates the materialism of hip-hop success while noting its pitfalls. Deploying this highly recognizable song as an intertext for Othello: The Remix exposes how the Q Brothers overlook racial inequity. For instance, instead, they could have referenced Biggie Smalls' "Things Done Changed" from 1994, which narrates how back in the day, neighborhoods were characterized by "lounging at the barbecues, drinking brews with the neighborhood crews..." But "turn your pages to 1993" ends as "getting smoked, G believe me, talks slick you get your neck slit quick." Indeed, here Biggie makes an assertion similar to Othello when he relates, "if I wasn't in the rap game, I probably have a key knee deep in the crack game." The distinction is that Biggie provides an alternative picture of Black neighborhoods involving community, celebrated by cookouts and sitting on the porch during a summer day. This positive view of Black society never appears in Othello: The Remix. Thus, quoting, "More Money, More Problems," becomes one of many decisions the Q Brothers make that sideline race by ignoring the racial legacy informing the ghetto, constructing their shaping of Othello. Perhaps nowhere is the Q Brothers' colorblind engagement with race clearer, however, than in Brabantio's confrontation of Othello after the elopement. Brabantio's tirade against Othello climaxes with his assertion, "You are so small, he's so much bigger. I just don't see you with that, that..." In addressing the Black Othello's overpowering size in comparison to the white Desdemona, Brabantio invokes the trope of the Black male rapist while stopping one step shy of using virulent racist language. Clearly the unspoken N word hangs over the theater. In the pause, the racist discourse otherwise omitted in the production exists as an absent presence. This powerful artistic decision makes the audience complicit in Brabantio's racist musings by filling in the discursive gaps. Yet the Q brothers diffuse the tension by having Brabantio whine and reply, "I was gonna say rapper, you didn't let me finish," and he says it almost just like that. A line that, in all performances I viewed, elicited audience laughter. Indeed the Q collective's response to Brabantio makes the desire to evacuate the moment of racist characterization clear when they rap, "He turned his back on her, / but not out of hatred./ He was stuck in the ways of a different generation." The Q Brothers' discomfort with and reluctance to engage with racism comes through in this explicit disavowal of it, one strategically covered up by comedy. The Q Brothers' racial colorblindness then comes at a cost, both by limiting the thematic resonances in their reinterpretation of Othello, and by circumscribing the power of the generic form they choose to deliver their retelling. Othello, The Remix illustrates the need for appropriations of pre-modern work to engage with pre-modern critical race studies. For the Q Brothers, it would have shed light on Othello's status as an alienated Moor in Renaissance Venice, a status of shifting inclusion and swift exclusion that would map well onto the use of hip-hop MCs by white corporate America. They would also have been provided with the ideological tools to craft a production not anti-Black in its stereotypical depictions. And appropriation scholars likewise need pre-modern critical race studies for it is all too easy to get swept up in the fun of the Q Brothers 4/4 beat, their irreverence toward the Bard, their attempt to try something energetic and new that to a casual observer may seem to engage with systemic racial inequalities in ways that echo the hip-hop we listen to day to day. If appropriators want to do race work better in their reimaginings, if they truly want to remix and not re-inscribe; and if appropriation scholars truly want to see race in appropriations, it is clear the creators and scholars of appropriations alike need pre-modern critical race studies. Premise two, pre-modern critical race studies needs appropriation studies. Recently on NPR's Code Switch, Ayanna Thompson identified the Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Taming of the Shrew as “three toxic plays that resist rehabilitation and appropriation.” She contends that when Shakespeare and his plays are not seen as “always necessarily good for us,” then we will be in a position where we can maybe rewrite the endings and change the plays. Thompson's call to rewrite endings and change narratives is what appropriation studies offer pre-modern race. Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar deftly note the complex history shaping the term appropriation. They identify two recent voices who build upon appropriation's history as a political interpersonal re-imagining to articulate its current signification. Thomas Cartelli's assertion that appropriations generally work for the interest of the appropriator and against the interest of the work or author being appropriated. And, Julie Sanders who defines appropriation as having a greater distance from the so-called source than do adaptations. This emphasis on the interest of the appropriator and distance from the source allows for a destabilization of pre-modern narratives by providing radical re-imaginings instead. Jordan Peele's film Get Out is precisely this type of reimagining. As numerous reviewers note, as Carol Mejia-LaPerle will discuss this April at SAA, and as Arthur Little observed in a seminar a few years ago, Get Out is Othello. I would add importantly an appropriation of it. When put in conversation with Othello, Get Out's concept of the coagula exemplifies the narrative revisions appropriations make possible for pre-modern stories. Get Out literalizes the horror of Othello's racial experience by stressing white supremacy's physical and psychological appropriation of, and violence against, Black bodies. Get Out follows African American Chris, who joins his white girlfriend Rose for a weekend to visit her family for the first time. A family, he learns, who is unaware that he's Black. Rose assures Chris of her family's liberal anti-racist, bonafides. Yet Chris feels unease as he meets Walter and Georgina, the friendly if odd Black help. The film reveals that the Armitages have chosen Chris as their next victim for a process and product they invented, called the coagula: a white brain surgically implanted into a Black body so that an aging or physically impaired white person can live on. However, a piece of the former brain and thus Black self remains, which necessitates the sunken place, the psychological corner reserved for the hypnotized, appropriated Black identity, where the victim sees what occurs but cannot respond. Chris miraculously escapes, killing the family in the process, and nearly strangling Rose to death minutes before his friend Rod rescues him. Through the concept of the coagula, Get Out viscerally confronts modern society's violent appropriation of Black bodies. Recognizing this appropriation can help one reconsider Othello's service to the Venetian state and his tragic end. Ta Nehisi Coates addresses precisely this appropriative violence, arguing that the elevation of whiteness comes through "...the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies." This violence functions as the Armitage's modus operandi as they seek to create more coagula, which I will address by focusing on Georgina. Georgina, actually Rose's grandmother, reminds viewers of the physical devastation enacted on Black bodies by white supremacy. One truly sees the appropriation of the Black body when Chris finds a picture of Georgina's unnamed host. Her scar, her formal hair, and her elderly attire all contrast with the selfie, which shows her with a millennial pout, luscious natural curls and contemporary clothes. Also particularly notable is her ultimate destruction. As Chris flees the Armitage's house, he crashes his car into her. Chris's subsequent attempt to save her suggests that to him, Georgina is not the white brain inside, but rather the Black woman signaled by her physical appearance. Chris thus sees hope for Black subjectivity despite its appropriation by whiteness. His recognition of her Black selfhood juxtaposes with Rose, who exits the house declaring, "Grandma!" indicating that for her, the white interior supersedes the woman's Black exterior. The camera returns to the car where Georgina's wig slides off, thereby emphasizing the surgical scar marring her forehead. She revives, grabbing Chris and screaming, "You ruined my house!" Despite Chris's attempt, the eradication of the Black self who once inhabited the woman next to him is complete. Through Georgina, the film comments on the ramifications of white domination over Black bodies. Once part of the coagula, Black selfhood becomes unrecoverable. This is the logical extreme of the violence Coates argues permeates the treatment of Black bodies in America. As a broader framework, then, the coagula makes all viewers -- those already cognizant and those woefully not so -- hyperaware of the constant physical and metaphysical threat whiteness poses to Blackness. In addition to stressing the corporeal and mental ramifications of the white appropriation of Black bodies, the coagula also demonstrates the white brain's overpowering nature, a literalization of the way that a white view of the world strives to govern Black experience. Sociologist Joe R. Feagin calls this the white racial frame, the white world view "dominant through the country and indeed in much of the western world that crafts a strong positive orientation to whites and whiteness and a strong negative orientation to racial others who are exploited and oppressed." A confrontation between Chris and Georgina powerfully communicates this white domination. In the midst of the Armitage's party, Chris tells Georgina, "All I know is sometimes if there's too many white people, I get nervous, you know?" In this moment, Georgina's true self struggles to appear as indicated by the fact that her smile falls as she trembles and cries, never taking her eyes off Chris. But the white Georgina's brain overcomes this temporary lapse, as signaled by the return of the oversized grin, and she responds, "No, no, no, no, no" 10 times. "That's not my experience. Not at all." Upon first viewing, the repeated "no" seem meant for Chris, but considered in light of the film's big reveal, these no!s may also serve as a command of repression for the young woman whose body hosts Regina's white mind. White control over the Black self may lapse for a moment in the coagula, but the dynamic here makes it clear that in the coagula, the white brain demands totalizing authority, thus embodying white supremacy's sociological dynamics. As an indicator of the physical, mental and sociological effects of white supremacy upon Black selfhood, Peele's depiction of the coagula provides a version of Othello's narrative that bolsters pre-modern critical race readings focusing on Othello's role as a Black man navigating the white-dominated Venetian society. Indeed, placing Othello and Get Out in conversation with each other, especially if one sees the latter as an appropriation of the former, invites what Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall identify as cross-historical tracing that might foster reflection upon strategies for othering in the early modern period that resonate with those deployed in modernity. Like Georgina, Othello too is deployed in the service of whiteness. Ambereen Dadabhoy stresses the dominating nature of his service, arguing that Othello's commitment to Venice's imperial war signals an obligation to the state that exceeds volunteer or even paid mercenary service. Venice, it seems, can and does deploy him with impunity. Indeed, Brabantio's onstage hospitality demonstrates the self-serving nature of Venetian's engagement with Othello. But Brabantio's welcome of him and his exotic tales finds its limits when the threat of miscegenation looms. Not only does Othello work for a coterie of all-white Venetians who order him at will, but as a Christianized Moor opposing the Turks, he also champions Christianity and its function as a force at once civilizing for the converted, yet exclusionary against the unconverted and above all, a white force. As Dennis Britton explains, Ethiopians, Moors, Turks, and Jews were “dually recognized in the early modern period as figures of alterity, foreign to normative white Christianity.” In his role as a soldier, Othello therefore defends not just Venice nor Christianity, but whiteness as well. Thus, in civil and interpersonal context, Othello, like Get Out's Georgina, serves whiteness in a literal and ideological sense. Indeed, one could interpret Othello as a Black man whose brain, like Georgina, has figuratively undergone the coagula process of whitening his identity, only to grapple with the ramifications in his final moments. Dadabhoy reads Othello in this way, arguing that the “duality of Othello's visage points to a psychological fairness belied by his somatic one.” Britton, too, stresses how “Venetian imperial interests necessitate an Othello who is ‘far more fair than Black’.” Othello thus mirrors those who have undergone the coagula process as a white mind within a Black body. As the film makes clear, the coagula ultimately entails a marginalization of Black selfhood. This is precisely Othello's journey in the play, so much so that he disavows his own name, "that’s he that was Othello. Here I am," becoming like Georgina's host, an unnamed entity traumatized by whiteness. By highlighting the violent, physical, and ideological appropriation of Black bodies and minds by whiteness, Get Out reorients how scholars, educators, students, directors, actors, and myriad future adapters alike might perceive of, and therefore re-present racists' role in Othello's tragic downfall. For, reimagined through the racial dynamics highlighted by Get Out, Othello's racial tragedy is the annihilation of Black selfhood at the hands of a white society that destroys Black subjectivity. This interpretation follows the shift Hendricks called for at the last RaceB4Race, recognizing the anti-Blackness in Othello while transforming the narrative into an anti-white one that indicts white supremacy. Get Out thus demonstrates how appropriating pre-modern narratives allows us to move beyond reifying whiteness through signifiers such as Shakespeare, or terms like Anglo-Saxon, to crafting radical narratives that decenter whiteness instead. To return to the two premises guiding this talk. Premise one: appropriations need pre-modern critical race studies. How else to explain limited appropriation scholarship addressing race and what David Sterling Brown calls Shakespeare's other race plays such as the overwhelmingly white-cast history plays? Indeed, all pre-modern and frankly even modern appropriations would benefit from pre-modern critical race studies. We live in a world where many are comfortable with a fantasy show depicting dragons, but in which representing a powerful non-stereotypical, non-exoticized person of color is a step too far, supposedly a-historical. Indeed, let us call for race theory to be applied to all narratives imagined on the page, podcast, stage, and across various screens. Premise two: pre-modern critical race studies need appropriation studies. The phenomenal scholarship undertaken by so many scholars in this room leaves no doubt that revisiting the archives is a vital endeavor. But for many of our students, and let's admit even some of our colleagues, but also especially undergraduates, the archives are inaccessible, even exclusionary. For students, archives are what we provide in our classrooms: Thug notes, Shakespeare memes, film adaptations, a graphic novel Kill Shakespeare, clips from Dr. Who, as well as the media all around them that relentlessly references Shakespeare and the pre-modern more broadly. This begs questions such as, do they understand the terms adaptation and appropriation just as much as they might archival ones such as Verso and Recto? More specifically, have we encouraged them to talk about the pre-modern and race in ways that they can transfer to other contexts? Have we taught them to observe what is present but also absent in regards to race as old narratives continue to be retold. Even as we encourage our students to revisit and rethink historical archives, we must train them to assess and create what will become the future’s archives. In the powerful play, American Moor, Keith Hamilton Cobb, the protagonist, the actor who's unnamed, discusses how his Blackness forces teachers, directors, and audiences alike to question their assumptions about who may perform Shakespeare and how. He notes that when embodying as a Black man, “the listener all too often has no place for it, no tools with which to hear it.” Are we providing our students and each other the best possible interpretive tools? Geraldine Heng observed at the last RaceB4Race that tools allow you to acknowledge, quote, "racial phenomena, racial institutions and racial practices," while Hendricks cautioned that the master's tools are ineffective. Are we using all possible tools for identifying and analyzing racial representation, or the master's ineffective ones? I contend that it is only when we offer the tools for both pre-modern critical race studies and appropriation studies that we can truly assert that we are using everything at our disposal. There is a reason these subfields have been marginalized in the past, for each has the potential to center often-silenced voices, to radically challenge the status quo, to call for ethics and equity in spaces where people have long ignored imbalances of power. How much more influential and effective could they be if they dialogued more with each other? As Carol Mejia-LaPerle asked at the end of her talk last time, “As we commit to anti-racist efforts in our research and teaching, what materials, archives, histories and experiences can be put beside each other?” At least one answer is pre-modern critical race studies and appropriation studies. SoSo, I leave you today with questions about how to bring these two fields together so that we have the tools to resist lobotomized literary studies, resist lobotomized pedagogy, resist lobotomized narratives that so many still try to maintain race free. Thank you.

Resisting Lobotomized Shakespeare: Race in/and Appropriation | Watch the full talk

Presented by Vanessa I. Corredera at Appropriations: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2020

Vanessa I. Corredera puts forward two premises for productively understanding racial representations in premodern critical race studies and in adaptations: first, that appropriations need PCRS; second, PCRS needs appropriation studies. She analyzes the Q Brothers’ adaptation Othello: The Remix as an example of an appropriation that does not critically engage with race and illustrates how crucially they need PCRS. Corredera reads Jordan Peele’s Get Out as an appropriation of Othello that offers a productive lens for engaging Shakespeare’s play. She concludes that taken together, appropriation studies and PCRS give students and scholars more complete interpretive tools for analyzing racial representation.

Early Modern
Literature
Appropriations
Shakespeare
RaceB4Race Highlight
Miguel A. Valerio

Anti-Blackness in colonial Mexico

Miguel A. Valerio discusses anti-Black matters and events in colonial Mexico City and the racialization of slavery more broadly in connection to the people of African descent in colonial Mexico and the Atlantic at large.

Spanish monarchs required outgoing viceroys to communicate to their successors, in writing, the state of the viceroyalty they were leaving and any advice they may have for its governance. When it came to New Spain or colonial Mexico’s Black population, the letter the Spanish nobleman Álvaro Manrique de Zuñiga left his successor Luis de Velasco, the younger, in 1590, upon leaving his post, read: In this land there are great numbers of dangerous and pernicious free Africans and mulattos, as your Lordship knows. They are only capable of living as vagabonds, robbing and causing violence. Although they owe tribute to his Majesty, the majority avoid it by not registering as I commanded all on pain of death. I sent an order to the alcaldes mayores and corregidores [both regional magistrates] to register the free Africans and mulattos in their districts. They will also be punished if they absent themselves from the districts where they are registered. This order serves two purposes. First, his Majesty collects the tribute that must be paid to him. The other intent, more central to the security and well-being of the country, is to command them to gather together for registration and then to apportion each one among all the mines, so they can serve there with miners, who will pay them. Others will be apportioned into labor gangs subject to an alcalde mayor and not permitted to leave their assigned district or contract without a registered license. This will protect the country from these vagabonds at large and their violence and robberies. The miners will benefit greatly from having these servants to relieve most of the Indians from service. The Africans and mulattos themselves also benefit by earning a steady wage making them more dependable. Their sons will be raised in this life, will enjoy and continue it. I did not have the time to carry out this plan. In the government records, your Lordship will find the order, which you can carry out as you see fit. Manrique de Zuñiga’s plan is replete with the biopolitics that characterized colonial society. The viceroy begins by stating the problem: Black freedom, real and imagined. This freedom makes Blacks “dangerous and pernicious,” because all they do is gamble, steal, and wander the land. Moreover, they do not pay their taxes, a serious offense that denoted disregard for royal authority. This problem, Manrique de Zuñiga suggests, is well-known. Manrique de Zuñiga makes clear that this freedom made colonial authorities uneasy. Colonial administrators in fact saw Black freedom as an existential threat to colonial rule. As Spanish officials had begun doing—and other imperial regimes would imitate—the solution to the problem was population control, limiting Black mobility, with the penalty of death for violating orders to stay put. Manrique’s plan also reveals what guided his reasoning: collecting taxes for the royal coffers, securing the territory, easing the burden of Indigenous laborers, and more importantly, providing miners and by extension Spaniards a steady labor force for generations. As Rachel Sarah O’Toole has analyzed, the rhetoric about protecting the native population from Black abuse was only colonial discourse meant to bolster the empire’s economic aims. The viceroy’s detailed plan reveals the apparatuses the colonial state could and often deployed to control its subaltern population: tracking, confinement, policing, labor, and punishment, including the ultimate punishment, death. Indeed, no early modern empire had as many apparatuses of population control in place as the Spanish empire. Thus, the Spanish Empire is an important locus to begin studying the development of biopower in the early modern world. Manrique de Zuñiga was not the first or last Mexican viceroy to express such sentiments about Afro-Mexicans. Ten years earlier, in 1580, outgoing viceroy Martín Enríquez de Almanza y Ulloa wrote to his successor, Lorenzo Suárez, that “Blacks are one of the things with which one must have more particular caution in this land.” Enríquez de Almanza’s reign was characteristic for its violence against Afro-Mexicans, limiting their mobility, denying their requests to establish hospitals, and, among other measures, ordering the castration of runway slaves. While this latter measure was intended to dissuade others considering leaving to found maroon communities, it also prevented these ungovernable slaves from producing equally unruly children. In this paper, I will discuss how New Spain’s anti-Black ethos stemmed from a racialization of African slavery, as well as two examples of how this anti-Black ethos led to the maligning of Afro-Mexicans’ clamor for justice and their festive traditions. This pairing may seem odd; it arises from the fact that I have come to this literature from my study of Afro-Mexican festive practices. But first I turn to the Jesuit missionary Alonso de Sandoval’s explanation of why Africans are Black and destined for servitude. Sandoval, who hailed from Seville, Spain’s gate to the Indies, worked as a missionary in Cartagena de Indias, Spanish America’s largest slave port in the 17th century. Sandoval worked there for the first half of that century. Sandoval began his ministry with Africans by going down to the port to baptize the enslaved as they were extracted from the slave ship. By his own account, at one point Sandoval experience a sort of conversion, realizing that baptizing enslaved Africans who could not understand the sacrament was of no use to them. So, he decided to do more in-depth ministry and to write a manual to guide fellow Jesuits on “How to Minister to Africans,” as we may translate the Latin title by which that 1627 manual is best known, De instauranda Aethiopium salute. (A more literal translation is: “On bringing salvation to Africans.”) In the first book of the manual, Sandoval, who never went to Africa, wanted to write about Africans’ “nature” and “profane customs and rituals.” We find Sandoval’s explanation of why Africans are Black and destined for slavery in Chapter 2, titled “On the nature of Africans, whom we commonly call Blacks,” of this first part of the manual. In Sandoval’s time, the climate theory espoused by the ancients was losing hold. Unlike Best, who came to doubt the climate theory because he had “seene an Ethiopian as blacke as a cole brought into England, who taking a faire English woman to wife, begat a sonne in al respects as blacke as the father was,” Sandoval came to doubt it because of reports of albinism in Africa, which many of the slave traders the Jesuit interviewed for his book shared with him. Sandoval did not accept Paré’s explanation for albinism, namely that it was caused by the mother’s imagination. After considering the ideas of the ancients, Sandoval put forth the following hypothesis: Whence, although I judge all these opinions to have some foundation, I presume that the cause for this wonder [i.e. albinism among Africans] is another, for if it were caused by the imagination or the clime, Spaniards living in Africa, married with Spanish women, would have Black children, and likewise, Blacks living in Spain would have White children, which is not the case. Therefore, this must either proceed from God’s will or some intrinsic quality in this people. Whereas as a priest, the simple answer for Sandoval should be that albinism among Africans “proceed[s] from God’s will,” he also wanted a natural/biological cause. So, he comes up with a solution that combines God and biology: the black skin of Africans not only came from the curse Noah put on his son Ham but also is an innate and intrinsic attribute of how God created them, which was extreme heat, so that the sons engendered were left this color, as a sign that they descend from a man who mocked his father, to punish his daring. This is supported by Saint Ambrose, who says that Ham means calidus or calor, hot or heat itself. Sandoval, however, was not the first Iberian intellectual to put Blackness in such terms. In his 1603 General History of the East Indies, Antonio San Román, a fellow Jesuit, expressed the same idea. Africans, contended San Román, were Black “ad intrinseco,” that is, intrinsically. Sandoval most likely had access to San Román’s work, either at the Jesuit school in Cartagena or in Seville, where he returned to publish the manual. Here Sandoval expands on San Román’s assertion. What is unique about Sandoval’s theory, however, is the role theology plays in it. While the other articulations of the early modern theory of Blackness cited here do not employ Ham’s curse, Sandoval conjoins this emerging notion of Blackness with theology, so that slavery remains part of the equation. This is noteworthy because in Chapter 18 of this same book of De instauranda, Sandoval affirms that “at the beginning the Lord our God did not people the Earth with masters and slaves … until, as time went on and men grew in malice, they began to tyrannize others’ liberty.” This in turn is intriguing because, while Sandoval does not mention slavery in his theory of Blackness, when he takes up the question of whether African slavery is just or unjust in Chapter 17 of this same book of De instauranda, Sandoval evades answering the question himself by reproducing a letter from a fellow Jesuit in Angola. Sandoval had written to the letter’s author, Father Luis Brandon, asking whether African slaves were or not “justly procured.” Father Brandon answers Sandoval that he should have no “scruples” about African slavery, not only because Church authorities have not condemned it, but principally because it is Africans who enslaved Africans. Therefore, African slaves are “justly procured.” Sandoval devotes the rest of the chapter to his own examples that underscore Father Brandon’s argument. Thus, African slavery is blamed on Africans, rather than Europeans. Recalling Sandoval’s theory of Blackness, then, slavery is seen as part of Africans’ “mark” and “punishment” for their biblical forebear’s transgression. From the perspective of Father Brandon’s argument, they have been condemned by God to enslave each other. Crucially for Sandoval, bringing salvation to Africans justified slavery: “And to lose so many souls that are taken from Africa, for some are not ill gotten, without knowing which, does not seem a great service to God for so few are the ill-gotten ones, and those that are saved many and properly enslaved.” Sandoval’s position underscores, as Thomas Holt has argued, that in early modernity race worked through religion; the reward of “knowing Christ” justified African slavery even if African slaves were not “justly procured.” After Sandoval, this understanding of Blackness and slavery would become commonplace, not only in the Iberian world, but in the Atlantic in general. In his 1649’s Evangelizing Mission to the Congo, for example, the Catalan Dominican José Pellicer i Tovar echoed Best, San Román, and Sandoval’s words: That nation is not Black because of the sun’s extreme heat as some have thought for, as we said above, the climate is temperate and the heat very moderate. Their Blackness proceeds properly from nature and an intrinsic quality; this can be seen by the fact that the children of Black parents born in Spain are Black. Understanding Africans as divinely destined for slavery in New Spain meant that they were conceived as excluded from freedom and sovereignty. Sovereignty here is crucial because many reprisals against Afro-Mexicans began with accusation that they had elected and crowned a royal court as part of a plot to kill all the Spanish men, rape the women, and enslave the Indigenous population in the African kingdom they would establish after taken over the land. This began with New Spain’s first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, who in his 1537 annual report wrote that had suppressed—by hanging the leaders—a Black rebellion that had begun with the election and coronation of a king. Yet the only reliable evidence we have of Afro-Mexicans electing royal courts is for festive purposes. This tradition was widespread in the Atlantic and must have been known to Mexican colonial authorities, who participated or witnessed public festivities that included festive Black kings and queens. However, this did not stop the royal magistrate Luis López de Azoca of accusing a group of Afro-Mexicans who elected a royal court during a Christmas Eve celebration in 1608 of plotting to overthrow the Spanish regime. The magistrate had forty Afro-Mexicans arrested and tortured but released them after most of Mexico City came to understand that what had transpired among Afro-Mexicans on Christmas Eve was “things of the blacks,” as the famous chronicler Fary Juan de Torquemada put it. In 1612, after Afro-Mexicans marched en masses demanding justice for a slave woman who was beaten to death by her owner, López de Azoca accused them again of electing and crowning a royal court as part of efforts to kill all the Spanish men, rape the women, and enslave the Indigenous population in the African kingdom they intended to establish after taken over the land. This time, because the accusation came after the protests over the woman’s death, a fearful city did or said nothing as thirty-five Afro-Mexicans were hanged, quartered and their heads put on display in the city’s gates. For López de Azoca the rebellion had arisen from Afro-Mexicans’ “demasiada libertad,” that is too many freedoms, which he hoped the execution would stamp out. López de Azoca begins his report of the supposed 1612 rebellion by stating the problem as follows: The great number of enslaved and free Blacks and mulattos in this viceroyalty, and particularly Mexico City, which increases with both those who are born here and those who are brought from Africa… and the freedom and license with which this people has acted, because of the goods and good treatment which they receive, and the expensive clothes, dances, weddings, confraternities, burials, and free houses which they have, where they live in sin, has caused that neither free nor slave does any work. López de Azoca here pairs libertad (freedom) with licençia (license), which the first Spanish dictionary defined as “immoderate liberty, and faculty for doing or saying whatever one desires.” It was this freedom, real and imagined, that Mexican officials like viceroys Manrique de Zuñiga and Emríquez de Almanza and López de Azoca saw not only as dangerous but as one to which Afro-Mexicans had no divine or ontological/natural right. This belief rested on an understanding of Africans’ nature has intrinsically, that is, biologically, cursed with Blackness and divinely destined for slavery.

Fear and Loathing in New Spain: Anti-Blackness in Colonial Mexico | Watch the full talk

Presented by Miguel A Valerio at Region and Enmity: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Miguel A. Valerio discusses anti-Black matters and events in Colonial Mexico City and the racialization of slavery more broadly in connection to the people of African descent in colonial Mexico and the Atlantic at large. He traces how New Spain’s anti-Black ethos stems from the racialization of African slavery and how it led to the maligning of Afro-Mexicans’ clamor for justice and their festive traditions. Valerio looks at the Spanish Empire as a locus to study the development of biopower in the early modern world. Through Alonso de Sandoval’s 1627 treatise on slavery manual titled De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute, or “On bringing salvation to Africans,” he highlights Sandoval’s concluding thoughts on why slavery is just for Africans.

Early Modern
History
Transnational studies
Activity
Adam Miyashiro

Postcolonial theory and the medieval epic

Analyzing The Song of Roland and The Song of the Cid from a perspective of postcolonial theory. Students will write short papers identifying themes and images in medieval literature read through postcolonial frameworks.

This short paper assignment asks you to analyze The Song of Roland and The Song of the Cid from a perspective of postcolonial theory. Choose two critical readings that we’ve read so far to use as proof-texts for your reading of the epic. You may choose from the following:

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Lampert-Weissig, Lisa. “Chapter 1: The Future of the Past.” Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

Kinoshita, S. “‘Pagans Are Wrong and Christians Are Right’: Alterity, Gender, and Nation in the Chanson De Roland.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001): 79–112.

Carpenter, Dwayne E. “Social Perception and Literary Portrayal: Jews and Muslims in Medieval Spanish Literature.” Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain. Ed. Vivian B. Mann, Thomas F. Glick, and Jerrilynn D. Dodds. New York: George Braziller, 1992. 61–82.

Possible list of themes identified by postcolonial critics (not exhaustive)

  1. Depictions of Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the poems
  2. War and religion
  3. Masculinity, femininity, and gender
  4. Race and racialization in The Song of Roland

Or, you may choose your own based on your own interests.

Instructions

Choose a theme or a connective link between either The Song of Roland or The Song of the Cid and your critical text(s). Define it for your reader and explain how it functions in your texts. Describe how a reader, either medieval or modern, might interpret this. 

Everything in a literary text symbolizes something else—both connotatively and denotatively. Consider multiple, or even contradictory, meanings to your chosen symbol. Cite frequently, to demonstrate and prove your points, using page numbers and/or line numbers from poetry. 

Medieval
Literature
Transnational studies
RaceB4Race Highlight
Geraldine Heng

Defining race, periodizing race

In her 2019 RaceB4Race talk at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Geraldine Heng argues for thinking about race in transhistorical terms.

GERALDINE HENG: Soon after a pilgrim militia from the Latin West captured Jerusalem in 1099—in what we now call the First Crusade—Guibert Nogent, the learned abbot of Nogent sous Coucy, wrote a chronicle of the Latin occupation from his perch in 12th-century France. Jubilantly, he calls the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem a new colony (novae coloniae) of Christendom, invoking the Roman Empire as predecessor in whose footsteps the Latin West would now follow in its own military adventures. However, Guibert’s evocation of Roman colonization as the template for Christian colonization marks not just historical continuity, as he supposes, but also a historical break. His chronicle—the Gesta Dei per Francos (the deeds of God through (the medium of) the Franks)—registers that break: God, now, is the author of the colonial enterprise, and Christianity is the authorizing discourse for invasion and occupation. Medieval colonialism, we see, is thus neocolonialism: religion in the form of Christianity has inserted a difference between two eras of colonization, creolizing the old template of the Roman Empire so that a new colonial vernacular, a medieval vernacular, is produced. This creolized medieval vernacular will prove indispensable to all the later European colonizers: Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, Spanish that would arrive around the world, not like Rome, but like Christendom, wielding the sword and the book to found their own Christian-colored empires in the modern era. We see from this simple example the importance of defining the meaning of historical phenomena accurately, as instantiations from one era are ported over to another era and repeated, but never repeated identically as before, and always with difference. The allegory of naming and difference here helps us to think about race in transhistorical terms. So, what is “race,” and how do we define “race” as a transhistorical category? Scholars of literature, history, and art struggled for a long time with the concept of race. Like other concepts, theorized by those who study modern eras, such as Orientalism, race has seemed to some like a theoretical imposition ported backward from the present into deep historical time. So, premodernists grappling with phenomena that looked distinctly racist or Orientalist have, in the past, resorted to a vocabulary of deference to modernity, naming their phenomena “proto-racial” or “proto-Orientalist” instead and favoring a vocabulary of greater generality and greater amiability. Instead of “race,” we’ve had “ethnicity,” “alterity,” or “otherness.” Instead of “racism,” we’ve had “ethnocentrism,” “discrimination,” “prejudice,” or just dislike of “otherness and difference.” The absence of trenchant tools, analytic resources, and a vocabulary adequate to the task at hand thus made it impossible to acknowledge the magnitude of the racial phenomena, racial institutions, and racial practices that occurred in the European Middle Ages long before terminology stamped with the word “race” had formally coalesced in the Latin West. When the Jewish minority in England were tagged with badges, herded into towns with a surveillance system to monitor their livelihoods, imprisoned for coinage offenses, judicially murdered by the state for the trumped-up lie that they mutilated and crucified Christian children, slaughtered by Christian mobs, targeted for conversion by the state, taxed to the point of penury, subjected to a branch of government specially created for their surveillance, and then finally deported from England in the last exploitation of their usefulness—when so totalizing a racial apparatus is marshalled against a minority group, a label of “premodern prejudice” hardly suffices as a descriptor of the dimensions of horror endured. I’ve argued that, in fact, England’s Jews lived under the conditions of a racial state, the first racial state in the history of the West. Racial biomarkers were attributed to Jewish bodies: a special stench, a facial physiognomy, even horns and a tail. Jewish men were said to bleed congenitally like menstruating women, stigmatized as conspiring with the Antichrist. Charges of bestiality, blasphemy, diabolism, deicide, vampirism, and cannibalism were laid at the door of Jews in the countries of Europe. Many of the biopolitics of how this minority group was characterized, as just anxiety over “alterity,” hardly begins to address the abjection stigmatizing of the bodies of this medieval race in the Latin West. Studying the archives of premodern and early modern Europe with the tools of critical race theory surfaces recognition of other atrocities. The people we call the Romani, who emerged from northwestern Europe in the 11th century and migrated westward, were enslaved by the monasteries and boyars of southeastern Europe from the late Middle Ages well into the high modern era. Until these diasporic peoples were finally manumitted in the 19th century, “gypsy” was the name of a despised slave race. Trans-Saharan Africans were depicted in visual art as merciless torturers of Christ and killers of John the Baptist. A tympanum on the north portal of the west façade of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Rouen depicts the malevolent execution of John, with his arm menacingly raised and brandishing a sword, as a phenotypic Black African. The 13th century abounds with images like this in architecture, sculpture, and illuminations. The encyclopedia by Bartholomeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, offers a conventional theory of climate inherited from antiquity in which cold lands produce White folk and hot lands produce Black. White being, we are told, a marker of inner courage, while the men of Africa, possessing Black faces, short bodies, and crisp hair, are “cowards of heart” and “guileful.” Cantiga 186 of Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, commissioned by Alfonso X of Spain, has an illustration in six scenes in which a blackface Moor is found in bed with his fair mistress. Both are condemned to the flames, but the fair lady is saved by the Virgin Mary herself. Black is damned, White is saved. Black is also the color of demons and devils and the color of sin, allowing Saint Jerome, the patriarch, to doom Ethiopia as the land of sinners. Is cultural production of this kind just “proto-racial”? The killing fields of international war furnish another crucible of racial formation. Bernard de Clairvaux, the theologian who cowrote the Latin Rule of Templars, pronounces in his treatise De laude novae militiae that the slaughter of Muslims didn’t constitute homicide, the killing of humans, but merely malicide, the extermination of incarnated evil. Muslims were not just vile, abominable, and a curse, as Pope Urban II, instigator of the First Crusade, had said; they were not to be seen as human beings at all, but as evil personified. St. Bernard thus saw no difficulty in calling for calculated genocide to extirpate from the face of the Earth these enemies of the Christian name: Extirpandos de terra christiani nominis inimicos. In 2011, I thus proposed a stripped-down, basic, minimum working hypothesis of race that goes like this: Race is one of the primary names we have—a name we retain for the epistemological, ethical, and political commitments it recognizes—for a repeating tendency, of the greatest import, to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, so as to distribute positions and powers differentially to the human groups. It’s kind of a long mouthful, isn’t it? Yeah, okay. Okay. Race-making operates as historical occasions in which strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices and pressures to constitute a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. Race is thus a structural relationship for the management of human differences—a mechanism of sorting—rather than a substantive content. The differences selected for essentialism will vary in the longue durée of human history, perhaps fastening on bodies, physiognomy, and somatic differences in one instance; perhaps on social practices, religion, or culture in another instance; and perhaps a multiplicity of interlocking discourses elsewhere. Biology and the sociocultural are thus not bifurcated spheres in race formation: they crisscross in the practices, institutions, and laws, operationalized on the bodies and lives of individuals and groups. So, my book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, discusses racial thinking, racial acts, racial laws, racial institutions, and racist phenomena across a range of registers and crucibles, invasion and occupation, nation formation and state formation, political theology, mercantile capitalism, holy war, settler colonization, economic adventurism, empire formation, contact and encounter, slavery, consolidation of universal Christendom, and epistemic change. I said all of that just for Jerry Singerman, who is in the audience, so that he knows that the kinds of projects we do are interdisciplinary projects. The book treats Jews and Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols, the Romani, and also White Christian Europeans as ethnoracial constituencies of the medieval era. You hear that, Jerry? Today, I focus on examples of racial dialect, racial logic, and racial strategies that repeat the difference across periodization, using examples largely not treated in the book to suggest the persistence of a transformational grammar of race from premodernity into the modern period. I also stress the importance of registering differences between periods and eras. For example, while Roman colonization, medieval colonialism, and the European maritime empires of the modern eras deploy ethnoracial strategies, as their forces march across their known worlds, their differences also require recognition. Slavery, an institution closely associated with racial formation, has also had varied configurations and meanings across macro history, hence this conference. Periodization matters. Racial logic, racial form, racial dialect, the transformational grammar of race across time. Theories of climate, Denise McCoskey attests, constitute a repeating arsenal in the amassing of racial dialect. As early as the fifth century BCE, the infamous essay, “Airs, Waters, and Places,” attributed to Hippocrates, already offers a fully fledged racial logic of climate, environment, and geography as grounds that predispose fundamental differences among humans from which group character can be assigned to differentiate between the inhabitants of continents. In the Middle Ages, encyclopedias like De proprietatibus rerum visually incorporated theories of racial character and behavior based on climate, geography, and physiognomies of bodily humors and temperaments thought to devolve from climate and geography. In modernity, environmental and geographic determinism prove indispensable for colonialism. India was subjugated because its climate made the natives “fatalistic” and “supine,” thus easy to colonize, whereas “the bracing weather of northern Europe . . . produced a dynamic race, fit for conquest and exploration.” You can tell that’s a quote, yeah? Plantation slavery, too, benefited from climate theory: In the . . . American South. . . [the fact] that Africans could . . . endure [slave] labor . . . was proof positive . . . that different climates had moulded the races differently . . . Africans were . . . better acclimated to hot climates. [These are quotations from Denise McCoskey.] Theories of religion, in the long history of Christianity, with its schisms, heresies, reform movements, and breakaway formations—and the insistence that there can be only one Christianity in the singular, not diverse Christianities—also created a slippery, tenacious logic that has configured religio-racial formation across medieval and modern time. Heretics—defined as anyone whose faith deviated from dogma—were persecuted in Europe in inquisitions, tortured, branded, tagged with badges, and hundreds, if not thousands, executed. Did “heretics” harden into a virtual race at specific historical junctures in the Latin West? The apparatus of heresy is deployed in signal instances of persecution and abjection: from the trials of the Order of the Temple in France, to the execution of Joan of Arc, heresy is operationalized as a preferred mechanism of sorting by which the Latin West cast out, condemned, and put to death. Popular movements of “heretical” Albigenses and Cathars evolved into the targets of holy war, as if they had been Muslims. At Béziers, where they were massacred in droves during the Albigensian crusade—by one account, 20,000 were slaughtered—the papal legate is said to have called for all to be killed, leaving to God the business of sorting out the victims. Putative heretics were hounded and persecuted in inquisitions from the 13th century until long past the end of the medieval period, with torture, exile, and execution being some of the favored outcomes. The history of the febrile internal divisions that conduced to the demonization of an otherwise non-physiologically differentiable population for the production of absolute intrareligious differences does not end. In the early modern era, the internecine war between Protestants and Catholics within a single nation, England, suggests an intractable historical continuity in the instrumentality of religion for the discovery of intractable differences. But periodization in race matters. Reading race transhistorically, however, requires acknowledging differences in the character of racial institutions in different eras. Periodization matters, and slavery is a key example. In the medieval period, slavery was an equal opportunity condition for all races and assumed a variety of forms. The slavery endured by the Romani in Wallachia and Moldavia spanned centuries, but Romani, domestic, and field slavery differed greatly from Egypt’s Mamluk military slavery, which also spanned centuries. For the Mamluks—a military elite comprising primarily Turkic and Circassian slave boys, who were plucked from continental Eurasia and raised as professional soldiers—the sultan of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria could only be drawn from the ranks of former slaves. For this most powerful Islamic polity of the southern Mediterranean and Levant over three centuries, until the ascendency of the Ottomans, the requirement of having once been a slave was an indispensable condition of eligibility for the highest office in the land. Prized female Caucasian slaves in Islamic Spain, al-Andalus, or in the Levant could rise to become the revered mothers of caliphs, sultans, and emirs—or, in the case of the remarkable Shajar ad-Durr (Tree of Pearls), to become the only Mamluka in the three-century history of the Mamluk dynasties. In Dar al-Islam, extraordinary social mobility meant that being a slave could be an important first step to power, wealth, and status, an avenue of upward mobility, importantly open to women. This is not the case for plantation slaves in the later American South. Premodern slavery is thus distinct from early modern and modern slavery, and distinct also from the mutating forms of slavery (including child and sex trafficking) that dog the 21st century. Caucasians—eastern and western Europeans—were sold at slave markets alongside other races throughout the Middle Ages. Household slaves were common and typical in premodernity. Plantation and field slaves, less attested. In the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade, slaves could become trusted commercial agents acting on behalf of absentee merchants, and, outside the lands of Christendom, manumitted slaves might become generals, admirals, diplomats, governors, and rulers. The sheer variety of medieval slavery’s conditions and opportunities thus attest to very specific differences within the medieval period, as well as between the medieval and later periods in the phenomena characterizing the institution of slavery. In discussions of race, distinctions of this kind must be honored with acknowledgement that periods can be marked by institutions and phenomena that reoccur, but reoccur with varied expressions over the longue durée, because periodization matters. This is not to say, of course, that racialized groups in populations cannot be studied for their historical continuities within a transformational grammar of race across macrohistorical time. Africans, the Romani, Jews, and Muslims all constitute racialized populations whose treatment variegates over time with racial instrumentalities being renewed, adjusted, adapted, or transformed. Religious dogma, over the centuries, also conduced to the devolution of absolute differences so that co-religionists can be cast out and treated like a virtual race across the centuries. In demonstrating the persistence of racialization across historical periods, my last example are the Cagots: abject communities of people living on the outskirts of towns and villages on both sides of the western Pyrenees throughout Béarn, Aquitaine, Navar, and the Toulousain. These impoverished, subaltern Christians were not physically or linguistically differentiable from the townspeople on whose margins they lived. Yet their stigmatization extends over deep historical time, from the 10th century through the 18th century, and accrued a variety of racial forms. Daniel Hawkins’s 2014 master’s thesis, Chimeras That Degrade Humanity: The Cagots and Discrimination, traces how Cagots—who were called by a variety of names—were shunned, despised, and abhorred from medieval into modern time. Legislation from the 13th to 17th century segregates them into residential quarters and occupations and constricted their day-to-day behavior and movements. Hawkins shows how they were banned from taverns and denied the use of public fountains, forbidden to sell food or wine or touch food in the marketplace, forbidden to work with livestock or carry arms or walk barefoot, and, though they were Christian, also forbidden the sacraments. Cagots could not marry outside their kind, and they had to keep to designated places in church, while they were alive. As late as 1721, a carpenter and his son were roughed up in a church in Beirut by three municipal counselors who refused to allow them their choice of seats. Segregation continued even after their death. Their bodies were confined to designated places in cemeteries. They had to wear a badge of red cloth on their chest, sometimes in the shape of a duck or goose foot, and were subject to endless punitive laws. Their racialization also took biopolitical form; they were said to lack earlobes, to possess an infectious smell, and to give off great heat. “When the salt wind blew, their lips, jugular glands, and the duck foot . . . under their left armpit all swelled, and their stench was well-known.” (This is a quotation from Hawkins.) The early modern period did not see a change in their subaltern status. In 1629, André du Chesne wrote of a people commonly called capots and gahets that everyone detests like lepers, with stinking breath. All are carpenters or coopers, the remains of the race of Giezi, or some say the Albigeois heretics, separated from the community by their homes in life and in the cemetery after death. [Another quote from Hawkins.] Many of the rules setting the Cagots apart from everyone else seem obsessed with them as sources of pollution and contamination, a phenomenon that scholars who study the Dalit or untouchables of India and those who study leprosy would find familiar. Explanations abound for why the Cagots were reviled and cast out from society. Perhaps they once formed groups shunned for leprosy—Hansen’s disease—and it was fear of infection or the moralizing of lepers as sinners damned by God that caused their original segregation, and the stigma then just continued to be attached to their descendants over many generations. Symbolizing depravity, lepers were also associated with heresy, R. I. Moore tells us. Lepers were expelled from cities like Paris—in 1321, 1371, 1388, 1394, 1402, and 1403—and were also massacred. Following rumors of a poisoning plot in 1321, one chronicler says “they were burned in almost all of France.” Or, another explanation goes, Cagots may have been the descendants of Muslims, and the memory of their origins as infidels persisted across time. Or they had been the poor of Christ, pauperes Christi, the wretched who had to scratch out an impoverished living. Hawkins finds that 15th-century records even insinuated Cagots were somehow related to Jews, another community of racial subalterns who had to wear a badge and were stigmatized by punitive laws. The association of Cagots with leprosy alerts us to how disease and disability produced bodily configurations that were moralized, judged, and abhorred. Even the monstrous races of Plinian tradition—another inheritance from antiquity, one that created a conceptual grid through which the Middle Ages understood other types of monsters like Jews, Muslims, and Ethiopians—even the monstrous races seemed uncannily to resemble deformed or disabled humans. Their bodies are too large, too stunted, too sexually overdetermined by their genitals, or missing a leg or an eye, or had corporeal features located in the wrong places. Disabled and non-normative bodies do seem to form the basis of the caricatures that constitute the monstrous races of tradition, among whom the Cagots—who might once have been lepers, or disabled, or diseased, or the abject poor, or Muslims, or Romani, or Jews—are a historical example of a population deemed monstrous and abhorrent for reasons not of their own making. The example of the Cagots, along with that of Africans, Muslims, the Romani, Jews, deviant Christians, and even imagined human monsters, shows us that the infrastructure of racial formation in deep historical time repeatedly intersected with, and was dependent on, infrastructures of class, disease, disability, gender, sexuality, and religion. These were the conditions through which race was articulated, and they furnished the particular forms of racial expression in a variety of contexts. Is it any wonder that race and racisms have been so long-lived?

Defining Race, Periodizing Race | Listen to the full talk

Presented by Geraldine Heng at Race and Periodization: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2019

Geraldine Heng argues for thinking about race in transhistorical terms. Because the concept of race uses a vocabulary that defers to modern understanding, premodern scholars have been missing a vocabulary to analyze the breadth of racial “phenomena, institutions, and practices” that premodern critical race scholarship now uncovers. Heng describes archival evidence of racialized atrocities that PCRS reveals: stigmatized bodies blamed and punished, identified as not only not-human but also evil personified. Heng outlines the repetition of racial thinking across history, despite the differences in eras. By tracing the wide variations of the conditions and targets of enslavement over time, for instance, Heng demonstrates the persistence of racialization and its consequences for peoples perceived as essentially different. Heng closes with a description of the Cagots, European peoples labeled “monstrous” and ostracized from the 13th-17th centuries. To demonstrate the persistence of racialization, Heng illustrates how the Cagot suffered intersections of religious, class, and gender prejudice coupled with fear of disease, and were discriminated against based on changing biological markers of disability and non-normative bodies.

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Medieval
Literature
Intro to premodern critical race studies
Transnational studies
Video
Dennis Britton

Race in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

The genre of epic has significantly defined what Muslims are in the white European imagination. Spenser’s allegory helps make racist tropes “stick” to Muslim bodies. 

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is significantly influenced by other poems in which the heroes are white European Christians who fight against variously skin-colored Muslims from Africa and the Middle East. In his letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, Spenser lists the ancient Greek, Latin, and Renaissance Italian romances and epics that he imitates in ​​The Faerie Queene—​​the Iliad, the Odyssey, ​​the Aeneid, Orlando Furioso, and ​​Jerusalem Delivered. Many students will have heard of, and some will have read, the heroic​​​​ poems by Homer and Virgil, but it is unlikely that they will know anything about the works by Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso. I have found that giving students some sense of what these Italian poems are about, and supplying excerpts from them, clarifies the conflicts between Christians and Muslims that lie at the center of the Italian poems and how those conflicts influence The Faerie Queene. Reading The Faerie Queene alongside Orlando Furioso and Jerusalem Delivered reveals Spenser’s poem as not only an anti-Catholic epic but also as an anti-Muslim epic, and allows students to interrogate the use of allegory in racialization across Europe. The allegorical nature of the poem has historically ​​been used to erase race from The Faerie Queene. The argument that scholars have made is that Muslim-coded characters in the poem have little to do with early modern attitudes about real Muslims, that they are merely a conventional enemy of the genre Spenser writes in. To them, what really matters is the allegory—that is, what the Muslim-coded characters signify. But I say, slow down. Let’s not be so quick to jump to the allegorical. Allegories, after all, tell at least two stories at once, and we need to examine what is happening on the literal level before considering what is being signified allegorically. Even if Spenser is not specifically channeling contemporary discussions about real Muslims that were circulating in his day, his poem nevertheless represents ​​Muslims in a way that bears striking similarities to stereotypes about Muslims. They are hot-tempered, violent, and lascivious, among other things. More than that, they threaten Christian lives and values—they don’t belong in Jerusalem, Europe, or Fairyland. So, even if Spenser is not representing “real” attitudes about Muslims in the late 16th-century, his representations of Muslims are surely part of the larger discourse about Muslims that spans centuries, genres, and Christian European national traditions. I have also found that reading The Faerie Queene as an​​ anti-Muslim epic is not at odds with reading The Faerie Queene as an anti-Catholic epic. It is not an either/or. Spenser is anti-Muslim and anti-Catholic at the same time. Moreover, Spenser’s anti-Catholic stance is advanced by the allegory that racializes and essentializes Muslims. That is, early modern English readers come to understand just how bad Catholicism is through reading Catholics as Muslims. Those who insist on reading The Faerie Queene as only an anti-Catholic allegory are missing a crucial truth: the epic genre had already made Muslims apt figures for his allegory, and that his allegory only helps further racialize Muslims. Race and allegory work similarly—they both require that bodies become abstractions, and that bodies and their features become signifiers of virtues or vices. While the genre of epic has significantly defined what Muslims are in the white European imagination, Spenser’s allegory actually helps make racist tropes “stick” to Muslim bodies. ​For example, Muslim characters in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene are no more than fleshy embodiments of doubleness, faithlessness, lawlessness, and joylessness. They have no personality beyond the negative characteristics they embody, and they cannot be anything other than what the allegory forces them to be. Unlike the white European heroes, they cannot change. Allegory assures that some bodies are equated with virtues, while other bodies are equated with vice.

Those who insist on reading Spenser's The Faerie Queene as only an anti-Catholic allegory are missing a crucial truth: the epic genre had already made Muslims apt figures for his allegory, and his allegory only helps further racialize Muslims. Race and allegory work similarly—they both require that bodies become abstractions, and that bodies and their features become signifiers of virtues or vices. While the genre of epic has significantly defined what Muslims are in the white European imagination, Spenser’s allegory actually helps make racist tropes “stick” to Muslim bodies.

Early Modern
Literature
Poetry
Religion
Video
Ayanna Thompson

How to talk about race in the classroom

Ayanna Thompson discusses how PCRS in the classroom starts with students and teachers being comfortable talking frankly about the reality of race in their lives as well as in the texts they encounter.

A few years ago, I was teaching a large lecture class on a survey of early British literature, and the class was unusually animated, willing to talk about the most challenging topics. So they weighed in willingly to talk about representations of misogyny, representations of non-consensual sex, and even representations of non-normative sex acts. They were highly engaged. And then we got to Othello and there was silence. At first I thought, maybe they haven't read the play. So I asked, and 150 heads said: no, we have read it. And I was like: why are you all quiet? And I realized at that moment that these students had never been in a space where they could talk about race openly. Many of us, in fact, have never been in spaces where we're taught to talk about race. Many of us, if we have been taught to talk about race, only do so in single-race settings, so not in mixed-race settings. And frequently in our culture, the only time that race is talked about openly is in a moment of crisis, where emotions are heightened. I set about articulating this to my students, to explain to them why this might be a challenge. And all of a sudden the floodgates opened, and they were like: this is a racist play. We don't think we should have to talk about it. And I said: okay, now let's start with the fundamentals. I've come to realize that the goal of a pre-modern class is more than just learning the content. Students need to practice listening, and talking, about issues and representations of race, both in historical context and in contemporaneous ones. This is something that we don't often do, and certainly we are not taught to do earlier in our education. One of the goals is to ameliorate fears about weighing into discussions and debates about race and issues of representation. I've also started articulating why higher education is particularly important for students – although if they're in your class, they probably think that higher education is beneficial in some ways. Many of them have not thought about the fact that collective discussion, in non-heightened situations, is how human beings learn most effectively. It's also important to stress that no human being is born with an ability to read pre-modern texts. It's not like you come out of the womb and you're like: Spenser. Got it. And similarly, there should be no expectation that students should know how to talk about race without being taught how to do so. So: you come to a pre-modern literature class, you're going to learn both about the content and how to talk about race and representation. I've also come to tell my students that educational settings are places where students and teachers should try out new ideas, experiment with thought, make challenging statements without the fear that they are going to be labeled as a racist or misogynist or an Anti-Semite or as Islamophobic, right? These are spaces in which you experiment with ideas, and that shouldn't follow you for the rest of your life. Some people have come to think of this as creating a “safe space,” and I know that there's negative reactions to those types of phrases, but I think of it as the educational space. This is where we experiment and learn together. But it's also a space where you can, especially if you're in a smaller classroom (not like this one), where you can remember what a student said earlier in the semester and then challenge them later when their opinions change. Or if you don't feel like challenging them, at least noticing it. Frequently I have students who start a semester saying that Shakespeare should only be staged in the way that he originally intended. Then we frequently get to things like Taming of the Shrew or Othello, where they frequently want to rewrite the endings of the plays. I think it's important in that moment to say: look, your thinking has changed. And that's a good thing, because the ultimate goal is growth, both intellectually and collectively: we have the ability to learn and transform from our discussions and readings. It's also important to de-center yourself as the teacher, as necessarily the expert on race, because for most of us, including me, we were not taught how to teach race in these types of settings. And so I frequently say to my students: I am on this journey of growth along with you. I'm not the person that holds all the answers about how to think about race. I'm here to ask provocative questions and to steer our conversation in the most productive way. But, like the students, I'm there for personal growth as well. So, my four takeaways for how to teach race in the pre-modern class. One, feel free to acknowledge the elephant in the room and to say that talking about race may not be something that anyone in the room has done before, and that that's okay. Two, I think it's really important to hammer home the uniqueness and the importance of the educational setting, as a space for collective learning and to develop habits of listening and talking about race. Three, that you are not the expert. You don't have to hold all the cards. While you may be the expert in Shakespeare or Spenser or whatever, you don't have to be the expert in race. You just have to be the person who can raise the issues. And four, that coming to a pre-modern class is not only to learn the content, but to learn skills that you can take away about how to listen and talk about representation and race in complex and nuanced ways. And ultimately, my hope is that the pre-modern classroom teaches students to develop habits of thinking about complex texts and complex issues of representation that are grounded historically and applicable contemporaneously. And that these are skills that they will take with them for the rest of their lives.

Frequently in our culture, the only times we talk about race are in moments of crisis. Ayanna Thompson offers a guide on how to approach race in the classroom, reminding teachers, “You don’t have to be the expert on race. You just have to be the person who can raise the issues.”

Early Modern
Literature
Intro to premodern critical race studies
Essay
Madeline Sayet

Shakespeare and the history of Indian policy in the United States

It is important when teaching Shakespeare in America to acknowledge the colonial legacy that brought his texts to this land.

Why do you need to know the history of federal Indian policy to fully understand Shakespeare’s role within communities and on this land?

Americans have long assumed Shakespeare is a prevalent literary voice because he is the best—but, when one voice is loudest, it is hard to hear the others. After a while, it becomes difficult to recognize that there could be alternatives, that those quieter voices might have something to say that is equally, if not more, significant. Shakespeare’s prevalence and power in America persists by upholding the tastes and the social and political paradigms of settler colonial cultures.  

It is important when teaching Shakespeare in America to acknowledge the colonial legacy that brought his texts to this land. Because American history is usually taught solely from the settler perspective, with a false narrative of progress, very few non-Native Americans are familiar with the history of Indian policy. Without the knowledge of this history, it is easy to view Shakespeare as a purely artistic or cultural pedestal, rather than as a political tool within the settler colonial project. Federal Indian policy represents centuries of (unconstitutional) legislation that led to the destruction, assimilation, removal, and erasure of Native peoples.  

Without the power systems that seized Native land, languages, arts, and culture, Shakespeare would not hold this position in the American literary canon.  

To engage students in the performance history of Shakespeare in America, they need to be familiar with the political landscapes in which his plays were taught and staged. Further, to bring the Indigenizing Shakespeare Movement into our classrooms, it is imperative that our students are informed and knowledgeable of this history—one that most of them were never taught.

What the Indigenizing Shakespeare Movement teaches us about Native theater and 21st-century Shakespearean performance

Each Shakespearean performance is an opportunity to see choices that are unique to the culture, community, moment in time, and artists inhabiting each production. The specificity of each Native nation’s culture and sovereignty is incredibly important, and one of the key expressions of that sovereignty is language. The Indigenizing Shakespeare movement centers language first and foremost, but not through reverence to Shakespeare’s texts. Instead, the Movement centers Indigenous languages in conversation with Shakespeare’s, exposing more people to hearing and speaking the hundreds of Native languages indigenous to these lands. Audiences understand the power that such language holds as equal to Shakespeare’s language.  

The use of Indigenous languages onstage is common in Native theater, but in an Indigenizing Shakespeare production, who is speaking what language wields additional power and intention. Philosophy and poetry already loved by Shakespeareans are more deeply engaged when more languages are considered. Shakespeare’s poetry can be reinterpreted through the lenses of the cultures of this place, just as has been done internationally for centuries. The Indigenizing Shakespeare Movement is a place-based sovereign continuation of the way all peoples who have received these texts are finding new ways to interpret them through their own cultural frameworks and empower their own communities today.  

Native theater has existed in different forms since before the colonists came to America. There has always been storytelling on this land, manifesting in different practices across Native nations. Before the Contemporary Native Theater Movement arose in the 1960-70s, performances or plays written by Native peoples manifested in unique ways in each era and community.

The Native Theater Movement began in urban Indian communities alongside a series of Indigenous rights protests, and shifts in policy toward the return of Native rights and freedoms during the civil rights era. Native theater has never lost its sense of deep political engagement because Native people are still being affected by Indian policy, every day.  

In the last decade mainstream theaters have begun welcoming Native plays on their stages. However, most mainstream theater practice remains embedded with the tropes of centuries of non-Native representation of Native peoples onstage.  

​​​Before American theaters were ready to produce Native plays, or understood anything about Native peoples or cultures, Shakespeare often acted as a bridge for representation to include Native peoples in theater productions. Shakespeare in the hands of Native theater makers was and is a powerful tool for asking more of contemporary theater at large.  

Early Modern
Literature
Indigeneity
Shakespeare
RaceB4Race Highlight
Arthur L. Little, Jr.

Shakespeare and the police

In his presentation at RaceB4Race in 2020, Little compares the policing of the Black body (Black persons) to intellectual theft that often surrounds Shakespeare and early modern studies.

I am talking to you, as I've put up here on the screen: (Mis)Appropriations, Shakespeare, Race, and the Police. And I should say, before I get started, that there are going to be some images that some may find a little disturbing or off-putting. This paper begins with Adam P. Kennedy and Adrian Kennedy's Obie award-winning best play, Sleep Deprivation Chamber, from 1996. An autobiographical work having a run-in with Shakespeare, with Shakespeare's Hamlet in particular. A run-in that is as incommensurable as the twenty-something, "highly educated middle class Black male protagonist” who has a run-in with the law, which leads to his being brutally beaten by the police in suburban Virginia. In Kennedy's play, written by mother and son, Teddy, the fictional son, is a senior in college and is directing the play Hamlet. And in one of many memorable scenes, Teddy is being interrogated by an unseen questioner as he, Teddy that is, stands in Yorick's grave, a recurring sight in the play. What is he doing there? What role, what alignment, or misalignment is playing out here? Is he Yorick, rendered now as always as Black clown painted inch-thick in the white cosmeticizing of higher learning, or is he a hollowed-out Hamlet as when he says to the cop during his beating, “I am an American citizen, could you please let me up and breathe?" A feint or perhaps faint with the A I N T in the faint, a feint or faint pathos-filled recall of Hamlet's "This is I, Hamlet, the Dane." Hamlet’s, however, is the moment of a heroic exhale: the articulation of the western subject’s individual freedom, his ownership of his humanness. Teddy's is something of a humanist bargain, a faint ghostly remnant of the human. The oxymoronic Black human contorting his Black body interpolating it as much as possible in American self-fashioning, so that he may take refuge in the trappings of an America that has systematically enslaved, lynched, torn apart, Jim Crowed, and incarcerated Black bodies. It's a strange place to occupy: America. A grave. Yorick's persona. Hamlet's. Not surprisingly, one of the repeated critiques of the play, that critics have talked about, is the play lacks cohesion. The play and its personas move like Teddy's uncle March, who is a retired Stanford professor, who like an unmoored King Hamlet ghost wanders through the play in every peripatetic fashion, often getting lost, going missing, searching for language to express a real history of living symbolically. “We live near the epicenter,” a line he repeats twice and almost the totality of his speaking in the Kennedy's play. Sleep Deprivation Chamber wants to work from within old Hamlet's purgatorial story of trauma narrative. The illusion of some kind of logic not only makes the storytelling itself a fiction, it renders the details anodyne, pretends to euthanize the Black bodies that are actually being torn apart, beaten, raped, lynched, murdered. Lots and lots of them. Lots and lots of us. Adam Kennedy says in a dedicatory statement at the beginning of an earlier printed edition of the play, "It is a sobering reality that my experience is such a common one." That is, the beating of Black men by the police. True in 1994. True in 1996. As true today as it was then, and of course, before. The Kennedy’s play itself is no less a traumatizing misappropriation (a critical term, in this instance, not a judgmental one) of the not-always-lawful impoverished Black Rodney King, whose March 3rd, 1991, videotaped brutal beating by three white and one non-white police officers was broadcast around the world. The iconography of that moment has a palpable stranglehold on Kennedy’s play, which features a Black college-aged man in a middle-class Black family that had done everything right. Says Suzanne, the mother in the play, "We are an outstanding Black American family, we are now a grieved family." This is the height of persecution of a Black male with tactics of the deep south, of the time 1930s in overtones of Emmett Till. We are grieved and shocked. We want these false charges dismissed. We Blacks have of course been trapped in, interpolated through a history of false charges. Now the Alexanders, the play’s family, finds itself, like Hamlet, stuck in a morass of grief and grievance. It is, of course, an unending grief and unending grievance. At the end of the Kennedy's play, the last words the audience hears are from the judge: "Case dismissed." Then Yorick's grave vanishes, but the play isn't over. The last image we see is bright light on Teddy sitting alone in the courtroom, remembering his family watching the film of his beating, his Mousetrap, as it is projected on stage, and the last thing we hear as the stage goes dark are the sounds of his screams. Still, I would argue, more traumatizing for Kennedy’s theatrical event, is the reality that Rodney King could emblematize, could be misappropriated to perform the Black man, as ontologically abject—as much as Hamlet, the white man, as universal subject. It's a strange thing that the first words spoken in the Kennedy’s play are: Ophelia, betrayal, disillusionment. And Rodney King would, in 2012, be found floating in his swimming pool the victim of an accidental drowning. Closure. Hamlet serves as a lynchpin for Sleep Deprivation Chamber, but Shakespeare refracts and cracks up at other moments in the play, as when a homeless woman stops Suzanne on her way to teach a class on the construction of a play with Aristotelian elements at New York University. Says the homeless woman: "I want to warn you that there is a vault underneath the street where brimstone lies and over it gunpowder. There is a plan for muggers on the Upper West Side to come up through a trapdoor, dressed like workmen, cast holes into the vaults so that it catches fire and consumes all. I know everyone." Giving us, of course, bits of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet. In short, Kennedy's play is about Black men and the police, refracted through postmodernists’ theatrical terror. That is, the theater itself as a primal scene, or a primal scream, and Shakespeare being called to do what? We may very well ask, why is Shakespeare in a police story? I would argue that this is the wrong question. Why the police in a Shakespeare story? It's the police disrupting the illusion of a coherent Western subjectivity, an illusion that is presumed to be accessible only by and for white consciousness, for white people. Is that a subject I see before me? In Sleep Deprivation Chamber, Suzanne repeatedly complains of not being able to sleep. Blacks have not murdered sleep, but have had their sleep murdered by posses and lynch mobs, by enthusiastic police officers, and seemingly fastidious new historicists, and far too many so-called academic humanists by false charges, by charges of misappropriation, by inappropriately, according to Western history's phenomenologies and epistemologies, by inappropriately trying to appropriate "man" with a capital M. A crucial point underscored by the late, brilliant paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould aptly and deftly titled study, The Mismeasure of Man from 1981 originally. And also, by the brilliant philosopher, essayist, dramatist, etc., Sylvia Wynter, who has argued, "For what Renaissance humanism was to effect was an extraordinary rupture at the level of the human species as a whole...the West was able to reinvent its true Christian self as that of man only because at the same time Western discourses were also inventing the untrue other of the Christian self as that of the man's human other. The invention of man is what the artists and the writers of the sixteenth century were doing." Shakespeare is key here, of course, but the “Shakespeare” I'm putting in quotation marks I evoke here isn't a metonym for the writer’s plays and poems but Shakespeare as humanist law. Shakespeare as the measure of man, Shakespeare as canonical man, especially from the age of the Enlightenment and the age of scientific racism. And what some of us have argued, early modern humanists were less busy explaining homo sapiens than they were obsessively trying to delimit him, even as they concomitantly and perhaps paradoxically, sought to universalize him. To find him as natural nobility, that is always already educated, always fully humanely endowed. Shakespeare is the apex of this aporia, where it at once is made to signal white people's racial superiority. (Where are all the Black Shakespeares, huh?) and to celebrate a universal non-raised human race. However, it's worth pointing out, if only as a way of short handing all this and moving my story along, that Shakespeare and race are inextricable terms as are race in the police i.e. policing. And by the. way, even in Shakespeare, and now I am referring to his works, Shakespeare's dozen or so uses of the word race, as Jonathan Goldberg has shown, frequently worried the question of mixture even within a noble strain. It is interesting that in most of Shakespeare's use of the word race, the concern is about the ending of that particular race, the adulteration of it. As real, violent, and consequential as the racialization in the west of the Black body is, from at least the 13th century onward, the Black body also serves as subterfuge, a seemingly salient illusionary and contained epistemic magic show for the more widespread and surreptitious policing of white people, both in relationship to non-whites and most especially, in relationship to each other. The policing of the Black body masks how the Black body gets deliberately misappropriated, theatricalized for the policing of the white body. Shakespeare gets misappropriated as racial cover. It should not surprise us then, that policing Black's relationship to Shakespeare is a thing, one in which white people, onstage and off, in and outside the Academy, are deeply and troublingly invested. Melancholically so, I’ve elsewhere insisted. Sleep Deprivation Chamber is an obviously complicated example of Shakespeare, race, and the police. A meta-example of sorts, but there are easier ones, such as the example of Alexander Brown, a free Black from the West Indies, who opened the African Grove theater in the 1820s so Black actors could perform Shakespeare for Black audiences. The performances drew large crowds, including white ones, but throughout his two-year history of changing names and locations, it had to grapple also with a white establishment taking offense at Black people performing Shakespeare. As one white critic put it at the time, who argued that The Grove audiences were generally of a riotous character. He recounts the infamous raid on The Grove on January 7th, 1822, "Police magistrates stormed the stage, stopped the production, and apprehended the entire company. The magistrates released the company from jail only after it promised to never act Shakespeare again." This moment, I would suggest, was not only about Blacks misappropriating Shakespeare or whiteness but also, if not more so, about ever-growing tensions about whiteness itself that were already being strained by a burgeoning non-Anglo immigrant population in the early part of the 19th century. This immigrant population, whose whiteness was on the cusp as a variable property, whose whiteness was being further attenuated by the likelihood of New York's abolishment of slavery some five years later, that is in the year 1827. I say even more so, because it wasn't just that powerful institutional, political, and cultural forces had no appetite for Black Shakespearean thespians, but as a sign of their own will to proper whiteness. The legitimate theater, as they called it, was namely the big theatre across the street from Alexander Brown's theatre. That Alexander Brown thought he could compete with the legitimate theater of course is the point of some ridicule. And one of the ways that we understand, too, of the way that Shakespeare was done (the “legitimate” Shakespeare) in the 1820s in New York, is that it was important to bring in the actors for lead roles from London itself. And show that America was indeed part of Anglo culture. Americans, American whites, we could say, were still in rehearsal. Their misappropriation of white Anglo culture was still on its way to becoming suitably appropriated as the better sort of Americans continued to police and perform and at times Shakespeare (I'm using it as a verb here) and to Shakespeare their way into white cultural authenticity. It's worth considering one more example. This one even earlier, from Thomas Rymer, who in 1678 coined the phrase poetic justice, the spirit of which he presumably put to use in his 1693, A Short View of Tragedy, where he lambastes not only Shakespeare's Othello but also Shakespeare himself for what he sees as Shakespeare's misappropriation of Cinthio’s tale, Shakespeare's mismeasurement. Shakespeare's first mistake, according to Rymer, was his bestowing a name on his moor, a gesture that in itself gives Othello, argued Rymer, “a dignity that is an affront to all chroniclers and Antiquaries. A Negro be their general and to marry him to the daughter of an heir of some great Lord, none of this comports with the condition of a general or indeed of a man.” I would ask you to think again about Sylvia Wynter, and I would insist there is no humanistic innocence here in Rymer’s man who stands firmly in contradistinction to what Ian Smith has cogently shown to be the racialized critical barbarity of the non-white other. In other words, man is racially white, not a generic species marker of the human race. And while it's beyond the scope of this particular essay, but something I hope to pursue in our discussion immediately following this essay, and something I'll argue in the introduction to the soon-to-be forthcoming White People in Shakespeare, whiteness was not an attribute or attainable by all what we may consider to be, white men or white people. In his misappropriation of Cinthio, Shakespeare fails, according to Rymer to properly police "his Negro.” Rymer argues that while Shakespeare's last speech may remind one, this is quoting him, "of the style of the last speeches and confessions of the persons executed at Tyburn." There, Rymer contends, "justice would be served." Here in Othello, I'm quoting Rymer again, "Shakespeare against all justice and reason, against all law, against all humanity and nature, in a barbarous way, executes and makes havoc of his subject as they come to hand.” Not surprisingly, many Shakespeare and early modern critical race scholars, myself included, would argue that there are a few fields within Shakespeare and early modern studies more important and consequential than critical race studies. At its humanist, sharpest, and its most insistent, it argues that indeed Black lives matter. Yes, in the United States, but also globally, and at the field’s broadest disciplinary reach, its fighting for the soul of the humanities itself, and yes for the progressive or troubled soul of Shakespeare. These are grand words to be sure, but they are also apropos, given the real beginnings of Shakespeare and critical race studies in the mid 20th century, and in the broader world of those fighting for social and racial justice, particularly as responses to the terrorism being systematically heaped upon Black persons and Black bodies. Not surprisingly, many of these same Shakespeare and early modern critical race scholars, myself included again, would argue that especially, but not only since the advent of New Historicism in the 1980s, no field has been more policed than Shakespeare and early modern studies. Before saying just a few words more, and as we begin to close out this fabulous conference, I would like to remind us of some of the important tenets of critical race studies and its distinction from what Margo Hendricks, at the last RaceB4Race, called racial study tourism. Tourism belabors and performs phenomenological and epistemological tricks that temporally and spatially locate race elsewhere and nowhere. And if it could even be imagined to be present (with the tourists), the word race (often flanked by scare quotes threatening to forklift it from the page) that the word race is too inchoate and too obfuscated a term in the period to have much purchase. It's a term that must be heavily policed, and often but not always, more sotto voce. Like Shakespeare himself needs to be protected from Shakespeare and early modern scholars of color, particularly Black ones. Shakespeare and early modern critical race studies works with three important affirmative arguments. One: race as an assemblage of racialized processes is very much founded on endlessly mutable acts of social and political violence, on acts of essentially social and political terrorism. Two: Western modernity is intimately bound to early modern race formations that come long before post-enlightenment and scientific iterations of race, which transformed these earlier iterations by fitting them into discourses that suited the phenomenological and epistemological needs of other eras, giving them purchase and authenticity in different locations and at different moments. And three: it is important to study all this, not only to deepen our understanding of race as a subject in and of itself, but in order for us to better grasp the role race played in plays in shaping the sense of discovery and enthusiasm in text -- locally and globally -- that gave birth to the Renaissance and made possible the kinetic energies that gave us the early modern stage. As Iago promises his eager audience—his hungry posse of an audience— “I have ‘t! It is engendered! Hell and night must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light.” Some of the grounding questions asked by Shakespeare critical race scholars have focused on the relationship between Shakespeare's humanity and the humanity of Black folks. Critical Shakespeare and early modern race work is by no means univocal: it involves a diversity of approaches and informed perspectives, it operates often implicitly but sometimes more explicitly with something akin to Alexander G. Weheliye’s exacting argument that quote, “the volatile rapport between race and the human is defined,” he says, “by two constellations. First there exists no portion of the modern human,” he says, “that is not subject to racialization which determines the hierarchical order of the homo sapien species into humans, not-quite humans, and nonhumans.” Second, continuing the quote, “as a result, humanity has held a very different status for the traditions of the racially oppressed. The human as a secular entity, a scientific and humanistic inquiry has functioned,” he says, “as a central topos of modernity since the Renaissance.” From this perspective, Shakespeare in early and modern race studies seeks to understand the how and why Shakespeare and his early modern English contemporaries thought to reinvent, not to invent, to delimit and theorize about the humanity of themselves especially in relationship to the humanity of others. Why did they appropriate, why did they misappropriate, other human beings? At the risk of stating the obvious, this area of inquiry is of course open to non-Black and non-people-of-color interlocutors. Many prominent studies have been written by white scholars. It would be misleading, however, to pass over the fact that self-identified scholars of color, particularly Black ones, have been crucial to the development of this field. And I was thinking here to something that Justin said earlier in that mesmerizing talk he gave earlier: how we see appropriating Black culture but leaving behind Black people. I would say to him that yes this is exactly also our experience in critical race studies in Shakespeare and the early modern period. It is somewhat surreal to sit, not in this room, but to sit in many other institutional conference spaces, and to hear Black thought and Black critique (that some of us have been doing for a decades now, and paying the price for as well), to watch that material in those studies get appropriated by white scholars who often find themselves discovering something new and at the same time they elide the very voices and the very people who have done that work. That is what came to my mind when Ayanna Thompson wrote me and asked me if I wanted to come and speak about appropriation. I thought yes: I want to come and talk about intellectual theft. It has been scholars of color who have most insistently and persistently argued for the importance of studying Shakespeare in a racialized context, especially given the prominence afforded to Shakespeare in Western literature in thought and also of course given the reading of Shakespeare from Ben Jonson to Harold Bloom to Jacob Burckhardt to Stephen Greenblatt among many, many others, the reading of Shakespeare as to quote Stephen Greenblatt, “the embodiment of human freedom.” A freedom which seems to go hand in hand with the earning of human status itself. Race is capacious and any viable critical intervention requires a capacious response. Part of this capaciousness includes thinking about race and racializing processes not just with respect to Shakespeare on the early modern stage or the early modern period more broadly but taking seriously a critique of our and your scholarly habits and practices. The way we police our bodies and scholarship (and I'm talking to the scholars of color) as a way of belonging, and the ways our bodies and our scholarship are policed, as an art of exclusion, sit at the evidentiary core of Shakespeare and early modern studies. Critical race studies builds from here. Working through the archives, and critical race theorizing, to take on to take on these issues: of embodiment, the human. Whiteness, Blackness, anti-Blackness, brownness, swarthiness, intersectionalities with gender, sex, able-bodiedness, religion, class, sexuality, queerness, nationality, etc, etc, etc. Taking all these on in order to better understand it as phenomenon and as epistemology, not only in the workings of Shakespeare's 16th and 17th centuries, but also in Shakespeare's afterlives, including in Shakespeare studies and for us here especially in Shakespeare studies. And that is, studies that are in the past. Studies that are in the present. And as I rage on, I am of course thinking about those studies in the future.

(Mis)Appropriations, Shakespeare, Race, and the Police | Watch the full video

Presented by Arthur L. Little, Jr. at Appropriations: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2020

Arthur L. Little, Jr. addresses the ways Shakespeare and early modern studies are policed in and out of the academy. He reflects on “policing” in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Adam P. Kennedy and Adrienne Kennedy’s Sleep Deprivation Chamber play, drawing parallels to the police brutality experienced by Rodney King on March 3, 1991, which was broadcast to the world. Little compares the policing of the Black body to the intellectual theft that often surrounds Shakespeare and early modern studies.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Essay
Ayanna Thompson

Teaching race in Titus Andronicus

Helping students make sense of race in Titus Andronicus with a strategic framework for in-class discussion.

Having convinced (and assigned) students to read Titus Andronicus by establishing that this is not the Bard they know from high school, I am very strategic in the discussions that follow. After all, I have assured them I will help them make sense of this crazypants play.

Defining the revenge tragedy

Before we discuss the play in earnest, it’s important to review the generic constructions of early modern drama: comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances. Many students come into my classroom already understanding the distinctions of the genres, but it is not often that they’ve dug deeper into how these narrative structures generate meaning in the play.

This is why students need to understand that a revenge tragedy like Titus is all about agency: who is able to act and who is denied. Revengers become agents of action instead of objects acted upon. For example, we’ll often discuss how Tamora’s sexuality, like her desire for revenge, transforms her from an object of the state into a subject of force. We’ll also discuss and examine how Lavinia’s rape and mutilation make literal the way she is objectified by everyone in this Roman society, including her father, as Titus sees her as his handmaiden for revenge.

Aaron the Moor and the construction of racial difference

Once we’ve discussed how the narrative structure forces the question of agency in the play, I like to ask the students why Aaron, as a character, is in the play.

First, we talk about the early modern conceptions of Moors, and why, if the play is inherently interested in the nature of action and agency, Shakespeare would have included a Moor. There was a great deal of confusion in early modern England about what a Moor was and what Blackness signified. I begin by offering students the OED definition:

A native or inhabitant of ancient Mauretania, a region of North Africa corresponding to parts of present-day Morocco and Algeria. Later usually: a member of a Muslim people of mixed Berber and Arab descent inhabiting North-Western Africa (now mainly present-day Mauritania), who in the 8th century conquered Spain. In the Middle Ages, and as late as the 17th century, the Moors were widely supposed to be mostly black or very dark-skinned, although the existence of “white Moors” was recognized. Thus, the term was often used, even into the 20th century, with the sense “Black person.”


Additionally, according to Anthony Barthelemy, “The only certainty a reader has when he sees the word is that the person referred to is not a [white] Christian.” Students need to remember, however, that the performance of Blackness in premodern England was often associated with representations of the devil. In medieval morality plays, for example, the devil was often performed in blackface.

In 1577, George Best wrote that racial differences stem from the biblical story of Noah. When Noah and his family were saved from the flood, they were told to “abstain from carnal copulation with their wives.” Noah’s son Cham (also known as Ham or Shem), however, disobeyed, and God punished him:

For the which wicked and detestable fact, as an example for contempt of Almighty God, and disobedience of parents, God would a son should be born whose name was Chus, who not only in self, but all his posterity after him should be so black and loathsome, that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the world. And of this black and cursed Chus came all black Moors which are in Africa, for after the water was vanished from off the face of the earth, and that the land was dry…, Africa remained for Cham and his black son Chus… being perhaps a cursed, dry, sandy, and unfruitful ground, fit for such a generation to inhabit it.


The early modern construction of racial difference was evolving, changing, and adapting from the influence of travel narratives like Best’s. In the end, whatever version or conflation of the story, this “curse” of Ham mythology solidified the belief that Black people were, by divine decree, inferior and associated with evil.

Aaron’s silence

It’s important to remind students that Aaron the Moor is (probably) onstage for the entire first act, but he does not say anything. He is brought in as a slave with the Gothic prisoners of war.

Aaron’s silence in the first act is significant because it can be interpreted in different ways. And this is an ideal place for conversation with students. I ask them to consider how Aaron’s Blackness is present on stage, especially in comparison to the Goths, and what function his visual presence serves. Why is Aaron here?

This is also a moment where I might discuss early modern staging practices and the likelihood of Aaron being played by a white actor in racial prosthetics (probably a wig, arm and leg coverings, and blackface). This explicit and constructed racial difference has an agenda—how is it affecting our understanding of this first act?

When Aaron does speak, it is in a long soliloquy, which is a marker of interiority. We read act 2 scene 1 aloud, noting that Aaron’s language is unlike any other characters in the play: he has a linguistic dexterity that is awe-inspiring. He is able to plot schemes to control the people around him: he controls Chiron, Demetrius (and by extension Lavinia), Titus, and Tamora (and by extension Saturninus and the Roman state).

Aaron’s awareness of stereotypes

I ask my students: is Aaron, the character, aware of the stereotypes and mythologies that are thrust onto him? We read act 4 scene 2 aloud while considering this question.

Aaron does not make references to his color or race until after characters like Lavinia, Bassianus, Titus, and the Nurse keep maligning him because of his Blackness. After these repeated comments, however, Aaron attempts to turn notions of color prejudice on their heads. Aaron condemns whiteness for being inconstant. He praises Blackness for its constancy and for its proof of paternity.

Shakespeare seems to be testing the audience’s conceptions of Blackness by having Aaron be the only parent who actually protects his offspring (both Titus and Tamora are willing to kill their own children to protect their positions in the state). By the end of the play, however, Aaron’s language changes significantly, and he becomes the cursing devil instead of the punning trickster. We read act 5 scenes 1 and 3 aloud to experience the shift in Aaron’s diction. It is clear that Aaron’s fate at the end of the play is to fulfill the devil.

A will of their own?

Titus Andronicus replicates the revenge tragedy genre, but it is also bizarrely self-conscious in its use of allusions to literary devices and models for cruelty, suffering, and revenge (Ovid, Horace, Homer, etc). It is almost as if the characters feel that there is no original way to experience their own lives. They seem to express a notion that everything has been scripted for them. Examples I point out include:

  • Chiron and Demetrius on rape (2.3.1ff/2.4.1ff)
  • Marcus on suffering (2.3.38ff/2.4.38ff)
  • Titus’s scrolls to the gods (4.2.18ff)
  • Lavinia’s use of Ovid (4.1.40ff)

Titus Andronicus, then, seems to be deeply engaged with an interrogation of the force and power of societal constructions of identity. Although Aaron, Tamora, and Lavinia all begin the play with identities that are unique and original, they all succumb to the crushing pressure of the society’s expectations. “As the saying is” becomes a way to plot these figures, and ultimately it becomes a way to deny them agency also.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Reading list
Scott Manning Stevens

Indigenous sovereignty and The Tempest

A reading list to consider further the question of Indigenous sovereignty in The Tempest.

Byrd, Jodi A. “Mind the Gap: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Antinomes of Empire, The Anomie of the Earth: Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. 

Engelking, Wojciech. “Caliban as Legal Subject: The Tempest and Renaissance Juridical Thought,” Law and Humanities, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/17521483.2023.2298001.

Greenblatt, Stephen J. “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge Press, 1990.

Seed, Patricia. “‘This island’s mine’: Caliban and Native Sovereignty,” The Tempest and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Stevens, Scott Manning. “Monstrous Indigeneity and the Discourse of Race in Shakespeare’s England,” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, ed. Patricia Akhimie. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Early Modern
Literature
Indigeneity
Syllabus
Geraldine Heng

Race in the European Middle Ages

This course explores the changing patterns, meanings, and uses of racializing discourses in medieval Europe from the 10th through 15th centuries.

An undergraduate course created by Geraldine Heng.

Course description

In medieval literature, difference from the norm is often marked by skin color: a Christian knight or lady in Western Europe is conventionally “fair,” while a Muslim or “Saracen” enemy is often described as Black, and someone of mixed parentage (European-and-African, or Christian-and-Muslim) may be depicted as piebald: Black-and-white. In romances, when a “pagan” or “heathen” person converts to Christianity, his skin may change color at baptism, turning dramatically white.

Jewish communities living in medieval Europe were required by canon law, from the Fourth Lateran Council on, to publicly identify themselves by wearing a special badge that marked them off as separate and different from Christians. In England, Jews were required by law to wear the “badge of shame” from 1218 on, until their expulsion from the country. Jewish people were said to have a special stench, a particular facial physiology, and even be marked by horns and a tail, and Jewish men were said to bleed congenitally, like menstruating women. In England Jews were tagged, herded, and imprisoned disproportionately, as well as judicially executed on trumped-up charges of murdering Christian children through torture, and ritual crucifixions, to re-enact the killing of Christ.  

Literature and history thus suggest that the European Middle Ages—like other periods before and after—were intensely interested in issues that we now today identify as race-related. It is also clear that the concept of race in the medieval period is complicated by religion, as well as various economic, political, social, military, and other factors that determine questions of race in Europe from the early modern period right to our time.

This course explores the changing patterns, meanings, and uses of racializing discourses in medieval Europe from the 10th through 15th centuries, by looking at some of European medieval culture's most prominent texts, legends, and artifacts. We will look at literary romances and travel literature, chronicles and sagas, saints' legends, statuary, maps, and whatever else may be useful to us. For purposes of comparison, we will also critically consider selected texts originating before the medieval centuries, as well as texts from non-European, non-Christian cultures, as well as theoretical materials.

Course readings

  • “Airs, Waters, Places,” Hippocrates
  • The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America (Penguin classics in translation: you will need to buy this book)
  • Parzival, Wolfram von Eschenbach
  • The Romance of Moriaen
  • The Book of the Glory of the Black Race, Al-Jahiz
  • History of the Mongols, John of Plano Carpini
  • Prioress's Tale and Man of Law's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer
  • Hugh of Lincoln (the Anglo-Norman Ballad)
  • The King of Tars
  • Richard Coer de Lyone
Medieval
Literature
Religion
Poetry
Activity
Kim F. Hall

One word essay

This assignment in Kim F. Hall's Shakespeare courses asks students to analyze a single word in early modern texts using a variety of primary sources.

Write a paper of approximately three pages (no more than five) on a single word that appears in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Discovery of Guiana and analyze its multiple meanings/functions. (Some suggestions: labour, command, authority, profit, art, shape, wonder, marvel, subject). You should bring to bear upon your analysis of the word relevant other uses of the same word either in the same or in other plays (use concordances).  

You must use the Oxford English Dictionary and a concordance to Shakespeare (e.g. Marvin Spevack, The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare). I would also like you to look at facsimiles of the early editions (e.g. Charlton Hinman, The First Folio of Shakespeare; Michael J. B. Allen and Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto).

Some available resources include

If you choose to use sources beyond this list, you must be careful: some texts are typed in by enthusiasts and not vetted by scholars.

Attach at the end of your paper the relevant photocopies/print outs/PDFs of the passages on your word from the dictionary, the concordance, and the early editions.

This is a primary source/close reading assignment. Do not consult any secondary sources (i.e. criticism). There are concordances to the Bible, many poets, Montaigne, and many novels and plays. To track how other contemporary texts make use of the same word, look at the concordances to, for instance, Marlowe, Donne, Milton or the Bible. (You may also find scholarly editions like the Arden Shakespeare and the New Variorum Shakespeare useful. There are also facsimiles of some early English dictionaries in Butler [English linguistics, 1500-1800 series]).  

Purpose

The main purpose of the assignment is to introduce you to various primary scholarly resources, and to get you to bring them to bear on something as small as a single word. It should also build up your confidence in your ability to analyze language in detail. If the word appears in more than one place in the plays, you may want to pick one or two passages where the appearance seems particularly significant.

When comparing passages in modern vs. folio editions, there may not be such significant changes in the passage you're looking at, but you should be aware of even the smallest of changes—changes in speech prefixes, in punctuation etc. (Not all such changes will be particularly significant, but you should nonetheless be aware of them). Using The Oxford English Dictionary, the early texts on-line, and the concordances, you should find that you have too much material for such a short paper. This means you will have to choose what is most interesting/significant in illuminating the specific passages you are analyzing.

Please keep in mind that this, like all papers, should have an argument. Locating the word’s meanings is only the first step. Please do not simply enumerate the meanings of the word.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Activity
Seeta Chaganti

Erasure poetry exercise: Chaucer’s The House of Fame

A student exercise using erasure poetry to interrogate Chaucer's text. By redacting Chaucer's poem, students can reimagine their relationship to premodern literature.

For this exercise, I suggest focusing on lines 239-381 of The House of Fame, Chaucer’s retelling of Virgil’s Dido and Aeneas account. It can be done with other sections of the text as well. (Large Chaucer classes that break into sections especially benefit from graduate TA’s who are creative writers in completing this exercise, and I encourage drawing upon their expertise in discussing poetic composition with students.)

After the class reads and considers the Virgilian context, the Chaucerian retelling, the medieval approach to source adaptation, and Jordan Abel’s modern creative technique of source adaption, students create their own erasure poem using The House of Fame as their source text.  

Some questions for them to consider as they approach this task

Abel’s work ranges from preserving full sentences and phrases to preserving single isolated words and even, in some cases, only punctuation marks. What do you think the purpose and impact of these different levels of erasure might be?
What role do you think the empty space plays in Abel’s poems? How would you relate the use of empty space here to other discussions of poetic form in the class?
With these thoughts in mind, what do you want to do in your own poem? How might your erasures reflect your thoughts about what Chaucer is doing to Virgil’s source, about the representation of Dido through these different lenses, about Dido as powerful or powerless, about Dido as racialized, or about the intersection of these different concepts? Do you think erasure creates a means to hear Dido’s own voice? Why or why not, and how might your poem reflect your opinion?


It can be useful to set certain limits to give students something interesting to think about as they are working. I’ve noticed that students who are still a little shaky in their Middle English will do things like leave the word “grave” in their erasure poem but treat it as a noun rather than the verb that it is. While doing so looks cool, I’ve realized that I can’t quite tell if they have done that intentionally or in error. I specify that nouns should stay nouns and verbs should stay verbs in their erasure poem, and let them try out composing with that constraint. They might also append a note explaining that they have changed a part of speech for a specific reason.

Medieval
Literature
Poetry
Video
Ian Smith

The cliché of race

Probing the cliché of race is a necessary moral objective and pedagogic requirement that begins by making race visible in Shakespeare’s texts to disrupt the prevalence of a destructive, convenient untruth.

To introduce students to thinking about race, let’s start with a simple classroom proposition: clichés should be avoided. Criticized as overused, unoriginal statements, clichés are, nevertheless, appealing because they can summarize an idea neatly. A cliché’s summary power might lead us to conclude that there is nothing else to say; that some matter has been efficiently reduced to its fundamentals and stated with sufficient brevity. As such, clichés prevent thought, or I should say, they arrest additional thinking since potentially complex reflection appears compressed into a single, accessible thought that acquires public acceptance through repeated use. Ironically, one might suppose that any discussion of the cliché itself is considered a closed question, yielding no new or interesting insight. So, clichés persist, but we might still learn something more from a closer reflection. Racial ideology, I argue, is implicated in one of the most familiar and recognizable clichés: “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” The Renaissance recognized this idea in the Silenus, a statuette that appears odd and unattractive on the outside, but when opened is quite beautiful inside. The figure memorably turns up in Plato’s Symposium to describe the unsociable but brilliant Socrates. The lesson to be drawn insisted that internal qualities, like human intelligence and wisdom, were to take precedence over mere surface things. The statement, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” encourages us to refrain from engaging in superficial thinking, drawing hasty conclusions, and formulating judgments based on surface appearance. In the context of teaching writing and rhetoric, we might dismiss this cliché as trite, but its life application tells a very different story. Consider this fact: Racial ideology has aggressively pursued an entirely opposite course, purporting that judging the proverbial book by its cover is just fine. This cliché of race turns its back on the more conventional formula by placing an inordinate value on the human epidermal cover—our skin. And this emphasis on skin and its emergence to prominence represents an important shift in the history of racial ideology that, in the premodern era, had relied on religion, geography, and language. Complaints about the injustice and unoriginality of this topsy-turvy, upside-down racial cliché have been set aside since its maintenance and durability are, in fact, the cultural goal. This cliché of race is alive and well in premodern literature. In George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, first performed in 1589, Muly Hamet is described as “Black in his look and bloody in his deeds” (1.Prol.7, 16), and in William Rowley’s All’s Lost by Lust (1619), Mulymumen is condemned as a “base African,” whose “inside’s blacker than [his] sooty skin” (5.5.14-15). Blackness is presented as instantly recognizable and fully knowable. One need not undertake any additional queries or pose further questions because this central cliché of race compels with its authoritative succinctness. Its legacy is found in sentiments circulated in the eighteenth-century writings of the colonial apologist Immanuel Kant who derided a man as “quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” But like Shakespeare’s Aaron, we are left asking, “is black so base a hue” (Titus Andronicus 4.2.73)? In addition to questioning whether blackness deserves to be so consistently defamed as the full, complete story of a person, Aaron’s forceful query asks, in effect, “is black so base a hue” for you? His immediate audience is the Nurse, but the question points tellingly to the often unnamed yet omnipresent “fair-faced breeders of our clime” (4.2.69-70), or more plainly, the members of a white-dominant culture from whose perspective blackness is constantly being defined. Moreover, in much of our textual analysis of Shakespeare, whiteness remains invisible, hiding in plain sight. From the Sonnets to The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Othello and beyond, Shakespeare is, however, quite interested in reflecting on whiteness. Take the example of Viola, the female lead in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Shipwrecked on an island, thinking she has lost her brother to drowning, Viola turns to the ship’s Captain who appears to be the only other survivor of the disaster at sea. Alone, in this strange country, she decides to disguise herself as a young man to seek employment. Thanking the Captain, whose aid she is about to enlist, she explains why he is an ideal choice to help in her gendered transformation that highlights what she calls her outward “form.” Not surprisingly, she sees a parallel in the Captain, not in his gender but in his external form: his whiteness. “Thou hast a mind,” Viola says, “that suits/ With this thy fair and outward character” (1.2.53-54). Once again, skin is approved as the apt sign of interiority. She insists on the physicality of white skin, comparing the Captain’s “fair behavior,” the visible, external expression of his inward state, to a “beauteous wall” (1.2.51-52). For Viola, this corporal wall functions as a sign of instant truth. Her surprisingly naïve acceptance of whiteness’ inherent value sets up a counter narrative to the way blackness is viewed even as she commits to the erroneous idea that in matters of race skin alone is sufficient for evaluating human worth. Probing the cliché of race, therefore, is a necessary moral objective and pedagogic requirement that begins by making race visible in Shakespeare’s texts to disrupt the prevalence of a destructive, convenient untruth.

How is the cliché of race developed in the early modern literary canon? The emphasis on skin and its emergence to prominence represents an important shift in the history of racial ideology that, in the premodern era, had relied on religion, geography, and language. Complaints about the injustice and unoriginality of this topsy-turvy, upside-down racial cliché have been set aside since its maintenance and durability are, in fact, the cultural goal. By asking students to interrogate the role of the cliché, they are given the opportunity to understand how race is understood as a form of cliché itself.

Early Modern
Literature
Intro to premodern critical race studies
Shakespeare
RaceB4Race Highlight
Hassana Moosa

Muslims and racial profiling in early modern England

Hassana Moosa here draws upon the critical tools of premodern critical race studies and Shakespeare studies to investigate genealogies of early modern race-making as they pertain to Muslims.

My paper today places pre-modern critical race studies and Shakespeare studies into contemporary concerns and critical conversations with Islamophobia, which is effectively the study of the racialization of Islam and anti-Muslim racism. My aim is to use the critical forces and methodologies of the two disciplines in order to consider the genealogies of early modern English race-making in our recent history. There are three parts to my discussion. I'll begin with an overview of some of the intellectual frameworks that guide my reading of Islam in the early modern world. I then examine the development of a key apparatus of Islamophobia in early modern England, specifically late 16th century-early 17th century England: that is the racialization of Islam in early modern English drama. Specifically, I'm going to be looking at the Merchant of Venice. And in the final part of this paper, I'll turn to the contemporary moment to consider how the early modern racialization of Islam is harnessed in contemporary acts of racial profiling, which operate in arenas of security, surveillance, and policing and which have very tangible antagonistic effects for Muslims: very lived, tangible effects for Muslims. I want to make a brief note about the language I use in the title of this paper, and particularly my use of the word stranger. Stranger, as we know in early modern England, is a category that is used to describe foreignness, intermingled with obscurity and often difference. And so I use this term to encapsulate the foreignness of the Muslim subjects that I am thinking about in this paper, and particularly of the Prince of Morocco, who is the primary subject of my analysis, and who Portia's attendant refers to in the play as a stranger in an ostensibly innocuous manner. I use it to evoke a history of travel associated with Muslim strangers in early modern England, especially since the policing around movement and travel, which we see often in contemporary manifestations of Islamophobia. Additionally, however, in using this language, I really want to repurpose the way we think about the stranger, following in the suit of Ruben Espinosa, who does this in his essay, “Stranger Shakespeare,” where he uses it to productively speak to the cultural and intellectual insights of Latino/Latina engagements with Shakespeare. I'm experimenting with this vocabulary here to draw on an Islamically rooted awareness, self-awareness of Muslim difference, one that enables a transformation of this terminology into a source of hope in the context of anxious realities and experiences of anti-racism. Abu Hurairah, who is one of the primary recorders and transmitters of the Hadith, and these are the orally transmitted sayings of the prophet Muhammad, narrates in an authentic hadith that the messenger of God, peace be upon him, said, “Islam began as something strange and will go back to being something strange, so glad tidings to the strangers.” The Hadith registers the tensions, oppressions, and confusions, which were attached to the early formation of Islam in pre-modern Arabia, but also looks forward in its recognition of a future where such discrimination against Muslims may rear its head again. This is a future which doesn't take very long to materialize after the early years of Islam. The statement encourages the oppressed to hold their convictions and asks Muslims to celebrate the so-called differences that will be used against them. And so I use this term to recall the Prophet's identification of Muslims, to reconfigure the English categorization of strangers, and to write Islam and its principles back into the Muslim figure that Islamophobia seeks to erase, as I will explore in this paper. One of the great values of the theme of this conference is that it has given speakers the opportunity and the space to acknowledge the intellectual traditions and the genealogies, the critical lineage that shapes our own scholarship. So, like the other speakers who have appeared before me, I wanted to emphasize that the ideas I consider with you today benefit from and build on the studies of the intellectual founders and the greats, the giants of pre-modern critical race studies, including Geraldine Heng, Kim F. Hall, Peter Erickson, Margo Hendricks, Ania Loomba, Ayanna Thompson, and those before them and working alongside them. I'm also seeking to engage with, and I seek to contribute really with the scholarship of critics like Ambereen Dadabhoy and Jane Hwang Degenhardt, who have done significant work to expand our critical understanding on the relationship between race and religion in the formation of 16th and 17th century English views of Islam. Dadabhoy's work in particular examines how Shakespeare's plays are made complicit in perpetuating the injustice of Islamophobia, both in the classroom and in the sphere of global Shakespeare performances and adaptations. My discussion hopes to add to these existing insights in the relationship between race and Islam with an attention to the strategies of racializing Muslims that operates not just by demonizing Muslims, but specifically by erasing Islam out Muslim identity. This racialization, I will argue, creates a breeding ground for further acts of discrimination like racial profiling. There is a racial project at work in England's historical denial of Muslim faith as part of the same theoretical theological lineage as Christianity, and even as Judaism. Benedict Robinson gestures toward this in his study on Islam in early modern English romance traditions, where he notes that quote “Europe has always refused to treat Islam as a religion at all, preferring to inscribe it into theories of racial, political, and cultural differences” in order to, “fashion a coherent Europeanness.” The critic supports his argument by referencing some of the vocabularies which have been used to historically refer to Muslims by another name: Turk, Saracen, Arab. And we could add to his list terms like Moor and even Malay, which is a category that Dutch colonizers use in mid-17 century South Africa, and English colonizers later inherit this to refer to the Indonesian enslaved populations at the Cape of Good Hope. The systematic and deliberate nature of such erasure in the period is made visible by our awareness of the historical reality of the fact that Islam was not a mystery to the English. The early modern period has been widely documented as a time of increased geographic mobility, as well as social, economic, political and cultural exchanges between societies from around the world. And in this global context, Muslim rulers and peoples, including those from the powerful Ottoman, Mughal, Safavid, and Saudi dynasties, represented political allies, trading partners, intellectual sources, and military enemies to the English, who were at this point a small, relatively un-noteworthy nation. Nabil Matar’s foundational work on this history of Anglo and Muslim encounter reveals the extent of interaction between these regions, but also the intimate ways in which the English would have engaged with Muslim identity, not least through the frequency with which Englishmen were converting to Islam. At the same time, Imtiaz Habib's prolific study on the notable population of black people living in Shakespeare's England opens up the possibility that black persons of Muslim heritage and perhaps faith were living amongst the English. Islamophobia studies is a disciplinary field which I believe should have a place in the branch of the family tree of pre-modern critical race studies as it offers a useful vocabulary and lens through which to make sense of this racialization of Islam in the period, and particularly in Eurasia. The field emerged out of the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, his seminal study, and it has since been expanded beyond the parameters of the colonial period that Said explores. Scholars working across the global north and the global south have shown that our recent past has been fraught with global events of anti-Muslim discrimination, where this faith-based group is demonized on the grounds of aspects of identity such as physical appearance, ethnicity, clothing, language, and nationality. And as Steve Garner and Saher Selod argue, “racialization is a concept that helps to capture and understand how this categorizing of Muslims works in different ways, at different times, and in different places.” I'm interested in using the paradigms from Islamophobia studies, which is a very contemporary-orientated discipline, to facilitate my reading of Islam in early modern drama, and to trace this genealogy from past to the present. The Merchant of Venice is perhaps the most fitting text for this examining of these ideas, given its racialization of Jewishness. The race-based treatment of Jewish identity in the play, which is reflective of early modern England, was descended from a European discourse of race-making, one, which like Shakespeare's play, puts Muslims and Jews against Christians. I refer of course to Spain's 15th century legislation around limpieza de sangre, or the cleanliness of blood, which used a fiction of blood purity to mark Jews and Muslims or those of such heritage as inferior to Christians. The Merchant of Venice expands on the pervasive racial ideology at the root of this 15th century Spanish practice and uses it to explore new technologies of difference-making in both religious groups. There is often some tentativeness among scholars to categorize the Prince of Morocco in Shakespeare's play as a Muslim, which is not surprising since the play makes virtually no explicit references to the prince's religious identity. The only illusion that appears to any religious deity in the context of his scene is in his invocation of “some god.” And according to the OED, the word some in the 16th century did not only refer to an undetermined one, but could also be an adjective used to indicate something specific. So “some god” could imply a specific God of the monotheistic religion as much as it could have conveyed a kind of paganism. But the absence of the particular religious categorizations of the Prince is curious, considering how central religious difference is to the play as a whole. And yet it doesn't take that much effort, I would argue, to discern that the prince is not a Christian. The play invites the audience to cognitively recognize that the Prince’s religious differences to the Christians in Belmont is very much a truth, and it manifests through his own language and the anxiety that his language reveals. In much the same way that the Prince attempts to mitigate the differences of his dark skin color and his African blood, by using what Ian Smith refers to as linguistic rationalizations in order to offer a solution to the disability of his difference, the Prince similarly mobilizes rhetoric to convince Portia and her companions of his religious sameness. As Kim F. Hall observes, the Prince frames his pursuit of Portia as a kind of religious pilgrimage. He uses phrases like, blessed, cursed, heavenly virgin, mortal, breathing saint, damnation, sinful, and angel. These allow him to make an outward show of the knowledge of his Christian discourse, and to signal his investment in the religious world of Belmont, as well as his potential to be effectively integrated into this world. The Prince's non-Christian identity unveils the character's insecurity about his spiritual state. Inevitably, the Prince betrays his lack of theological understanding when he blasphemously characterizes Portia as an idol to be worshiped, demonstrating his ignorance of pivotal tenets of the monotheistic Christian faith. And, in imagining Portia as an angel in a coin, he indicates that his knowledge has been derived from Belmont: his knowledge of religious identities and discourses has been derived through commerce. If the Prince’s failed pursuit of Portia confirms for the audience that the Prince is necessarily a religious other, then the playwright establishes the religious differences of the Moroccan prince by using geographic and cultural signifiers of identity that enable the audience to mark the Muslim identity of the Prince. That is where “to mark” at once denotes the process of rendering a stain or a visual code or a mark on the body that signifies religion, but simultaneously registers the racializing act of visual ordering, as it has been categorized by Patricia Akhimie. As Akhimie asserts, marking represents a form of social judgment or scrutiny, one which equips certain privileged members of society with a lens through which to organize differences and establish outsiders and threats. The Prince's Muslim signifiers are referenced in one short set of lines, where the character attempts to prove his valor and strength to Portia by swearing “By this scimitar/ That slew the Sophy and a Persian prince / That won three fields of Sultan Solyman,/ I would outstare the sternest eyes that look.” His assertion that he would outstare his competitors, who he earlier identifies as white northerners like the English, teases the English audience with a challenge that calls them to respond, to look back intently. This is something that really facilitates a marking and a measuring of the Prince in his cultural signifiers, which are mentioned just a moment before. The character's description of his triumph over the Persian prince, the Egyptian Sophy, and the Ottoman Sultan Solomon certainly positions him in the geopolitical terrain of the early modern Islamic world. These allusions are complemented by the Prince's later references to Arabia. The extensive interactions taking place between England and the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid Empire, and Persia meant that many of the early modern English were familiar with the religious identities of these geopolitical powers. Additionally, theatergoers would have recognized the Islamic faith of these rulers from other plays, including perhaps most famously Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, which is renowned for kick-starting the 16th century English trend of staging Muslims in plays. The play includes an Ottoman emperor, an Egyptian sultan, the king of Morocco, and the king of Arabia, who highlight their Islamic identities throughout the dialogue with references to God, the Quran, and Muhammad. There are no similar religious references in the Merchant of Venice. Instead, the audience is called to understand the Moroccan Prince's Islam via geopolitical association. By suggesting that the Prince's proximity to Muslim powers in the Mediterranean is what constitutes and represents his Muslim identity, the play uses a signifier that collapses religion into geography, thereby erasing the theological essence of Islam and correspondingly racializing the space-based group. The effect of this racialization extends beyond the Prince of Morocco or the confines of Shakespeare's play. The grouping together of these Muslim powers will impact the way audiences construe all peoples of these geographies. As Garner and Selod explain, “racialization draws a line around all the members of the group, instigates groupness, and ascribes characteristics based on factors such as work, ideologies, beliefs, and social-cultural organization. The basis of such racialization is not always rooted in groups or looking vaguely the same, but it is the unity of the gaze itself that groups them together.” So as these critics contend in their studies of contemporary Islam, those who produce, absorb, and reproduce representations of Muslims can “transform clearly culturally and phenotypically dissimilar individuals into a homogenous block.” The unified gaze here is that of the predominantly white English audience, and the Belmont audience on stage, who implicitly joined the Muslim powers together by a relationship to Islam, which is effectively empty of meaning. At the same time, the Moroccan Prince’s Muslim identity is marked by his scimitar, which he shows Portia in an attempt to prove his strength. In early modern England scimitars and similar weapons were associated with Turks and other Muslim figures, and thus became used to symbolize Muslim identity on stage. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the performance of a playlet which is based in a story of Ottoman cruelty and desire, staged in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. The director in this play-within-the-play insists that a Portuguese prince who's performing a Turkish character use a Turkish cape, a black mustache, and a falchion, which is another sword with a curved blade. The falchion here can turn an actor not only into a Turk, but given the connotations of Turk in the period, turns the actor specifically into Muslim, making the sword a visual representation of Islamic identity. Although swords are removable props that do not represent permanent or essential markers of physical difference, as Garner and Selod observe, physical bodies are still the ultimate sites of racism, even if the path towards those bodies lies through cultural terrain. The Prince of Morocco’s sword works the same effect as it operates as an item of clothing that connects the Prince to early modern ideas of a militant Muslim identity. Moreover, in the context of performance of race on the early modern stage, where clothing and costume are used to create phenotypical racialized differences like skin color, as Ian Smith has shown in his work on performance, the lines between costume and prop and body are blurred or they are troubled, and the stage therefore encourages a reading of such connections. As such, the accessorizing sword implicitly attached to the Prince of Morocco's person has a racializing function as it maps religious difference onto the Muslim's body. Crucially, the racializing signifiers Shakespeare employs to mark Muslim identity are both aligned to ideas of violent aggression. The Prince’s proximity to the Muslim world is described through his attacks on the Egyptians, Ottomans, and Persians, and his scimitar itself is a weapon or an instrument of warfare. Therefore, in representing Islam through these cultural strokes, the playwright erases or indeed simplifies Islam into symbols that feed into early modern discourses of terror embodied in a Muslim whose religion is defined by an inherent culture of violence and who must as a result be feared. The dual active process of marking that takes place in The Merchant of Venice is intrinsic to forming practices of racially profiling Muslims, which seems to descend almost directly from these trends of pre-modern racialization. The playwright's use of cultural symbols to characterize the strange traveling Prince as a Muslim resonates strikingly with the racial profiling of Muslims that has become prevalent in international travel because of counterterror campaigns designed in the global north. Post 9/11, international travel became and remains one area where the racial aspects of these practices are tangible, as crew members and airport security around the world read Muslim bodies. As Zareena Grewal has shown, “signs that make a person appear threatening to travel staff include ‘Muslim names,’ ‘Sikh turbans and ceremonial knives,’ ‘a t-shirt with Arabic writing across the chest’ and ‘olive-skinned bodies.’” These signs are uncannily similar to those Muslim-like characteristics that The Merchant of Venice gives to its traveling prince to invite us to understand this character as a threatening Muslim foreigner, and an undesirable African stranger, trying to enter into the European world of the play. Like the modern Black Muslim traveler, the Prince's religious difference and the threat embodied in this difference is marked by his name Morocco, clothing and accessories, his scimitar, national/geographic associations (“Arabia” and the Mediterranean) and skin color, his tawny, shadowed livery. More recently still, performances like those staged in the early modern age seem to have found their way into policing and security cultures in England, even contemporarily. One example of this, which I found really striking was a sketch that was incorporated into, but soon removed, from the curriculum for the UK’s Metropolitan Police’s Crime Academy for the training of new detectives in the UK. This just took place a few months ago, actually, I think it was only removed from the curriculum in July of 2022. The sketch portrayed the violence, greed, and lust of a powerful Muslim Turkish gangster who, though based in the UK, operates in a world of foreigners and persons of color and those from marginalized and minority ethnic groups. Notably there are no white persons in this sketch or this performance. Included in the Turkish gangster's crimes are his killing of an East Asian moneylender which he does using a curved knife, and his acts of physical and sexual assault against his Indian girlfriend, who works with her Indian family. The character uses Islamic law or the Sharia to validate his acts of cruelty. According to an article published in The Sunday Times, the Met’s Crime Academy and retired officers, including a former diversity leader, helped draft and approve the case study which also includes incest, throat-slitting, self-mutilation and attacks on a disabled child. The article also suggests that similar kinds of content had been incorporated into earlier curriculums in the past, and of course those passed without question. In its basic form, this dramatic work has all the makings of an early modern English drama on Muslim and, here specifically, on Ottoman and Turkish identity. This gruesome narrative, which centers on an unruly powerful Muslim man, is basically the same tale told in various versions by various dramatists in England from the late 16th to the mid 17th century. Plays like Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Robert Greene's The Tragical Reign of Seamus, John Mason's The Turk, and numerous others reflect these narratives. Each of them tells a tale of a powerful Muslim-presenting figure, typically an Ottoman Sultan, who commits acts of tyranny and desire that establish this figure as terrifyingly dangerous. These are men who kidnap and rape women, either individually or in groups. They kill, they commit patricide, fratricide, filicide, and they oppress their populations because of a blind desire for power. Their acts are also usually accompanied by either the figure’s celebration of Islam's enabling of evil acts, a sacrilegious abandonment of Islam in favor of a self-aggrandizing idolatry, or the absence of any sense of Muslim faith altogether. The sketch emphasizes a misinterpretation of Islam that resonates more with some of the other early modern English texts that I referenced above, rather than the same kind of absence we see in The Merchant of Venice. What was interesting to me about this sketch was some of its very clear resonances between those cultural signifiers I suggested earlier, from the Turkish man's location in a broadly marginalized Muslim community, right down to the detail of the curved knife. Although the sketch was thankfully removed from teaching due to the resistance of lecturers, this didactic piece of performance, which as I said was put together only a few months ago, is a testament to the connections between early modern English constructions of Islamophobia and those that exist in our every day. In closing, I want to tease out the term stranger, which I want to use one more time here to pose a very general question to the audience, one which can be addressed after this, or just even just to ruminate on. This is something that I've been thinking about, which is: what is at stake for other identity groups in the racialization of Islam and the injustice that Islamophobia breeds, or is bred through Islamophobia, both in the pre-modern world and in the genealogies of its racial practices. I present as a prompt here a statement that the UK-based poet and activist Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan (or you might know her as the Brown Hijabi) makes in her recent book, Tangled in Terror, in which she asserts that “Islamophobia is not a problem for Muslims alone and cannot be tackled on its own. It's not a single-issue struggle but a problem for the world, related to all racisms, all forms of oppression, border violence, policing, war, environmental catastrophe, gender-based violence, and injustice. The standard narrative about Islamophobia hides that it is less about Muslims than it is about everything else.” My question really comes out of my concern with, and also my complete solidarity with the recent protests in Iran following the brutal killing of Mahsa Amini for wearing the hijab inappropriately. These events have showed up some odd and problematic commentaries on Islamophobia, but also some important truths about gender-based violence and the use of the hijab as a policing mechanism for organizing Muslim women's bodies. This is just something that I wanted to leave you to take away with. Thank you.

Marking Strangers: Muslims and Racial Profiling in Early Modern England | Watch the full talk

Presented by Hassana Moosa at Geneologies: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2022

Hassana Moosa here draws upon the critical tools of premodern critical race studies and Shakespeare studies to investigate genealogies of early modern race-making as they pertain to Muslims. Through an in-depth study of the Prince of Morocco’s character in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (c. 1598), Moosa demonstrates how the racialization of Muslims is keyed to a set of geographic, political, and sartorial markers which ultimately evacuate any other signifiers from the figure of the Muslim. In this way, the early modern English stage comes into view as a site where a simplified notion of Muslims—as embodied symbols of a culture of foreign violence—was transmitted to audiences. Moosa’s analysis further connects the early modern English context to today’s securitized Western settings, in which practices of border control and policing cannot be disentangled from the deeper history of staging anti-Muslim racism.

Early Modern
Literature
Religion
Shakespeare
RaceB4Race Highlight
Ambereen Dadabhoy

Shakespeare and the War on Terror

Ambereen Dadabhoy investigates the long history of the logics of the War on Terror and how these structure narratives about Muslims across the centuries.

I changed my plan for this presentation after the white supremacist attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The images coming out of the capital that day exposed how the premodern past was being mobilized in the service of white grievance, white militarism, and white toxic masculinity through the flagrant symbols meant to invoke a racially pure time, the “European Middle Ages,” but also through analogies to Shakespeare. As more people began to call this white nationalist insurrection an act of “domestic terrorism,” I was reminded of the specter that the use of the latter part of this term invokes, that of the threat of Islam and “radical Islamic terrorism.” Terror discourse in the United States and globally has focused on the bogeyman of the dangerous and fanatical Muslim, and to use the frame of terrorism within this context might seem like an act of recovery and restitution, a way to acknowledge the blatant hypocrisy of law enforcement, government policy, and the media that consistently frames white criminal acts as personal and individual grievances rather than as being ideologically motivated. Rather than redressing the wrong, however, terror discourse deployed in this context is problematic because of the historical mapping of such violence onto Islam and Muslims, which means that the allusion to Islam is ever-present, ready to confirm the severity of violence through analogy and the need for continued scrutiny and policing of these communities. In light of the renewed conversation about terror, I turn to early modern drama and to Shakespeare to propose that teaching narratives of English and European encounter with Islam can often reaffirm rather than destabilize the firmly held and established stereotypes our students might hold. I investigate the intersections of terror, Islamophobia, and race in Othello and Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, and uncover how seemingly recuperative pedagogies and texts can harness white supremacist and Orientalist rhetorical frames. Shakespeare’s Othello appears to be ideal text through which to explore the conflict between Islam and Christendom as articulated through the imperial competition between the Ottomans and Venetians. On its surface, the play reiterates the binary oppositions that attend to the logics of the War on Terror writ large, which are: expanding the security state, the imminent threat of “radical Islam,” Islam’s incompatibility with the west, and inherent danger and violence of Muslims. The binaries further serve as the moral and political high ground from which Europe, Christendom, and/or the United States can launch its offensive or defensive attack on the foreign, encroaching other. Indeed, the first act of the play establishes the Ottoman threat as possible cultural annihilation. Moreover, Othello’s “theft,” of Desdemona is positioned as an extension of “the Turks’” potential siege of Cyprus, linking race to religion and both forms of difference to the Ottomans in order to establish their alterity. This unnuanced and flat approach, facilitates the “clash of civilizations” reading which transforms the Ottomans into outsiders and invaders rather than the dominant imperial power in the eastern Mediterranean. Simply exploring the play through its binaries also lends credence to the notion that that there were unified entities called Christendom and the Islamic world, historical fictions that elide the deep internecine schisms and wars that characterize the early modern formations of both religions. Indeed, this Christian unity rings particularly hollow in the English context, because they are negotiating their own religious identity. Finally, the polarities Shakespeare develops further disguise the cultural and political intimacies between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, an alliance so objectionable in European eyes, that Venice was routinely called “the Turk’s courtesan.” Othello, then, can be put to use in extending its own early modern brand of War on Terror logics, and might present one of the few moments in an early modern English / Shakespeare classroom where the past and the present neatly align in their political and cultural investments. We might further consider how performances or adaptations of Othello that locate the play in the present day—knowingly or unknowingly—reiterate war on terror logics in performance. As I turn now to one such production, to Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Disgraced, I investigate the ideological investments that this narrative is serving in the context of post-9/11 Muslim identity. What are the critical nodes that connect identity formation across the centuries from the premodern to the modern? And what work is the term “Moor,” doing in facilitating these cross-temporal linkages. I further inquire into Akhtar’s tacit acceptance of the white and Orientalist frames that structure his play. Set in New York City in 2011, Disgraced considers the personal and political ramifications of the demonization of Islam and Muslims ten years into the United States’ War on Terror. The protagonist, Amir Kapoor is a successful attorney on the cusp of realizing the American Dream and reaching the pinnacle of his career, making partner in his law firm. Confirming his success is his white American wife, Emily, his expensive suits complete with bespoke $600 shirts, and the premium alcohol he likes to regularly imbibe. Marring his perfect American life, is the reminder of his ethnic and religious identity, appearing first in the figure of his nephew, Hussein, and then in the Imam who his nephew and wife persuade him to assist. Amir’s American nightmare results from the support he offers to the Imam, which instigates the unraveling of the lies he’s told at his firm—that he’s of Indian descent and a Hindu, rather than a Pakistani-American Muslim. Things culminate for Amir at a dinner party where we learn that his wife’s Islamic-inspired art has been accepted in an exhibit at the Whitney, that Amir is so alienated from his cultural and religious heritage that he becomes the mouthpiece for virulent Islamophobia, that Emily has had a sexual liaison with Isaac, the curator of the Whitney show and the husband of Amir’s colleague Jory, and that Amir has been passed up for promotion at the firm in favor of Jory, who is African American. Following these explosive revelations, we get to the play’s harrowing scene of domestic violence that in the fashion of its textual ancestor, Othello, requires a brutal attack on a white woman by a Brown man. For my purposes today, I would like to trace some key moments that underscore the importance of the premodern to this rehearsal of 21st-century American Muslim identity, particularly scenes that focus on the process of racialization of non-Black people within a white supremacist racial hierarchy, such as we have in the United States. Disgraced opens on a scene of Emily painting a portrait of Amir in the style of Velasquez’s portrait of his enslaved assistant Juan de Pareja. The occasion for the portrait is a prior racist incident during which Amir was profiled by a waiter. In trying to process that moment of everyday, casual racism Emily notes that the waiter’s actions were motivated by his inability to fully perceive who Amir was, that he was “not seeing you. Not seeing who you really are. Not until you started to deal with him. And the deftness with which you did that. You made him see that gap. Between what he was assuming about you and what you really are.” For those of us familiar with Othello, we hear in this scene an echo of Desdemona’s pronouncement that she “saw Othello’s visage in his mind.” The waiter’s inability to “see,” the reality, fullness, or authenticity of Amir, before he displayed his social superiority and cultural knowledge, uncovers the rupture of identity that Emily seeks to seam through her portrait. In other words, Amir’s identity is overdetermined by an interpretive frame that makes his body signify in racialized ways. He is made legible through the Orientalist terror frame, and he can only counter that through a rehearsal of his mimicry of civilized norms. While this instance of casual racism is brushed aside by Amir, Emily becomes fixated on it and so is painting the portrait in response, “But I started to think about the Velàsquez painting. And how people must have reacted when they first saw it. They think they’re looking at a picture of a Moor. An assistant.” At this point Amir corrects her that Juan de Pareja was an enslaved man and after acquiescing she continues, “But whose portrait—it turns out—has more nuance and complexity than his renditions of kings and queens.” Emily’s rationale here requires some unpacking because it is quite incoherent as a response to a racist incident against her husband. The most generous and benign reading would point out that Emily is trying to recuperate Amir’s image and self-esteem which might have been damaged by this incident. A more critical reading, however, would note, not only the over-reaction that is this painting, the kind of white guilt and white fragility that are at the heart of this maneuver, which is an attempt to compensate for systemic racism through personal, individual acts of restitution. Yet this act of restitution is in itself shot through with fetishizing and otherizing a raced male body, and so is itself racist. Emily’s painting of Amir styled after Juan de Pareja offers a racialized link between the two men: they both occupy subordinate identity positions within the dominant white culture that they inhabit. By depicting her husband in this style, which she admires as “nuanced and complex,” Emily hopes to reveal the noble untapped depths of her husband to a white gaze that seeks to circumscribe and limit who he is based on his identity. In this way, Emily tacitly acknowledges the deficit that Amir’s racial identity represents in his daily life. Indeed, it is a deficit that Amir seeks to overcome by eschewing his ethnicity and religion. At the same time, transforming Amir into an object for the consumption of the white gaze, as the painting is designed to do, further estranges Amir from himself and from his social milieu. Amir becomes an object to be gazed at and interpreted within the American socio-cultural-political imaginary of his on-lookers, who have the power to determine who and what he means. Even though he is the subject of the painting, he lacks the agency to control his subjectivity. We see this happen in the play’s third scene when Isaac offers a reading of Amir’s completed portrait: “So there you are, in your six-hundred dollar Charvet shirt, like Velàsquez’s brilliant apprentice-slave in his lace collar, adorned in the splendors of the world you’re now so clearly a part of…and yet..[…] the question remains […] of your place. For the viewer, of course. Not you. It’s a painting, after all.” In his “black suit, Silver cuff links,” and bespoke “lily-white dress shirt,” Amir represents both the heights and limits of achievement and assimilation. By noting that “the question” of Amir’s “place” “remains” for the presumably white viewer, Isaac verbalizes the persistent belief of white supremacy that of the inherent inferiority of the subordinate or “subject” races. No matter how much Amir might ape his betters, as this logic goes, there will always be a question about fit, a question about whether external signifiers can absolutely and authentically reflect internal being, the other as always ontologically different from the form of humanity Eurocentrism grants itself and its descendants. This is, of course, what renders the racialized non-white subject within a white supremacist society always suspect, criminalized, and pathologized. The shadow of Shakespeare’s Othello that attends the play is most visible in its yoking of Amir to “the Moor,” Juan de Pareja, and therefore also to the most famous “stage Moor,” Othello. Rather than seeing Amir’s visage in his mind, Emily presents him with a painting of him in her mind, which is also what Shakespeare does in his representation of Othello’s subjectivity in his play, an image of Blackness for the Anglo imaginary, an image that confirms the meaning of Moor through Othello’s credulity, jealousy, and vicious murder of his innocent wife. The capacious elasticity of Moor as an ethnic signifier that simultaneously announces a religious—Muslim—identity connects Othello, Juan de Pareja, and Amir: Othello as convert to Christianity, Juan de Pareja as an enslaved Morisco (having a Muslim lineage at some point in his family line), and Amir as an apostate. Disgraced, draws on premodern ethnic discourses to articulate lines of cultural belonging that emphasize the primacy of religious difference and to rehearse the rhetoric of the “clash of civilizations,” in order to advance its interrogation of identity within a post-9/11 American milieu. Nonetheless, what remains residual to this investigation is the importance of race within this dialogue, the racializing of Islam and the exclusion of Blackness within that formulation. I stress this point because the portrait of Juan de Pareja is central to the play, appearing in every scene, operating as a vital symbol of identity and belonging. The play uses the image of a Black man in order to assert Amir’s “place,” within his society. The portrait of an enslaved Moor is an avatar for a South Asian Muslim man in Disgraced, an avatar meant to signal the questionable and contingent status Amir enjoys within the US-racial hierarchy, and in a way, Amir is a stand-in for all Muslims living in “the West,” under War on Terror’s social and cultural regimes. Such a construction elides the way racial hierarchies exploit anti-Blackness, which allows Akhtar to articulate a form of “we are the ‘new’ Black people in America.” Upon learning that he’s been passed up for promotion in favor of Jory, Amir furiously turns on her and exclaims, “You think you’re the [n-word] here? I’m the [n-word]!! Me!!” It is an audacious and offensive claim to make to a Black woman, but the play has been leaning into it with the parallel so blatantly drawn between Amir and “the enslaved Moor,” and through its problematic construction of Jory, who is described in the stage directions as “mid-to late 30s, African American—is commanding, forthright, intelligent. Almost masculine” and who has a quote from Kissinger prominently displayed above her desk. We are meant to see her as a “race-traitor,” in the same way, that Amir has disavowed of his religion and culture. Another critical occlusion in the play, which follows swiftly upon the heels of the first is that Black Muslims exist and their communities, whether they are Black American or Black immigrant, have been targeted by law enforcement before and after 9/11, through the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and more recently CVE programs. The privileging of South Asian and Arab identity within the discourse of Islamophobia can, then, collude with the racial hierarchy in this country, not only by sanctioning certain demographics over others, but also by erasing the lived realities of millions of Muslims and appropriating a history of struggle, that for civil rights that Black American Muslims have fought for, one of whom, Malcolm X is highlighted in our conference’s program. Akhtar’s obfuscations of Blackness within the Muslim community and in US society, allow him to position Amir as “most victimized,” playing into a facile understanding of race that relies on rather than combats the racial hierarchy. It is a version of the Olympics of oppression. The play fails at offering a serious critique of the damaging effects of racializing Islam because it leans into the material and interpretive frame of white supremacy. Disgraced absorbs the narratives of race told by the dominant culture and tries to articulate its resistance through that system and is consequently unsuccessful. Along with its limited and difficult race logics, Disgraced further concedes to the War on Terror discourse that constructs Muslim identity through the ideologies that have justified that conflict. By doing so, it reasserts the power of that frame to control and define what it means to be Muslim without interrogating the racism, bigotry, imperialism, and Orientalism undergirding that optic. We witness this damaging construction in Disgraced where violence is the only lens through which Islam can be legible to the western imaginary and even to the Muslim who has committed to living in and “assimilating,” to the superior values of “Western civilization.” Amir’s rehearsal of Islam’s failings and his own position vis-à-vis the religion’s libidinal hold on him catalogues the atavistic and “medieval,” portrayal of Islam so common in Western discourse and plays into the “Muslim psyche,” pathology that Orientalism establishes: “So the point is that the world in the Quran was a better place than this world, well, then let’s go back. / Let’s stone adulterers. / Let’s cut off the hands of thieves. / Let’s kill the unbelievers. / And so, even if you’re one of those lapsed Muslims sipping your after-dinner scotch alongside your beautiful white American wife—and watching the news and seeing folks in the Middle East dying for values you were taught were purer—and stricter—and truer…you can’t help but feel just a little bit of pride.” Amir’s litany which was meant to highlight his difference from those other Muslims, his successful mimicry of a civilized western subject, fails through his revelation of feeling “proud,” at terrorist violence—a momentary confirmation of the Islamophobic belief that Muslims can’t ever be “just like us,” that they are “ticking time bombs.” Moreover, the play’s reliance on Shakespeare’s Othello means that Amir, like his “Moorish,” ancestor must be made to inhabit the violent, wife-beating Muslim identity that he has thus far excoriated. While he does not murder Emily for her infidelity, the play climaxes a brutal scene of domestic violence wherein a Brown man unleashes his fury and frustrations on the helpless body of a white woman. At this moment then, we see Amir’s true, Muslim face, and not the “visage” of Emily’s mind. The play ends by having succumbed to the narratives it sought to overturn. It caters to a white gaze and confirms that everything they secretly suspected but could not say was, in fact, true. As an afterlife of Othello, Disgraced slavishly follows its source in trafficking in stereotype as truth. Moreover, it refuses complexity because of its investment in the terror frame and insistence on the homogeneity of Islam and Muslims. To teach this play to undergraduates is to court deliberate misunderstanding and not to foster empathy toward this community. This is, of course, not to say that empathy should be our only goal as teachers of literature. It is, however, to think about our pedagogical investments in cross-cultural engagement and dialogue and in antiracism. The last few weeks have vividly revealed the need to combat white supremacy in all aspects of our lives. Our classrooms offer one arena wherein we might take up this work; however, we must continually be mindful of the overwhelming nature of the frame and gaze of whiteness that influences who, what, and how we read and interpret. Let’s heed Audre Lorde’s caution that, “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Our liberation is not in Shakespeare or in the predetermined scripts of white supremacy and Orientalism. Teaching literary texts that have a deep investment in these ideologies requires a pedagogy of resistance, of deep and sustained critiques of the texts and of our own passive interpellation into regimes of power and domination that might be reinforced in our classrooms. We must, then, expose and actively reject such epistemologies, especially if we seek to cultivate in our classrooms and our activism a hermeneutics of emancipation.

All Our Othellos: Shakespeare and the War on Terror | Watch the full talk

Presented by Ambereen Dadabhoy at Education: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Ambereen Dadabhoy investigates the long history of the logics of the War on Terror and how these structure narratives about Muslims across the centuries. Here, she engages the question with reference to Shakespeare’s Othello, the portraiture of Velazquez (1599-1660), Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced (2012), and contemporary discourses of white supremacy. Dadabhoy’s talk draws upon the connective tissue between these cultural fragments to show how teaching our existing narratives of European and English encounters with Islam might affirm stereotypes of what it means to be Muslim in lieu of destabilizing them.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Essay
Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Deep dive: Biopolitics and citizenship in Euripides' Ion

Dan-el Padilla Peralta dives into the question of citizenship in the ancient Mediterranean world and how it resonates across the long legacy of racialization.

Biopolitics and citizenship in Euripides’ Ion

a lecture by Dan-el Padilla Peralta

I'm here today to talk with you about the value of a play written in the fifth century BCE for contemporary discussions of race, racialization, and citizenship. That play is Euripides' Ion. And what I'll do over the next few minutes is give a brief overview of the context of the play itself and what forces in 5th century classical Greek and Athenian culture shape it. From there I'll provide an assessment of how the play can be used to invigorate conversations about citizenship and belonging with an emphasis on how these intersect with formulations of race. With Euripides' Ion, we can explore a couple of features of citizenship: citizenship as security or safety for some and not for others, early definitions of who can be counted as a legitimate citizen and who cannot, and ways that classical Greek ideas about citizenship continue to inform and inflect discussions about citizenship today. Here I'll be thinking in particular about the biopolitics of citizenship and how we understand the relationship between reproduction and citizenship.

“And in the third year after this in the archonshop of Antidotos, on account of the multitude of citizens, at Pericles’ proposal they decided that no one who had not been born of two citizen parents would have a share in the city.”


This is a description of the Athenian citizenship law of 451 BCE, as preserved for us in the constitution of the Athenians. And this is a law that operates in the background to Euripides' Ion.

But first, The Suppliants

To make our way to the Ion, we'll start by thinking with one of his predecessor playwrights in classical Athens, Aeschylus, and a production of the playwright Aeschylus that also bears on questions of citizenship: The Suppliants. Aeschylus' The Suppliants raises a question that's important for our assessment of citizenship in classical Athens: "How can a space that is open to all protect me?" This play centers the story of immigrants pleading for protection and for this reason, it's received some take-up in contemporary adaptations of Greek myth. Among the most riveting and much discussed of these adaptations was Moni Ovadia’s production on the island of Sicily some years ago, a production that was staged with deliberate emphasis on and conscious attention to the EU’s treatment of migrants and refugees.

In one of the key scenes of Aeschylus' The Suppliants, the ruler Pelasgus attempts to have the immigrant women who've attached themselves to an altar of Zeus for supplication and protection moved away from the altar to a more open public space. The Chorus Leader responds, "How can a space that is open to all protect me?" In a recent essay, the philosopher Sara Brill has mulled over this question's implications, and I'll quote her:

"But the Chorus Leader's question — 'How can a space that is open to all protect me' — lays bare the conditions of democracy in an even more profound way. We can hear in it, a deep awareness of the relation between how humans bear the weight of symbolic life and the fragility of embodied existence. Will we be safe here in this shared and open space created by human agreement?"


The labor of creating public spaces that protect the most vulnerable is an exacting labor, and its demands aren't always, and indeed are not usually, distributed equitably. These labors and their consequences are ones that Greek tragedies are quite interested in exploring. The labor of moving towards "a shared and open space that's created by human agreement" we see from some of these tragedies is incomplete if we limit ourselves to fumbling for abstractions without thinking long and hard about how the most vulnerable are made to feel in open spaces.

Greek tragedians

The Ion, which is a tragedy by the playwright Euripides, is where I'll try to ground some of that understanding that develops in this Greek context. This is a play that emerges in the course of the 5th century BCE's ongoing negotiations of Greek identity. And in order to get a sense of the play's place in Greek life, I'll give a brief overview of what Greek tragedy looks like during this period and who the major players in the production of tragedies in Athens were.

There are three canonical tragedians. There is, first of all, Aeschylus, who lives from the 520's to 456/455 BCE, and is the author of The Suppliants. He is an author who fights in the Greco Persian wars and who enjoys a prominently visible role in public life. He scores 13 victories for his plays at the Great Dionysia, the public festival where these plays were staged. Next we have Sophocles, who was 495 to 405 BCE, who is very politically engaged, very productive. In addition to putting on plays, over 120 of which we have titles for, he is also a player on the political scene. And finally, we have Euripides, who is 40 years younger than Aeschylus, 10 to 15 years younger than Sophocles, and who, by comparison to Aeschylus and Sophocles, is not quite as successful initially, but who becomes incredibly popular in later generations. He will come to outshine the other two playwrights, 19 of his plays survive.

Racialized reproduction

The Athenian citizenship law of 451 BCE is important for understanding one of Euripides' plays, the Ion. And to clarify the relationship of that citizenship law, I'll turn to a passage from Susan Lape's recent book. In Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy, Susan Lape writes:

"By requiring that future citizens have two native parents, the law fostered the idea that the citizen body was a descent group or genos in the specific sense of an interbreeding group. In so doing, the citizenship law brought new political salience to Athenian women and their reproductive work. [...] By identifying Athenian or native women as the only women capable of producing Athenian citizens, the law tapped into both gender and ethnic national or racial categories. To put it another way, the law attached ethnic national or racial salience to Athenian women and to their reproductive work. In this way, it created a regime of racialized reproduction."


This regime of racialized reproduction is grounded in, among other things, the production and reproduction of myths on stage. And the philosopher Arlene Saxonhouse has given a lot of thought to this in her writing in Fear of Diversity. In particular, she's drawn attention to how the diversity entailed in heterosexual creation is at the center of some of the most anguished debates about citizenship and belonging in classical Athens.

Crucial to these debates and to the myths that coalesce around them is the premise that Athenian identity is rooted in the land of Attica. This is a racial script. It is a script of autochthony, of belongingness to the soil, and it's a bedrock principle of Athenian civic identity. The givenness and the constructedness of the biological, in this context, and the relationship between the biological and the land requires examination. Euripides' Ion gives us one framework within which to conduct that evaluation. In this play, we see the interrelation of sexual violence, civic origin stories, and structures of citizenship, all of which receive concentrated but powerful treatment in the play. The Ion is a play put on in the years after the Periclean citizenship law of 451 BCE. And one way of reading this play is as an extended meditation on who gets to feel safe and who does not get to feel safe in an Athenian context.

Who was the Ion for?

But first, let's dig a little deeper into the life and context of its author, Euripides. As I noted earlier, Euripides is the third of the canonical Athenian playwrights whose productions between them account for the lion's share of our knowledge about classical Greek tragedy and Greek intellectual culture in the fifth century. It's important to recognize that these plays are spaces for thinking-out-loud-about issues of significance and salience for the Athenian community. All of these plays are put on at the Great Dionysia Festival in honor of the god Dionysus at Athens, for which three tragedians were chosen to compete. Each year, each tragedian had to stage four plays, and at the conclusion of the multi-day cycle of performances a victor was chosen. The three canonical Athenian playwrights about whom we know the most happen to have lived long and incredibly productive lives. There's much that we wish we knew about the staging of the plays themselves and their original incarnation. We're decently well-informed about their authors and about the festival context in which the performances took place, but the question of who precisely was allowed to be in the audience for these plays, plays whose roles were all acted by men, remains a point of contention.

If, as one school of thought holds, the overwhelming majority of those in the audience were men, then, as the philosopher Arlene Saxonhouse has commented, in the case of plays that have strong female roles such as Euripides' Ion, "the city of adult males saw on stage the powerful portrayal of women—women whose existence, as the playwrights reflected on the human condition, could not be denied as curtly as Pericles had chosen to do in his funeral oration." Here, Saxonhouse is referring to the funeral oration delivered by the Athenian statesman Pericles that's reserved for us in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. This is a funeral oration that sidelines women, not addressing them until the very end, where Pericles avails himself of a few very slighting remarks to these women after having spent much of the speech extolling the virtues of Athens.

Autochthony and Athenian civichood

We'll come back to that speech in a moment, but for now, I want to focus on how Euripides' Ion in particular brings out some of the tensions between gender roles and identities in civic space, and how these tensions in turn inform the representation of the biopolitics of citizenship and the biopolitics of race. Euripides' Ion, like many of the other Greek tragedies during the fifth century, constructs a space for the negotiation of fundamental questions concerning Athenian society's organization around sex/gender difference, precisely as this difference structures the physical and intersubjective spaces in which the plays are put on and are processed by their viewers.

The Ion foregrounds autochthony as a racial script before proceeding to more extensive comment on sexual assault and violence as charter-myths for the civic foundation story of Athens. This is a story that is of interest to many of our Athenian sources and many of our Greek sources on Athens. And in the history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides has the Athenian statesmen, Pericles, spell out the implications of autochthony quite explicitly. "In this land of ours, they have always been the same people living from generation to generation up until now." The Ion invests this idea with some real heft by grounding Athenian roots in the soil of Attica. But here's where some of the tensions that are associated with this myth begin to come into focus. These tensions are at the heart of the conflicts in the play. 

For these tensions, it's important to have a vocabulary for thinking about race and for articulating race. And for this, we'll turn again to Susan Lape, who has argued that the idea of Athenian autochthony is a racial formation. With many definitions of race that we can bring to bear on the material in Euripides' Ion, I'm going to examine two that can provide us with a foundation for calibrating the relationship between these stories of autochthony and racial discourse in fifth century Athens.

The first is from Michael Omi and Howard Winant's classic Racial Formation In the United States: "Race is a concept," they explain, "which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies... an unstable and 'decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.” For Omi and Winant, racial formation is a technology for constructing difference through typologies and hierarchies of the human body.

A second definition, one proposed by Barbara and Karen Fields in their 2012 book, Racecraft, has race "standing for the conception or the doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct groups, each defined by inborn traits that its members share and that differentiate them from the members of other distinct groups of the same kind but of unequal rank."

It's the second definition that can help us get a grip on the racializing properties of autochthony as guiding the myths that are told about Athenians and that Athenians tell themselves about their origin: the collective embrace of the myth that Athenians descend from people who are literally born from the soil. This is the story that according to some of our sources begins with the god Hephaestus' effort to rape Athena, and in his failure, his ejaculation on the ground then produces Erechtheus, the first Athenian, is a story that separates Athens from other Greek communities. The story's racial underpinnings are suggestive of some of the strategies that were available to civic communities in the archaic and classical Greek world and communities that were seeking to reinvent themselves, especially in the fifth century BCE context. The myth of autochthony was important to an Athens that was on the way to claiming a kind of superpower or hegemonic status among other Greek city states, and paired that rise to hegemonic status with escalating investments in slavery and colonialism. But the myth is also important for us if we want to use Euripides' Ion as a way of thinking about citizenship's dependence on fictions. 

Citizenship as fiction

This is a story that invests the Athenian state with an abstracted coherence. It's predicated on the intersection of civic identity with biological kinship, and it relies for its reproduction as a story that people buy into on its staging by Euripides among others. The fiction operates on a number of different levels, beginning with one of the fictions that is central to the narrative arc of Euripides' Ion itself. One of the fictions subjected to scrutiny in Euripides' Ion itself is the fiction of paternity. Xuthus, the husband of Creusa, one of the protagonists of the play, is tricked into believing that he is Ion's father. Germane to the work of interrogating Athenian citizenship's interaction with kinship and with false kinship as laid out in the Ion is another point brought by the philosopher Arlene Saxonhouse.

In Fear of Diversity, she has this very powerful insight into the significance of the birth of Erechtheus from the soil of Attica. This is a coming into being that productively varies the virgin birth or parthenogenesis myths that circulate in other Mediterranean and Eastern Mediterranean contexts. "The city in its idealized and mythologized origins,” Saxonhouse writes, "is peopled from a single source: the earth, and is not dependent on the diversity entailed in heterosexual creation."

On this reading, in its canonical form, the myth of Athens' origins erases both racial and sexual difference because it postulates a unitary Athenian community that doesn't descend from the licit and consensual union of a man and a woman. But what the Ion does is to challenge this in part by demonstrating that this origin myth is encased in all kinds of fabulations about, first of all, the consent or non-consent of those individuals who are necessary to the biopolitics of the Athenian state. And second, the participation, willing or unwilling, of folks from the outside who are required to legitimate the project of Athenian civichood, even as they are denied access to its full benefits.

Reproductive labor

I'll now set out three passages in the Ion that foreground several dimensions of the fundamental paradox of Athenian civichood. Namely, that there could be no Athenian civichood without the reproductive labor of Athenian women, even though Athenian men and the intellectual productions with which they were associated sought insistently to exclude or marginalize women from the necessary biopolitics of the city.

Beginning with lines 10 and 11 of Euripides' Ion, which tee up the centrality of sexual trauma and violence to the experiences of Creusa, one of the protagonists of the play. Early in the play, we receive a very brief description of the experience that Creusa has had. "Phoebus compelled Erechtheus' daughter Creusa / to accept his violent embrace," in conjunction with Creusa's words to Ion at lines 251 to 254, "Unhappy women! What things that gods ought err! And where / shall we turn for justice when we are being destroyed / by the unjust actions of those who are much stronger?"

These verses call up the constitutive violence by which the divine and human heteropatriarchy comes into being in Athens and how it enters into conversation with debates about the meanings and limits of justice, especially as these bear on the trauma of sexual assault. This trauma is excavated for its bearing on the content and extension of justice in the Athenian polity and it's presented to us, in the second set of lines I quoted, from the perspective of a victim. At the same time though, one of the more harrowing features of Euripides' Ion is that at the very end of the play, Creusa, the victim of the sexual assault, is made effectively to forget the trauma that she has experienced after rediscovering and reconnecting with the child who was born as a consequence of this sexual assault.

Access to citizenship

Another dimension of these debates concerning citizenship is brought out in the description of another of the characters whose arc is central to the plot of Euripides' Ion. This is Xuthus, Creusa's husband, for whom we get a brief description of his background, followed by more extensive presentation of his perspective in the play.

At lines 59 and following, we receive some background information about Creusa's husband, Xuthus: "...a war rose between / Athens and Chalcodon's people in Euboea; / Xuthus as an ally helped to end the strife / and though he was not a native, but Achaean / son of Aeolus, son of Zeus, the prize / he won was marriage to Creusa. But / in all these years, no children have been born."

What's noteworthy here is Creusa's marriage out to a foreigner for whom marriage into Athenian society is a reward. The implication of the phrase, "though he was not a native," is that normally marriage to Athenian women was reserved for Athenian-born men. In other words, that Athenian society was endogamous. And this is a state of affairs that is solidified by the Periclean citizenship law and the social opprobrium against exogamy that we can detect in the exclamation of Ion himself to Creusa at line 293: "A foreigner! How could he marry an Athenian!"

Middling ideology

Later on in the play, lines 485 to 490 and again at line 625 and following, we as readers are put in the position of being able to connect the dots between the play on the one hand and the elaboration of what Ian Morris and other scholars of Greek culture have termed a "middling ideology" in Greek culture. This middling ideology seeks systematically to level distinctions between Athenian male citizens, while also presupposing in the background that these male citizens will enjoy privileges that are denied to other more vulnerable or minoritized communities.

Here's the Chorus in Euripides' Ion: "For myself," the Chorus sings, "I would choose, rather than wealth / or a palace of kings, to rear / and love my own children: shame to him who prefers / a childless life, hateful to me. / May I cling to the life of modest possessions / enriched by children."

Ion himself channels the same ideological commitment. In the play, we hear him say, at 625, "I would prefer to live / as a happy citizen than be a king / who must choose to have the evil as his friends / and must abhor the good for fear of death. / You might reply that gold outweighs all this... Let me avoid distress, seek moderation."

This is a recapitulation of middling ideology. It's an ideology that values the capacity to enjoy a moderated existence as a member of the polity that comes with some obligations—having children, being a participant in the reproductive system that defines the capacity of the Athenian state to sustain itself—but that distinguishes sharply the average Athenian citizen from people aspiring to wealth, or seeking to accumulate wealth, or seeking to differentiate themselves from other citizens via the accumulation of goods. What makes this middling ideology particularly significant for our purposes is that it is really bound up with racial principles. It's bound up with autochthony and with an understanding of the enduring significance of autochthony to the constitution of Athenian civic life.

Biopolitics

I've been making use, from time to time, of the term biopolitics. And in order to clarify how autochthony and racialization work hand-in-hand, I need to say a few more words about what biopolitics entails–what the regulation of life and reproduction at the hands of the state have to do with the capacity of Athenians to develop and inhabit a biopolitical order. Anxieties about reproduction are at the heart of the Ion and other classical Athenian sources. One of Pericles's encouragements to those who have lost their children in the early stages of the Peloponnesian War is to keep making more babies. Not only because, as Pericles says, these new children will prevent you from brooding over those who are no more, but because, Pericles continues, they will be a help to the city, both in filling the empty places and in assuring her security: "For it is impossible for a man to put forward, fair and honest views about our affairs if he has not, like everyone else, children whose lives may be at stake."

Reproduction within the family unit and its relevance to the affairs of the city state are subject to continuing interest in later decades of Greek historical writing and Greek political theory. So for instance, in Aristotle's Politics, a lot of space and time is given over to explaining how, why, and under what circumstances children should be brought into the world for the purposes of defending and shoring up the city state.

One of the things that's at stake in the interweaving of citizenship and politics, in our Athenian and Greek sources, is nothing less than the indexing of full civic identity to childbearing capacity: if one cannot have children or chooses not to have children, can one even be a good citizen? Can one even be a citizen in the first place? Does legitimate civic standing require the production of children? To what extent should the state actively intervene in the management of the family so as to promote practices it deems most beneficial or conducive to the overall good of the citizen body? To what extent should the state interfere in people's exercise of agency over their own bodies? These persist as living and explosive issues in Greek philosophy from the late fifth century, well into the fourth century BCE.

And in the case of Euripides' Ion, though, we are also faced with still another dimension of citizenship that brings out the implications of the Periclean citizenship law for not just the biopolitics, but the substantive rights held by members of the Athenian city state.

At lines 670 to 675, Ion says, "If I may do so / I pray my mother is Athenian / so that through her I may have rights of speech. / But when a foreigner comes into a city / of pure blood, though in name a citizen / his mouth's a slave: he has no right of speech."

In bringing up biopolitics earlier, I was channeling the French philosopher Michel Foucault. What I want to do in thinking about this passage from Euripides' Ion is develop one of Foucault's insights into the relationship between biopolitics and the capacity to speak in the city. And to that end, I'll read a passage from one of Foucault's lectures. In his lectures on “The Government of Self and Others”, which were originally delivered at the Collège de France, 1982 to 1983, Foucault devotes a section to a brief discussion of the Ion, in which he writes:

"We see someone in search of his birth who does not know his mother, and so who wants to know what city and community he belongs to. Why does he want to know this? He wants to know precisely so that he knows if he has the right to speak. And since he is searching for this woman, he hopes that the mother he will eventually discover will be Athenian and thus belong to his community, this dēmos, et cetera, and that by virtue of this birth, he himself will have the right to speak freely, to have parrēsia. For he says, in a town 'without stain,' that is to say, within a town which keeps its traditions, in a town in which the city state, the constitution, the politeia has not been debased by tyranny or despotism or by the abusive integration of people who are not truly citizens, so in a town which has remained without stain and in which the politeia has remained what it should be, only those who are citizens have parrēsia. Beyond this general theme which structures the search for this single personage's mother and which links the right to speak to membership of the dēmos, it's worth keeping hold of two things. The first," Foucault continues, "is that the right to speak, parrēsia, is transmitted in this case by the mother. Second, you see too that the stranger status is defined and appears in contrast with that of citizens who have the right to speak, and so far as the town is without stain, his tongue is servile. Exactly: his mouth is a slave. To ge stoma doulon. That is to say, the right to speak, the restriction on the freedom of political discourse is total. He does not possess this freedom of political discourse; he does not possess parrēsia."

Colonial citizenship and autochthony

At the conclusion of Euripides' Ion, we are left with several questions, all of which Euripides poses to the audience and invites Athenians, and possibly non-Athenians in the audience, to engage. The first concerns the extent and expansiveness of citizenship in the Athenian world. In the play’s final movements, we see a vision of the future after Ion, the future of the community that will descend from Ion as that community extends across the Aegean Sea, and in the process, anticipates by several centuries the substantive colonization that the Athenian empire will itself undertake in the fifth century BCE. So, foregrounded for Euripides' audience is the question of what it means to be a citizen of an Athenian community that has extended well beyond Athens, but that is still claiming this rootedness in the soil of Attica. How do the imperatives of autochthony, and imperialism, and settler colonialism interact with each other? But relevant to this question is another one that is more intimately embedded in the reproductive logic of this community. It is a question that arises on either end of the Athenian citizenship law of 451 BCE and that, as given shape and form by the experiences of Creusa in the play, guides the play's own intervention in these debates, and also steers the conversation that I think Euripides intended his audience to have.

What is the place of women, and what is the place of gender and gendering in the construction of the Athenian civic community?

Noted earlier that in Thucydides' account of the Periclean funeral oration, held and delivered on the occasion of the commemoration of the war dead in the early stages of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian statesman Pericles, instrumental in the passage of the citizenship law, effectively sidelines women, addressing them directly only at the very end of his speech. At the same time, though, at various points in the speech, it is clear that without the reproductive labor of women in the Athenian community, there is no future to the Athenian community. The expectation and the burden is that for those families who have lost children in the conflict, this reproductive labor will continue to be carried out. This labor imposes demands, it triggers tensions, and some of these tensions are ones that we can read into Euripides' Ion. And that I think in some cases, especially when we see the fraught conversations between Xuthus and Creusa, on the one hand, and Creusa and Ion on the other, are ones that the playwright very intentionally frames in the course of developing the narrative momentum of the play itself.

A final question to take up concerns the formation of the Athenian civic body along racialized premises in the fifth century BCE. From the beginning of my effort to contextualize Euripides' Ion, I've drawn attention to the works of Susan Lape and others that have made a pretty compelling case for understanding the citizenship law as racializing, in that, among other things, it locks Athenian identity and Athenian citizenship into a biological and birthright paradigm. What one can do to recover more fully the dynamics of racialization in the Athenian world of the fifth century BCE and the greater Greek world beyond Athens, is to think about how the citizenship law intersects with or diverges from developments in other Greek communities.

Here, it's important to emphasize that by Euripides' time, and certainly in the generations after Euripides, his plays and other plays put on stage in Athens in the fifth century BCE are circulating to other parts of the Greek world. How are communities, Greek speaking communities in the south of Italy, for example, or in Sicily, or on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, wrestling with the content and messaging of this play? How does this play and other plays invite them to engage questions concerning the Greekness and the definition of Greekness that was such a contested topic in Athens itself and in other communities during this period? Most importantly of all, from the perspective of thinking with and about race in the fifth century BCE and after, how are racial concepts embedded in the vocabulary and concept worlds of Greeks themselves?

We have noted that autochthony, the myth of Athenian rootedness in the soil, is one potent mechanism by which Athenians and other Greek speakers lay out a set of authoritative claims concerning the coherence, the presumed biological coherence, and ontological coherence, of a community. There are, of course, other ways of imagining the formation of communities that were available to and were trafficked heavily by Greek speakers during this period. For instance, migration narratives and the idea that some Greek communities had originated not from the soil, but directly as a result of diasporic or migration and its trajectories over the Mediterranean world in the seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries BCE create circumstances for other Greek speaking communities to assert that their identities had come into being and shape in the course of movement, not in the course of stasis or residence in one place. 

Athenians themselves are on the move, and as I noted a minute ago, one of the tensions that's bubbling to the surface in the period when this play is put on is how to reconcile the facts of Athenian mobility with the presumed facts of a kind of proto-national ethnic racial coherence. That tension and its foregrounding in Euripides' Ion makes it an exceptionally suggestive text for thinking about dilemmas of citizenship, belonging, and racialization. And its confrontation with biopolitics and the imperatives of reproduction also make it a valuable text for thinking about the overlays and intersections of racialization and gender.

Ancient
Literature
Transnational studies
Gender and sexuality
Essay
Ruben Espinosa

Henry V and belonging

Shakespeare's language and status in the Western canon can feel inhospitable to many students, especially students of color. Teaching Henry V with a focus on linguistic identity, legitimacy, and belonging can open conversations that allow students to carve out a Shakespeare for themselves.

Why Henry V?

Henry V is a great play to teach when asking students to think about nationalism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and immigration. On the surface, the play extols a sense of English identity and community—that is, it is looking to England’s history and inviting Shakespeare’s audience to partake in the organizing of such a community.

Despite all the jingoism, though, the play is giving this sense of nationalism quite a bit of side-eye and ultimately allows us to look at the English themselves through the perspective of the stranger.

Legitimacy and linguistic identity

Given the urgency of anti-immigrant sentiments and legislation in the U.S., the idea of who is deemed a legitimate insider is a significant entry point for American students to discussions about national identity, race, and belonging. Notions of legitimacy in the U.S. are often tethered to linguistic identity, so the play’s attention to language is critical for these conversations.

While the sentiment behind Henry’s “band of brothers” (4.3.60) speech espouses kinship for all men fighting for England, all men are clearly not alike. The Scot Jamy, the Irish MacMorris, and the Welsh Fluellen (who all fight for the English) represent cultural otherness. We can home in on the importance of this representation of otherness when we encourage students to interrogate how the language and cultural identity of the stranger impacts the construction of Henry and of English identity.

When Henry famously historicizes the English victory at Agincourt by connecting it to Saint Crispin’s Day, for example, Fluellen reminds him of Edward the Black Prince’s victory in France and the role of the Welsh in that victory. Fluellen explains how this victory was and continues to be commemorated:

"If your majesties is remembered of it, the Welshmen did good service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps, which your majesty know to this hour is an honorable badge of service. And I do believe your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leeks upon Saint Tavy’s day" (4.7.89-94).


Fluellen is referring to the practice of commemorating the feast of Saint David (the patron saint of Wales), and it was observed not only by the character Henry V in the play but also by Shakespeare’s own Queen Elizabeth I. It is important because Fluellen infuses Henry’s historicizing moment with alternative, equally significant, and much older cultural tradition. In short, the cultural identity of the foreigner here precedes and supersedes Henry’s historicizing moment.

Fluellen then takes it a step further in connecting Henry with the Welsh tradition. Responding to the leek-wearing custom, Henry says, “I wear it for a memorable honour, / For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman” (4.7.95-96). Henry’s Welsh connection is tenuous (he was the Prince of Wales), but Fluellen responds in kind: “All the water in the Wye cannot wash your majesty’s Welsh plood out of your pody” (4.7.97-98). There is no desire to assimilate with the English here, but instead a clear desire on the part of Fluellen to honor Wales.

Leeks against ethnocentrism

To attend to this understanding of the dominant culture’s identity in Henry V is to encourage our students to scrutinize structures that govern notions of national identity and legitimacy. The play deploys Fluellen’s confidence in his cultural identity to speak to England’s own emerging self-perception, and it questions that ethnocentrism. When, in an offstage moment the knavish Englishman Pistol ridicules Fluellen and his cultural practices and foreignness in a public sphere, for example, Fluellen demands to be treated with dignity. He confronts Pistol, force-feeds him a leek, beats him, and says, “If you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek” (5.1.34). The bloody scene is so striking that the English Gower says to Fluellen, “Enough, captain, you have astonished him” (5.1.35).

© The Trustees of the British Museum

While the violence is sobering, Gower sides with the foreigner standing up for himself by saying to Pistol after Fluellen departs:

Will you mock at an ancient tradition, begun upon an honourable valour, and worn as a memorable trophy of predeceased valour, and dare not avouch in your deeds any of your words? I have seen you gleeking and galling at this gentleman twice or thrice. You thought because he could not speak English in the native garb he could not therefore handle an English cudgel. You find it otherwise, and henceforth let a Welsh correction teach you a good English condition (5.1.70-80).


To be certain, Fluellen has been teaching his English audience all along—reminding Henry that history is larger than the moment, and demonstrating that respect breeds respect, and indignity engenders violence. Gower calls for respect of the stranger’s cultural traditions and personhood and also for dignified behavior on the part of the host society. The critical moment allows our students to see how language discrepancies—as Fluellen employs a broken English—and cultural identity, issues vividly relevant in our present moment, infuse a play that imagines an inclusive brotherhood while demonstrating how that inclusion is always just out of reach for the stranger.

A neighbor worthy of respect

The many markers of identity in this play—patron saints, religious affinities, language, customs, and cultural traditions—are all facets of nation building and concurrent markers of divisiveness. However, when one looks past difference, when one listens beyond the broken English, when one sees Fluellen not as an object shedding light on Henry’s identity, but rather as someone distinctly valuable and decisively self-possessed, one will recognize in him the many foreigners, and the many immigrants, who demand to be, and who should be, treated with dignity.

To treat others with dignity, it seems, renders one a neighbor worthy of respect. In the U.S., and in our present moment, we have yet to accomplish this.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Discussion questions
Seeta Chaganti

Teaching "Merciless Beauty" in juxtaposition

When teaching "Merciless Beauty" alongside the film The Prison in 12 Landscapes, discussion questions can help students engage with topics of incarceration and justice.

One of my main pedagogical priorities in teaching early literature is preventing students from falling into generalizations about courtly love, the place of women in society, the role of Christianity, etc. Students will often cling to this kind of generalization because it feels familiar to them, but obviously they do not have the expertise or (usually) the time and space to do the research to support their broad generalizations, which they would find contradicted if they did anyway. I generally try to be as focused as possible in how I ask questions and direct them to the text to keep them from having the room to make assumptions. This does not always succeed, but these prompts and questions reflect an effort in that direction.

One way I do this is by juxtaposing the poem “Merciless Beauty” with the documentary film The Prison in 12 Landscapes.

Before beginning our discussion, I ask students to write in a shared document or discussion board:

Contribute at least one comment about this film, how it might relate to the use of time in "Merciless Beauty," or anything else that occurs to you about the film and the poem. Some ideas to consider:

  • How each seems to understand the idea, image, or reality of prison.
  • How each asks you to think about how you are moving through time and how incarcerated persons experience time.
  • What role repetition plays in each.
  • Any other thoughts.

Follow-up class discussion

With these shared ideas in mind, the class could turn to different possible moments in the text for further consideration.

For example, one moment I like to discuss in class occurs at lines 14-16

So hath your beautee fro your hertechaced
Pitee, that me ne availeth not to pleyne;
For Daunger halt your mercy in his cheyne.


In translation:

Your beauty has so chased pity from your heart that it does me no good to complain, for Daunger (the class should look this up in the MED) holds your mercy in its/his chain.


These lines are useful first because of their complicated and deceptive syntax. This is a good opportunity to make students identify the subjects, objects, and verbs, and rearrange these in a straightforward s-v-o order so they understand who is doing what to whom in the passage.

Questions to ask about the poem

  • How do you understand the image of Daunger holding mercy in his chain? This is a good place to look at the MED together for the definitions of Daunger. Think about the linguistic phenomena it reflects and its relation to our current sense of the word and how we might narrate that trajectory. Is the modern sense of danger a possible resonance in this line?
  • How would you talk about the relationship between the linear image of Daunger holding mercy in a chain and the convoluted syntax of this sentence?
  • Why do you think an image of confinement is introduced here? (Ideally, you would want students to think about how this image anticipates the prison in the next section. This could lead to further points about time in the poem, the way time itself imprisons the speaker or subject in creating this sense of inevitability around imprisonment.)
  • Studying this passage could create a transition to The Prison in 12 Landscapes, or one could move to the passage that explicitly mentions the prison (lines 26-29). I think most literature teachers will know how to handle the latter in the context of the questions above, so I focus on the film. It is interesting to see the association of the prison with quantity, accounting, etc. in light of the prison industrial complex as a profit industry.

Questions to ask while juxtaposing the film

(It’s helpful to start with a more impressionistic/subjective question to open the discussion of the film since it is such a radical shift in subject matter.)

  • Which vignettes did you find especially interesting and why? What questions came up for you in watching the film?
  • What are different ways the film shows us the experience of time’s passage in prison through its different topics?
  • How does the film help us see the role time plays in the poem? In particular, what might you realize now about the poem’s use of time and repetition that you didn’t realize before?

(Students at my university are often very well versed in the critique of carceral systems, especially their disproportionate effects on racial minorities in the US. Their preexisting knowledge helps lead to important questions about reforming the system from within vs. abolishing the whole system and starting with something different, something that frees us from the racial hierarchies and inequities in which we all suffer. At this point, it’s interesting to return to the poem and ask students to consider how it helps them to think about this question of reform vs. abolition.)

  • To what extent does the poem seek to escape its own structure? Or, to what extent is it trying to change things within its overall framework—while leaving the framework through which it expresses itself intact? How does the roundel form participate in a potential conflict about reform?
  • How can these ideas from the poem contribute to a contemporary discussion about seeking racial and social justice? Is it possible to have this conversation using a Middle English text? What are its limits?
Medieval
Literature
Poetry
Video
Scott Manning Stevens

Indigenous sovereignty

Scott Manning Stevens dives into the history of sovereignty and indigeneity, defining the relationship these concepts have to the past, present, and future of Native peoples' self-determination across North America.

The topic of Indigenous peoples' sovereignty can be challenging for people unaware of the political status of the first inhabitants of the United States, let alone Indigenous peoples in other settler colonial nations. It is especially worth pointing out that sovereignty, as the term comes to us in English from the Western tradition, is neither the term nor the concept used by most Native peoples. What Native peoples demand is the right to self-determination and the right to govern their own lands. This gets conflated with sovereignty but is not quite the same thing. And so, while Shakespeare's The Tempest is not primarily a play about the early stages of British imperialism, no one can hear Caliban's impassioned complaint about his dispossession from his home and not think of all those Indigenous persons who felt similar outrage at losing sovereignty over their homelands and themselves: “This island's mine by Sycorax, my mother, which thou takest from me.” That line rings in the ears of Indigenous people around the world, particularly the world of the former British Empire upon which the sun was said never to set. Contemporary productions have relocated the place-setting from an unknown island in the Mediterranean to Haida Gwaii on the Pacific coast of Canada, the Caribbean, Huron-Wendake in Quebec, Mohegan territory in Connecticut, and the Torres Straits Islands of Australia—all of which speaks to how the play resonates among colonized and/or formally enslaved peoples. That does not mean Indigenous sovereignty is always the focus of reinterpretations. Both Aimé Césaire and George Lamming reworked the play from a Black Caribbean perspective that focused on Caliban’s enslaved subaltern status. But for Indigenous peoples, it is more the loss of control over our own lands and freedom than it is about forced labor, and that brings us to the issue of land. Prospero presumes to have peremptory rights over the island because of his belief in his own superiority, both in learning and actual power. The island is not the ancient homeland of Caliban. His mother was banished there, but he knows it as his birthplace and has an intimate knowledge of his environment. He also deeply regrets having shared that knowledge with Prospero. “[I] showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle, / The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile. / Cursed be I that did so!” Indigenous sovereignty is inexorably associated with land. Our societies flourish when we recognize that our relationship to the land is as much determined by responsibilities as it is by rights. We maintain our collective right to protect the land and all that's on it, and we do so with our custodial duties toward the environment in mind. Many Indigenous people see Caliban as a figure with intimate knowledge of his homeland: “I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’ th’ island” who has been dispossessed of it by an outsider, who takes that knowledge freely offered, and then labels Caliban “monstrous.” The Tempest is often listed as a romance, but from Caliban's perspective, it's a tragedy. For a large portion of the early modern period, the term sovereign was most often applied to the preeminent leader or ruler of a realm. It often referred to a king or a prince. When European explorers first encountered the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, following Columbus's 1492 landfall, they often projected on Native societies leadership systems based on their own experiences in Europe. That meant sachems/sanskwas or headmen/headwomen of Native societies were frequently labeled kings/queens or princes. Paramount leaders might likewise be called emperors or empresses, but in general, Europeans recognized that Native societies were organized as polities with layers of territorial leadership and social organization. Such a recognition of political organization had its limits, given the goals of European imperialism. In absence of large urban centers in most of North America, there was a presumption that Indigenous polities were a primitive version of European aristocratic realms. By the 1590s in England, Native American nations were being described as "tribes" rather than nations, which placed them below nations in the political hierarchy of the day. If a tribe was a polity among so-called barbarous races, then what was the nature of a tribe's sovereignty? We should think of sovereignty here as the authority and right to govern oneself as a people. By the early 18th century, sovereignty was a quality necessary for an independent state to be recognized. It also followed, in the course of the 18th century, that the leaders of tribes were more frequently referred to as chiefs. One might reasonably posit that when European power sought alliances with Native nations, they recognized the sovereignty of those nations and referred to their leaders as kings. Conversely, when a colonial power wished to downplay the sovereign independence of an Indigenous polity, they referred to them as tribes, and their leaders as chiefs. For Indigenous peoples of the continental US, the history of their nations' sovereignty evolved with the shifting power dynamics of the expansion of the United States after its independence from Great Britain. Treaties made between colonial British authorities, representing the Crown, could obviously be abrogated by the new nation, but the US continued to pursue a policy of treaty making with Indigenous nations well into the 19th century. A US treaty carries the weight of a nation-to-nation agreement in which the sovereignty of both parties is recognized. Thus, the 1794 Canandaigua Treaty between the United States and the Six Nations or Haudenosaunee Confederacy represents a recognition of Haudenosaunee sovereignty. This treaty is still recognized by both parties and is in effect to this day. However, the United States does not recognize the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as an independent state. The complexity of Indigenous sovereignty within the continental United States goes back to a landmark US Supreme Court decision in 1831. In the case of Cherokee Nation versus the State of Georgia, adjudicated by the Marshall Court, a precedent-setting decision was made on the nature of Native American sovereignty. Justice Marshall's opinion made clear that he believed that Native nations are neither foreign states in relation to the United States, nor independent of it. Rather, he infamously designated them “domestic dependent nations.” By retaining the term nations, he left open the possibility for a prescribed type of sovereignty at best, but he did not preclude Indigenous sovereignty altogether. Instead, he placed it under the hegemony of the federal government, but outside of the state governments' authority. As dependent nations, Native governments retain a nation-to-nation relationship with the federal government, but are not held to be independent states. Marshall portrayed the United States as having the duties of a guardian to its ward. But such paternalism would seem a de facto denial of a Native nation's ability to exercise sovereignty in any real way. Advocates of Native sovereignty have argued that it must be practiced as a means of retaining the power to self-govern. Just as Americans accept that cities govern themselves within self-governing states that in turn exist within the United States, they must accept that Native sovereignty exists within, but separate from, other forms of sovereignty. The limitations of that sovereignty are constantly being tested by Native nations, pushing back against state and federal policies that would interfere with their self-rule. The situation in the continental United States is the result of government policies and judicial rulings such as Marshall's 1831 decision, but each settler colonial nation state that resulted from European settler colonialism will reflect the unique colonial history of that place. For instance, in Australia, Britain did not make treaties with any of the aboriginal nations, but rather pursued a policy of conquest and occupation, which ignored their existence as a people with inherent rights. By claiming the land fell under the category of terra nullius (nobody’s land), Britain in effect held that there was no such thing as Native title, and that, as a civilized nation, the United Kingdom had the right to claim and colonize Australia. Whereas in Aotearoa (a.k.a. New Zealand), the settlers engaged in diplomacy with the Maori (as well as warfare), and together produced the Treaty of Waitangi / Te Tiriti (1848), a still deeply contested bi-lingual agreement which remains a cornerstone of the respective notions of sovereignty between settlers and Maori citizens to this day. If we see Prospero as a stand-in for a proto-imperial colonial authority, it is in the paternalism, which he uses to justify his rule over Caliban and over the island. He cannot see Caliban's bond with the land from anything but an instrumentalist perspective. He wants Caliban's knowledge to better exploit the environment, not to adapt and care for it. Indigenous sovereignty over oneself and one's homeland is very different from the sovereignty understood by Prospero and later colonists. There's no standard way that so-called Indigenous sovereignty has been configured among settler colonial nations. Native nations continue to hold on to deep historical notions of self-governance and self-determination, even as they evolved to meet the global privileging of Westphalian international “sovereignty” definitions.

What is sovereignty within a world-view that has historically never recognized a “sovereign”? In a settler-colonial state, it is imperative to recognize how even liberatory language is steeped in hierarchical epistemologies. Scott Manning Stevens dives deep into the history of sovereignty and indigeneity, defining the relationship these concepts have to the past, present, and future of Native peoples' self-determination across North America.

Early Modern
Literature
Indigeneity
Reading list
Ian Smith

Reading race in Shakespeare

Suggested readings from Ian Smith for an in-depth understanding of the "cliché of race."

Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard. Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

Little, Arthur, Jr. “Is it Possible to Read Shakespeare through Critical White Studies?” In Ayanna Thompson, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020: 268-80.

Marcus, Stephen and Sharon Best. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108.1 (2009): 1-21.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Schreiner, Susan E. “Appearances and Reality in Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare.” The Journal of Religion 83.3 (2003): 345-380.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Intro to premodern critical race studies
Essay
Dennis Britton

Religious conversion(s)

Teaching Jewish-to-Christian conversion helps broaden the understanding of religious and theological conflicts that characterize the Protestant Reformation.

Teaching from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs allows students to examine different types of conversion in the same text. Teaching Jewish-to-Christian conversion helps broaden the understanding of the religious and theological conflicts that characterize the Protestant Reformation.  

Regarding Foxe’s treatment of Jews, Sharon Achinstein writes, “Contradictory and complex, Foxe's writings on Jews show how a powerful English writer conceived of the place of Jews in a newly self-conscious, Protestant English national identity amidst conflicting currents of theology, race, and politics.”

Tales of violence and cruelty as conversion rhetoric

Because it is a recurring trope in Book of Martyrs, I assign readings of stories about killing children and infants from the text. (It is important to note that both Catholics and Jews kill children in the book.)

The depictions are gruesome and should be handled with care: I alert students that we will discuss human torture and murder and remind students that Foxe is describing what happened to real people. We look at the story of Catherine Cauches and her two daughters, killed for their Protestant beliefs:  

The time then being come, when these three good seruauntes and holy Sayntes of GOD, the Innocent mother with her two daughters shoulde suffer, in the place where they should consummate theyr Martyrdome, were three stakes set vp. At the middle post was the mother, the eldest daughter on the right hande, the youngest on the other. They were first strangled, but the Rope brake before they were dead, and so the poore women fell in the fire. Perrotine, who was then great with childe, did fall on her side, where happened a ruefull sight, not onely to the eyes of all that there stood, but also to the eares of all true harted christians, that shall read this historye: For as the belly of the woman brast a sonder by vehemency of the flame, the Infant being a fayre man childe, fel into the fire, and eftsoones being taken out of the fire by one W. House, was layd vpon the grasse.

Then was the child had to the Prouost, and from him to the Bayliffe, who gaue censure, that it should be caryed backe agayne and cast into the fire. And so the infant Ba∣ptised in his own bloud, to fill vp the number of Gods innocent Sayntes, was both borne, and dyed a Martyr, lea∣uing behinde to the world, which it neuer saw, a spectacle wherein the whole world may see the Herodian cruelty of this gracelesse generation of catholicke Tormentors.


This episode is compared with an account of Jews in medieval England. It contains well-worn antisemitic tropes, including Jews as Christ-killers and accounts of Jews sacrificing Christian children:  

About which time, the wicked Iewes at Lincolne had cruelly crucified, whipped, & tormented a certaine child named Hugo of 9. yeres of age. An. 1255. in the month of August. Ex Gualt. Gisburn. At length the childe being sought & found by ye mother, being cast in a pit. 32. of those abhominable Iewes were put to executiō. wherof Mathew Paris. reciteth a long storie. The same or like fact was also intended by ye like Iewes at Norwich 20. yeres before vpon a certaine childe, whom they had first circumcised, & deteined a whole yere in custodie, intending to crucifie him, for the which the Iewes were sent vp to the tower of Lōdon, of whom 18. were hanged, & the rest remained long in prison. Of these Iewes moreouer king Henry the same yere 1255. exacted to be geuen vnto him 8000. markes in paine of hanging. Who being much agreued therwith, & complayning that the king went about their destruction, desired leaue to be geuen thē of the king, that they might depart the realm, neuer to returne agayne. But the king committed the doing of that matter vnto Earle Richard his brother, to enforce them to pay ye mony whether they would or no. Moreouer of the same Iewes mention is made in the story intituled Eulogiū. Of the Iewes in Northhampton, who had amōg thēselues prepared wilde fire, to burn the city of Londō. For the which diuers of thē were takē, & burned in the time of Lent, in the said city of Northhamptō, which was 2. yeres before, about the yere of our Lord. 1253. Ex Eulogio. And for so much as mention here is made of the Iewes, I cannot omit what some English storyes write of a certaine Iew: who not long after this time about the yeare of our Lord. 1257. fell into a priuy at Tuekesbury vpon a Sabboth day which for the great reuerence he had to his holy Sabboth, would not suffer himselfe to be plucked out. And so Lord Richarde Earle of Glocester, hearing thereof, would not suffer him to be drawne out on sonday for reuerence of the holy day. And thus the wretched superstitious Iew remaining there till Monday, was found dead in the dong.


For Foxe, Jews were no less a threat to Christianity in medieval England than Roman Catholics are a threat in the 16th century.  

I ask students to identify similarities and differences between these episodes. The killing of children is an important similarity, because it is used as evidence per excellence that Jews and Catholics are inhuman. Students will also notice the essentializing rhetoric.  

Particular to the second passage, it is useful to discuss the juxtaposition of Jews as murderers with the “humorous” account of the Jew who falls into the privy, and the significance of the fact that these appear in the same paragraph. The paragraph’s conclusion enacts a kind of revenge upon the supposed long history of Jews seeking to destroy Christians. We don’t know if this particular Jew participated in any of the cruelties described earlier in the paragraph, but this single Jew is made to bear the guilt of all the other Jews in the paragraph, as well as those who the text explicitly mentions not mentioning in the paragraph.  

And yet, Foxe still believed that Jews could become Christians—in Foxe there is a tension between seeing any individual Jewish person as representative of all Jews, who are always enemies to Christianity, and seeing Jewish individuals as potential Christians. Jews can become Christians, but those are an exception to the rule—and racist systems need “exceptions” in order to deny the existence of systemic racism. In this text, we can see a rhetorical mirror to our present moment: Foxe provides us with an example of the early modern “post-racial” (on President Obama as both exception and example that was used to prove that America was post-racial, see Bonilla-Silva). Foxe is thus messy, but grappling with race, of course, requires sorting through messiness and contradictions.  

Martin Luther, antisemitism, and the inability to convert

Martin Luther’s The Jews and Their Lies is less “messy” with regards to Jewish-to-Christian conversion. In it, the refusal of Jews to convert is racialized (chapter 15):

In short, as has already been said, do not engage much in debate with Jews about the articles of our faith. From their youth, they have been so nurtured with venom and rancour against our Lord that there is no hope until they reach the point where their misery finally makes them pliable and they are forced to confess that the Messiah has come, and that he is our Jesus. Until such a time it is much too early, yes, it is useless to argue with them about how God is triune, how he became man and how Mary is the mother of God. No human reason nor any human heart will ever grant these things, much less the embittered, venomous, blind heart of the Jews. As has already been said, what God cannot reform with such cruel blows, we will be unable to change with words and works. Moses was unable to reform the Pharaoh by means of plagues, miracles, pleas or threats; he had to let him drown in the sea.  


This is one of the tamer passages from Luther—in the most famous passages, from chapter 12, Luther asserts that Jews should be denied safety, their property seized, their sacred texts destroyed, and the ability to practice usury revoked. But in the passage above, I want students to note Luther’s essentializing language and his insistence that Jews are rendered unable to convert—or at least until some far off, unspecified future, and after the further “misery finally makes them pliable.” Luther even goes so far as to suggest that God himself cannot alter them: “God cannot reform [them] with such cruel blows.” Luther believed that 1400 years of oppression should have led Jews to convert to Christianity, and that it is too late to convert them now.  

The Jew of Malta and the early modern perception of Jewish identity

Debates about religious change more broadly and the conversion of Jews more particularly are foundational to Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. The Jewish villain, Barabas, explicitly raises the issue that if all Jews are the same any individual Jew bears a general Jewish guilt:  

Some Jews are wicked, as all Christians are:
But say the tribe that I descended of
Were all in general cast away for sin,      
Shall I be tried by their transgression?  
The man that dealeth righteously shall live:
And which of you can charge me otherwise.  


Ferneze doesn’t answer the question. He responds, “Out wretched Barbaras, / Sham’st though not thus to justify thyself.” His lack of response suggests an unwillingness to answer the question. The question seems to have struck a nerve; it exposes the same racist thinking that lies behind the discourse about Jews that we see in Foxe.  

This passage also bears on larger questions about Marlowe’s depictions of Jews in the play. Is only Barbaras guilty of his villainy, or are all Jews guilty? Does Abigail’s conversion suggest that “Jew” in not a racialized category? Does the fact that the Christians tie conversion to financial incentives undermine the early modern audience’s belief in the sincerity and supremacy of Christians? These questions can spark lively conversations in the classroom.  

Resources

Achinstein, Sharon. “John Foxe and the Jews.” Renaissance Quarterly 54.1 (2001): 86-120.

Bonilla-Silva, Edwardo. “The Structure of Racism in Color-Blind, 'Post-Racial' America.” The American Behavioral Scientist 59.11 (2015): 1358-1376.

Early Modern
Literature
Religion
RaceB4Race Highlight
Cristi Whiskey

Race-making in the Trans-Saharan slave trade

Embedding West Africa in broader transregional maps, Whiskey reviews the history of anti-Blackness in premodern Muslim societies while charting Ahmad Baba’s interventions in longstanding debates.

In my talk today I will look at Ahmad Baba’s (b.1556-d.1627) The Ladder of Ascent Towards Grasping the Law Concerning Transported Blacks or another known title from the manuscript Miʿraj al-Suʿud. He wrote his manuscript in 1615, at the beginning of the 17th century. I’m revisiting this text to think about Ahmad Baba through the lens of black and premodern critical race studies, a perspective in which scholars have not discussed Ahmad Baba’s work. My intervention focuses on the ways in which anti-blackness and race have had a long-standing presence in early Islamic history while at the same time making the argument that Black Africans from the region known as the Sahel or Sahara themselves are a part of early Islamic history. Thus, my paper considers or explores the connections, divisions, and regionalism that “existed” between West Africa (Songhay Empire) and North Africa (Maghreb) and how the trade in enslaved men and women became profitable on multiple fronts. This Trans-Saharan slave trade into the Islamic world stretched from the Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, and Atlantic Ocean, and everywhere in between. Ahmad Baba’s Ladder of Ascent is a written record about the correlations between race, slavery, and Islamic Law, and how these three concepts already had a “defined” meaning and interpretation in the 17th century. The Ladder of Ascent is a legal opinion that gives important insight into the legal debates on slavery in 17th century West Africa. My talk will be organized into three sections: a discussion of Ahmad Baba; a closer analysis of the Islamic jurisprudence around the question of enslavement of free Muslims; and a wider contextual discussion that considers how discussions in Black Atlantic Studies, particularly Black feminist work in this area; Mediterranean Studies, and Islamic Studies in Africa and especially the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade can be used to have a wider conversation about Antiblackness and premodern critical race. Ahmad Baba wrote his fatwa or legal treatise in the city of Timbuktu, one of the most influential places that contributed to the production of Islamic thought and intellectual history. Scholarly discussion has seen this work as: explanation of jurisprudence and its relationship to the enslavement of Black men and women. The Ladder of Ascent is a compilation of replies concerning the legitimacy of the capture and transportation of enslaved Black West Africans. Ahmad Baba’s fatwa had a wide-ranging audience; this fatwa could have been used and circulated throughout Western Africa and the Maghreb, and his legal treatise could have served as a legal guide to an assortment of Arab and Imazighen enslavers, as well as other legal jurists. His opinion was a response to letters sent by Saʿid b. Ibrahimal-Jirari, who is a merchant, from Tuwat. Al-Jirari sought Ahmad Baba’s legal advice because he noticed the frequency of both non-Muslim and Muslim Black men and women being sold throughout regions in the Maghreb, thus, he sought legal counsel from Ahmad Baba to understand how race played a role in the evolution of the Trans-Saharan slave trade. More specifically, Ahmad Baba catalogues the complexities between race and slavery and writes that the demarcation of difference amongst enslaved Black men and women, or those vulnerable to kidnapping and enslavement, were not always clear. In this way, Ahmad Baba’s legal opinion created an ambiguous zone in defining who is a free Muslim. This means that he gave the merchants who wrote to him a legal loophole to potentially find legal backing to enslave free Black Muslims. The Ladder of Ascent helps us think about the “relationships” between jurist, enslavers, and black Muslims and non-Muslims. Al-Jirari’s concerns revolve around finding ways to discredit Muslim identity specifically to benefit from the profits of the slave trade. He posits that the distinction between Muslim or non-Muslim identity was not of particular concern to enslavers, sellers, or buyers. Not only that but Ahmad Baba’s work illustrates the “problems” circulating around determining whether or not the enslaved were Muslim or non-Muslim and the extent to which slave raiders as well as traders questioned whether or not the “sale” of black enslaved men and women were even legal. I believe that we must keep cognizant formations of racial literacy and race-making in premodern West Africa as well as the Maghreb influence in facilitating evolving notions of race, while examining the contact zones between western European slave traders and adjacent slave markets off the west African coast. In this archive, we see that racial theories are commonplace in the dominant discourse found in the 17th century Sahara as well as Sahelian borderlands. What are the implications of the ways in which the language of race surfaces in legal opinions? As I read through his text, these are some of the questions that surfaced for me: How original was Ahmad Baba’s legal opinion on the conditions that need to be met to satisfy the legal retention of Black enslaved peoples? How are Black West Africans transformed into commodified objects using both legal and religious language? Ahmad Baba, a Muslim scholar, was commissioned to write his legal opinion on the topics concerning the capture of Black west Africans, the journey to the slave market, and the questions that arise over religious and ethnic identity. His legal opinion The Ladder of Ascent gave merchants such as al-Jirari insight into understanding the spread of Islam in west Africa as well as hinting at other popular perceptions of race and religion and the new dynamics between social histories and legal theories. Scholars, such as El Hamel, make a case that the topic of law and slavery were already present debates within Islamic doctrine; thus, at the turn of the 17th century Ahmad Baba’s legal opinion is one amongst many potential bodies of work that tried to articulate the relationship between west Africans and paganism. Paganism is important in his discussion because West African “pagans” could be legally enslaved within Islamic law. When al-Jirari sent a request seeking legal counsel from Ahmad Baba, it was to understand the implications of racial ideologies and its effect on legal doctrine and the legitimacy of enslaving or selling freed Black men and women on the slave market. According to scholars like Ghislaine Lydon, Chouki El Hamel and Bruce Hall, there were legal debates that were beginning to emerge within the archive that focused on known practices of enslaving Black Muslims as opposed to non-Muslims. Hamel writes, “the legal queries and replies under discussion are not isolated cases but rather a consistent body of historical records voicing similar concerns.” These similar concerns revolve around whether Black Muslims could be enslaved. Scholars have seen Ahmad Baba’s work in this larger legal archive as a voice of “abolition” because of his own personal history as someone who was held captive. Ahmad Baba was a member of Sanhaja an Imazighen people; he, as a non-Arab Muslim, would have been familiar to different Islamic groups were racialized within the larger hierarchies of the Islamic world. Ahmad Baba’s legal opinion emphasizes that the distinctions between Black Muslims and non-Muslims were blurred even as it was clearly unlawful to enslave other freed Muslims. Al-Jirari presents a set of questions that seek legal counsel to understand the breaking of Islamic law in connection with the rise in the number of freed Blacks that were transported to the slave market. Al-Jirari’s questions centered around the enslaved person’s legitimacy and the inability to readily identify a fellow Muslim in the lands of the Sahara. I am using John Hunwick and Fatima Harrick English translation of this text in this talk. Al-Jirari writes: Also, in the case of him whose land [of origin] is not known and whose status is unknown, and it is not known whether his enslavement preceded his conversion to Islam or not, is it not permissible to go ahead and buy and sell him without investigation? Or is investigation mandatory, or is it [merely] preferable? What is to be done if an investigation is undertaken with inconclusive results? What then is the law? Should the word of the slave be accepted or not? Does this come under the heading of doubt about the impediment, and thus it should be nullified, as in [the case of] doubt in divorce and manumission? This passage from the “The Questions of al-Jirari” reveals a layered mountain of misconceptions. He begins with his focus on the “land [of origin]” which refers to the “Sudan,” and al-Jirari goes onto mention the politics of “status;” “status” is supposed to be a signifier for religion, whether (or not) the enslaved captives from the “Sudan” are Muslim or non-Muslim. He continued to write, “it is not known whether his enslavement preceded his conversion to Islam or not.” In this line, there is consciousness dissonance about how Islam spread in the region, here al-Jirari implies that those who were captured voiced that they were Muslim, yet, as a result, of misunderstanding the religion in the “Sudan;” it was presumed that the reason for these declarations to a Muslim identity were seen as a plea to avoid transport to the slave market rather than actual long-standing Muslim identity. In this way, the Black West Africans are not seen as fully able to claim a Muslim identity. From these declarations, al-Jirari reveals the implied process of an investigation into the claims of those who claimed to be Muslim, but he then interjects, “[o]r is investigation mandatory, or is it [merely] preferable.” Two key words “investigation” and “preferable” are used within proximity to one another hint that the process of investigation was not a practice that needed to be adhered to and that the conclusion of these investigations were left up to the merchant. Then he continues to cite two other Muslim jurists, Abu Ishaq b. Hilal and al-Qarafi, who both wrote about the problems of determining the “condition” of the enslaved which the use of “condition” within al-Jirari’s questions could lead to some confusion because it may be in reference to a few things such as the status of an enslaved captive after a jihad, or the doubt about the conditions meant to keep the enslaved man or woman within one’s household, or the validity of the sale. Timothy Cleveland argued that Ahmad Baba was aware of these changing social attitudes toward Black people in West Africa, and he argues that Ahmad Baba tried to change these attitudes developed by enslavers of the enslaved, and specifically, from the Maghreb: “but his text went far beyond a mere interpretation of law and practice, and made specific attempt to change the behavior of North Africans, whom he accused of sometimes purchasing West African slaves on the basis of race, rather than according to Islam.” This sets up an even larger debate about the methods that were considered “legalized” tactics to create the enslavable other. One avenue would be through the concept of a legal jihad and another means would be through identification of the “unbeliever” or “infidel.” Scholars use the definition of “unbeliever” to discuss the concept of a legal jihad: [t]hat only the unbeliever who has refused the summons to place himself under the governance of Muslims…may be enslaved after having been defeated in lawfully constituted jihad. The condition for a lawfully constituted jihad was that it be conducted by the caliph as amir al-muʾminin shariʿa or his duly appointed regional governor. According to Ahmad Baba, all who reside within the realm of the Songhay Empire are Muslim, thus, they should not be subjected to enslavement. Yet, there remain lands that are “unknown,” additionally, he mentions locals’ disputes between peoples. Notably, Ahmad Baba mentions the raids of Muslims onto the lands of those who are non-Muslim, “close to each of these is a land in which there are unbelievers (kafara) whom the Muslim people of these lands make raids on.” Then, he moves into a debate concerning land tax (kharja); the land tax is supposed to be a form of protection from the possibilities of being captured. Even though he makes clear that the Songhay is a Muslim land, the concept of a jihad creeps into the frame of his narrative. He begins his discussion about the constant disputes between Sultans which leads to unsanctioned raids, “[s]ometimes the sultans of these lands are in a state of discord the one with the other, and the sultan of one land attacks the other and takes whatever captives he can, they beings Muslims.” From the assortment of passages that Ahmad Baba weaves together within his replies, he acknowledges that both of Muslims and non-Muslims were included in those being enslaved. Ahmad Baba responds to this known practice by simply stating that it is lawful to own a nonbeliever and unlawful to have ownership of a Muslim: You said: It is known that according to the shari‘a the sole reason for being owned is unbelief (kufr). Thus, whoever purchases an unbeliever is allowed to own him. In the contrary case he is not. Conversion to Islam subsequent to the existence of the aforementioned condition has no effect on the “continued ownership. Although it does address the illegal aspect of owning enslaved Black Muslim, his answer is still rooted in a stance of anti-blackness. His crucial point, “[i]n the contrary case he is not. Conversion to Islam subsequent to the existence of the aforementioned condition has no effect on continued owner.” The construction of these two sentences really sets up an incredibly difficult process for Black Muslims to legally prove a Muslim identity while at the same time reinforcing the position of Black subjectivity. Black subjectivity as pagan subjectivity is continually reinforced because it is presumed that Blackness already has a more established relationship to paganism and conversion to Islam cannot completely happen from this Black subjectivity position. Ahmad Baba to some extent could relate to captivity because he spent many years in exile in Marrakesh. However, even with his experience of seclusion, he illustrates the limitations of relatability. His legal opinion on the issue of slavery is that one should not enslave other Black Muslims, but the capture of non-Muslims was acceptable. And even with the latter, the continuum to full Muslim identity for Black West Africans is constantly put under pressure. As mentioned earlier through al-Jirari questions, we can see the unfolding friction in the legal theory of enslavement when it is applied to Black men and women. Al-Jirari mentions the testimonies of those who claimed to be Muslims were subject to investigation, but the process of proving, “who was Muslim,” proved to be the legal negation needed to enslave people from West Africa. Al-Jirari and more broadly speaking enslavers in North Africa, were aware that there were Muslims in West Africa. But is this history of Islam accepted or do Arabs, and North African capturers of the enslaved have created narratives for the Black people that originated in “Sudan.” Saidiya Hartman, a cultural historian on Black life in the 19th century, mentions in her interview with Frank B. Wilderson, “the slave occupies the position of unthought.” The process of placing narratives onto enslaved West Africans is a form of obliteration, “that every attempt to employ the slave in a narrative ultimately resulted in his or her obliteration.” Thus, earlier I mentioned the concerns that al-Jirari expressed over the enslavement of other Black Muslims, but of course, that is a qualifier to say that al-Jirari might have been more concerned about the “conditions” of the sale overlooking the identity of those that were enslaved. Hamel writes about how blackness presented a source contradiction in Islamic thought about the spread of Islam in West Africa. He explains how the Hamitic curse could be used to justify the legal enslavement of Black Africans even if it was direct contradiction of Islamic law: These interpretations of Islamic law dismiss the Hamitic myth and deny any difference between the races with respect to being a Muslim but admit divisions and enforce or create the identity of the “enslaveable other,” namely the unbeliever or infidel. This identity is validated through the insistence on differences derived from paganism, although the ideology of enslavement based on infidelity (kufr) does have any foundation in the Qur’an or the Hadith. Miʿraj al-Suʿud by Ahmad Baba at the beginning of the seventeenth century is an example of a legal text that illustrates how identities were defined, maintained, and violated. Thus, Hamel explains this ideology about the concept of “unbeliever” or “infidel” or who is amongst inhabiting these ideas has a negative impact on blackness because blackness is not readily associated with Islam nor is it readily perceived that process of conversion was a more holistic process in the Sahara. The curse of Ham is an interesting thing to think about because this is racialized ideology that does not exist within the Qur’an, so this points to how those who traded in enslaved peoples were looking for other means to justify slavery within the codification of Islamic Law. Ahmad Baba disapproves of this racial theory as something connected to outside influences as the base to consider the enslavement of Black men and women who were Muslim. Ahmad Baba’s legal opinion could be seen as a legal treatise that tries to resolve these contradictions between racial discourses, between the Qur’an and the hadith, thus he tries to emphasize the role of being identified as Muslim. By doing so, his work moves the goal posts of who gets to be seen as fully Muslim and whose Blackness already causes suspicion and question to his/her/their Muslim identity. Ahmad Baba’s treatise is working within a rapidly changing landscape about how slavery would be legitimatized within Islamic thought. To conclude, I am examining the connections between legal theory and race that went into constructing legal opinions about African groups that were enslaved, and by this, this paper undertakes the scope of examining how these legal opinions shaped structures that allowed for the anti-blackness and structural racism to manifest. In this way, though my talk today focuses on the Trans-Saharan archive of slavery, Islamic Africa, and Black West Africa, it should be brought into conversation with the work on race, enslavement, and Antiblackness that is happening in the Black Atlantic and also in the Mediterranean. However, while this talk does not address the wider archive centered on the connections between legal thought and race, this talk does heavily rely on Ahmad Baba’s legal treatise The Ladder of Ascent to look at these formations of race-making in the Sahara. The ability to look at a text with a bidirectional lens lends itself to consider how we interpret these texts as it relates to modern African history, as well as the conditions of anti-blackness throughout the African diaspora. Long after the 17th century, The Ladder of Ascent is still a crucial text amongst the archives of slavery, revealing the important ways in which ethnicity and affiliation within ethnic peoples in the Sahara produced its own type of racial hierarchies and anti-blackness ideologies. Thus, as shown through Ahmad Baba’s fatwa, the Trans-Saharan slave trade was complex and racialized institutions and structured antiblackness did exist. Ahmad Baba’s interpretations of what constitutes lawful enslavement, his legal treatise draws attention to the complexities of a developing racial hierarchy within Islam distinguishing what groups of West Africans were to be considered Muslim tethered to racist theories that associated blackness to positions of enslavement, despite a Muslim identity.

Questionable Bills of Sale? Legal Opinions and Race-Making in the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade | Watch the full talk

Presented by Cristi Whiskey at Region and Enmity: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Cristi Whiskey discusses Ahmad Baba’s Ladder of Ascent Towards Grasping the Law Concerning Transported Blacks (Miʿraj as-suʿud ila nayl majlub as-sudan) (c. 1615), a legal treatise composed in seventeenth-century Timbuktu, itself a response to the letter of Saʿid ibn Ibrahim al-Jirari of Tuwat (present-day Algeria). Embedding West Africa in its broader transregional map, Whiskey reviews the history of anti-Blackness in premodern Muslim societies while charting Ahmad Baba’s interventions in longstanding debates. How, Whiskey asks, were Black Africans subjected to legal and religious discursive forces that sustained transregional mercantile complexes of slavery? By looking into Ahmad Baba’s work, Whiskey highlights where distinctions imposed between Black Muslims and non-Muslims were blurred in service of rationalizing enslavement. The discussion also brings the context of early modern West Africa into conversation with work being done in Black Atlantic feminist work, Mediterranean Studies, and other fields for the sake of fostering a wider discussion on historical anti-Blackness.

Early Modern
History
Transnational studies
RaceB4Race Highlight
Roland Betancourt

The far right's Byzantium

Roland Betancourt analyzes contemporary white supremacist invocations of Byzantium. The alt-right ideas of a New Byzantium share links with premodern narratives of defeat and reconquest.

Over the past year, the conversion of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul back into a mosque has been smoldering in the background of global politics. Built as the church of “Holy Wisdom” by the architects Anthemios and Isidoros under Emperor Justinian between 532-537 CE, the monument has had a long and complex history. It served as the key imperial church of the Byzantine Empire until its conquest by the Ottomans in 1453, when it was converted into a mosque under the Ottoman Empire, and eventually it was turned into a museum in 1934 in the early days of the Turkish Republic. As an emblem of the Byzantine Empire and associated with modern-day Christian Orthodoxies, however, the role of Hagia Sophia in modern discourse has long been used as a subterfuge for promoting anti-Islamic rhetoric under the guise of cultural heritage and preservation. From Charlottesville to the Capitol, medieval imagery has been repeatedly on show at far-right rallies and riots in recent years. Displays of Crusader shields and tattoos derived from Norse and Celtic symbols are of little surprise to medieval historians like me who have long documented the appropriation of the Middle Ages by today’s far right. But amid all the expected Viking imagery and nods to the Crusaders has been another dormant “medievalism” that has yet to be fully acknowledged in reporting on both the far right and conspiracy theorist movements: the Byzantine Empire. In September 2017, Jason Kessler, the white-nationalist organizer of the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, inaugurated a new white-supremacist group, entitled “The New Byzantium.” Kessler’s manifesto describes this body as “a premier organization for pro-white advocacy in the 21st century.” The premise being that when Rome fell, the Byzantine Empire went on to preserve a white-European civilization. For Kessler, this “New Byzantium” is intended to preserve white dominance after “the inevitable collapse of the American Empire,” going on to tout it as a “civil rights organization” and a “nonprofit dedicated to preserving Western Civilization.” The same narrative today is scattered across QAnon boards, who spout conspiracy theories about a deep state cabal of Stan-worshipping, blood-drinking pedophiles running the world. These declarations (dispersed across 4chan and its subsequent iterations, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms, including Facebook) discuss the Byzantine Empire as either continuing the legacy of Rome after it was destroyed by the Jews; or, Byzantium being the only true empire, Rome having been a mythical invention to degrade its power. In some renditions, Byzantium is the original foundation of the deep state, which has persisted in secrecy since its fall, trading in eunuchs or preserving whiteness and Christianity, depending on the thread. Most Americans, however, have never heard of Byzantium. In the United States, Byzantium is rarely taught and when it is, it is subsumed under a narrative of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and set alongside outdated narratives of the “Dark Ages” still being taught in our high schools. At most, one might have learned in passing about the mosaics of Emperor Justinian and Theodore in Ravenna, Italy, most likely as a colorful illustration in the textbook. And yet, Byzantium has had a significant place in the imaginary of the so-called “alt-right” and other adjoining white nationalist groups across an ever-more nefarious internet. The entanglements seen between Byzantium and white nationalist mouthpieces are not a cursory, random, or haphazard selection of just an organization’s name. For years, Byzantium has appeared throughout far-right social media, primarily in the Russian, Serbian, and Greek spheres and their diasporas, connected to radicalized iterations of Orthodoxy. On Instagram alone, we can find countless memes that deploy kitschy Crusader images alongside well-known far-right tropes. In one example, we see an image of Pepe the Frog in his racist, 4chan manifestation as Kek, depicted as a kneeling Crusader holding a bloody sword before a scene of destruction in a desert landscape. The scene is captioned on the image, “Kek Wills It,” echoing the alt-right’s preferred Crusader cry, “God Wills It” (Deus Vult), with Kek replacing that God. Curiously, the hashtags tell us little about medieval history per se, instead they speak repeatedly of Rome, accompanied by hashtags like #RetakeConstantinople or simply #Byzantines. More explicit posts speak to a vision of Byzantine supremacy or the insistence that Hagia Sophia and Constantinople will be re-conquered. In one such example, posted in late 2015, we see a Western depiction of Christ floating in the foreground above Hagia Sophia, while the military figure of Saint George slaying the dragon stands beside him as a metaphor for the defeat of the Turkish state. This point is made explicitly clear when we look closer into the image, which is tightly cropped so as to erase the Ottoman minarets from the building, and the spire at the top of the dome has been replaced with a resplendent gold cross. The hashtags go on to reassert that narrative of defeat and re-conquest. This narrative of the re-conquest of Constantinople is the most prominent appearance of Byzantium within Orthodox groups that wish to see a Christian Constantinople once again. But, these narratives are as old as May 29th, 1453, when the city was overwhelmed by Ottoman forces. Following the conquest of Constantinople, laments for the city were written throughout the early-modern period. While relatively understudied, these Greek “laments” (threnoi) speak to two key notions evident in these social media posts: Firstly, the divine will of God in these military quests; and, secondly, that the city will be Christian again. In one dialogue between personifications of Venice and Constantinople, the figure of Constantinople states that it is “by divine will that I fell from the throne.” And, in another lament for Hagia Sophia itself, angels descend from heaven as the masses are huddled celebrating the liturgy during the siege. The angels, admonish the priests to cease the liturgy, saying: “Stop the Cherubikon and lower the sacred objects; priests, take the chalices and you all turn off the candles, because it is the will of God that the City be Turkish.” The laments and historical chronicles attest to this idea that Constantinople did not so much fall as it was put in a state of suspended animation. The texts speak about the relics and icons departing the city and ascending into heaven, so that they may be safeguarded until the return of Christian rule. Even the Emperor Constantine XI Palaeologos was understood not to have died, but rather to have been petrified at the time of the fall and entombed in the city’s walls, awaiting the return of the Empire. Today, excerpts of these laments for the city are being quoted on QAnon message boards to lament the conversion of Hagia Sophia and to speak of the prophesized re-conquest of the city and the monument. These stories, diluted across the centuries, are vividly at work in contemporary online culture. Posts touting the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a church as an impending reality (or threat) are prevalent. For example, you often find tightly cropped images of Hagia Sophia with a modern orthodox cross photoshopped onto its dome. The ominous, meme-like script over it reading, “Soon…” with hashtags like #ConstantinopleWillRise or #RetakeConstantinople. In one poignantly causal iteration of this meme, we see a person holding an orthodox-cross necklace over the dome of Hagia Sophia, superimposing it in real time in a gesture that is as striking in its banality as in its violence: the caption here again reads, “One day…” Such violence of erasure is perhaps best embodied in one image, shared by a Slavic nationalist, which shows an exalted Orthodox cross on a stepped pedestal before a resplendent sun. Its appearance cuts through the shadow of clouds over Istanbul, while blood-red rays shatter the minarets of Hagia Sophia. The golden spire atop the dome that is being destroyed in this image is not like the one atop the building today, but has been replaced with a crescent moon to emphasize the destruction of Islam. Posted in late 2017, the image shows Hagia Sophia as a mosque in order to re-articulate the object destruction, namely Islam and the Turkish state. The caption makes the point of this image explicitly clear: “One day we will reclaim our stolen city, Constantinople.” In March 2019, a terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand claimed the lives of over fifty worshippers at two mosques. In his 74-page manifesto (posted to the infamous 8chan message board), the shooter railed against the Turks and the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, stating that “We are coming for Constantinople, and we will destroy every mosque and minaret in the city. The Hagia Sophia will be free of minarets and Constantinople will be rightfully Christian owned once more.” Such historical citations are prolific across infamous message boards, where the so-called “alt-right” and QAnon conspiracy theories have been thriving for the past years. Yet, the Byzantine Empire, its former capital, and Hagia Sophia have been a consistent presence in the vocabulary of white supremacy and Islamophobia, gaining immense popularity in the fall of 2017, curiously alongside the rise of QAnon itself. Over the past year, as news of Hagia Sophia’s conversion into a mosque trickled through news outlets, such posts have naturally escalated in number and intensity. Yet, already in the buildup to the 2016 election and its aftermath, the narratives of Constantinopolitan re-conquest have been explicitly politicized in the guise of United States politics. Memes like Emperor Justinian wearing a hat that says “Make the Roman Empire Great Again,” quickly gives way to the more sinister reality of this alleged nerdy joke. There are a multitude of hats and shirts online that clearly explore this connection between Byzantium and America, such as a rendition the MAGA hat that reads, “Make Istanbul Constantinople Again,” or shirts that say, “Constantinople Reclamation Squad” or “1453: Worst Year Ever,” or the Coca-Cola logo reworked as “Retake Constantinople.” And many posts across social media seek to rebuke those who might call it Istanbul instead of Constantinople. Associations between Byzantium and extremism in America are well attested. The hashtag #OrthodoxyOrDeath,” for example, documents associations between Christianity, Orthodoxy, Crusaders, and Confederates, and these ties are seen in other hashtags too. Today, it is common to see “Make Istanbul Constantinople Again,” circulated with QAnon-associated hashtags and the call for its reclamation is found across QAnon boards. Even a simple Twitter search of the keyword “Constantinople” sheds light on the violent ideologies brewing under the guise of Byzantium today. The re-conquest of Constantinople was explicitly tied to Donald Trump’s presidency with images that prophesized this event during his rule. In the most popular of these, Trump is depicted congratulating Putin “on the retaking of Constantinople,” shaking hands before the Blue Mosque (which surely the person composing this image thought was Hagia Sophia). Yet, other such images of this ilk play with the union of Trump and Putin, as one where Putin admonishes Trump for calling the city Istanbul, or where Trump himself asks for the city’s conquest on behalf of Russia. These memes even have led to their own prophetic logic as online readers analyzed formal connections between existing images and those that had been photoshopped into existence, as we see here. Certainly, it is possible to historically contextualize the promulgation of such memes throughout the Greek and Slavic worlds, and certainly one can reasonably understand their appearance within pockets of Orthodoxy in the United States. Yet, one is left to wonder why American teenagers with no ties to orthodoxy in any capacity would be championing the reconquest of Constantinople, alongside the Crusader-cry of “Deus Vult” and the OK-hand-gesture popularly understood in this period to be a dog whistle for “white power.” For example, following the news coverage of the OK gesture’s white-power associations, one Reddit post took the American Sign Language alphabet and produced a satirical alphabet of alt-right language with the suggestion that it be share with Vice in order to confuse the liberal media. This is a deeply disturbing and grotesque series of alleged hand-gestures, which is why I have opted not to show it here today, advocating everything from rape to lynching, and yet it culminates with the words, “Byzantium (retake Constantinople).” While to the uninformed reader, this might come off as the nonsensical punchline to a sick joke, what we can appreciate from this evidence is that “Byzantium” has found a strange place within a newfound vocabulary of hatred and genocide. Nevertheless, this does not answer the earlier question of how or why Byzantium has found such a home in the far right’s online culture. This view of Byzantium is one that is fundamentally contradictory to the Byzantium taught in American history books, which has traditionally had a fairly negative view of the Byzantine Empire. It is a view of World History where the Crusaders did not pillage, destroy, and occupy the city of Constantinople in the thirteenth-century, it is a view where Italians did not mock the Byzantine emperors for their dark skin, it is a view where Venice did not ignore the calls for aid from Constantinople in 1453, and it does not acknowledge the fact that the Byzantines were seen as much as infidels in Western eyes as their Islamic neighbors, excommunicated by the Pope in the mid-eleventh century for their heretical ideas regarding everything from the use of leavening in the Eucharistic bread to the progression of the Holy Spirit. In these memes, we see no trace of the “servile and effeminate Greeks of Byzantium,” that Edward Gibbon decried in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) and which has long marginalized the Byzantine Empire in the English-speaking world. In our dictionaries, the adjective “byzantine” covers a range of deprecative characteristics, encompassing everything that is overly complicated, bureaucratic, devious, and corrupt. Nowhere in popular western history is there a vision of Byzantium that fits with what we saw online in the ramp up to the 2016 presidential election and in response to the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque by the Turkish State in 2020. What we are seeing espoused in these various online posts is a vision of Byzantium from a Greek, Serbian, and Russian nationalist perspective, but one that has somehow managed to permeate the online culture of the far right. The answers as to how and why this has occurred merits and deserves concerted research and careful scrutiny. But as newfound laments for Hagia Sophia are sung, it is necessary to be aware of these unholy entanglements. And to remember the conditions under which Hagia Sophia was built in the sixth century: After the original Hagia Sophia was burned down in an uprising against Emperor Justinian, he is said to have slaughtered over thirty thousand of his own citizens, defiantly building the new church from the ashes. Throughout the centuries, it served as the imperial stage for the coronation of emperors, the marriage of dynasties, and the performance of the usual and habitual ceremonies of state. Hagia Sophia has always been political. Emerging from the utterly brutal state politics of Justinian and serving as the contested space of imperial power and dominance. It is impossible to condone the Trumpian politics motivating Erdoğan’s use of Hagia Sophia, yet the contestation of power and faith through this building is poignantly in keeping with its long imperial histories. As scholars lament the de-secularization of Hagia Sophia, we must remember the sinister role that Byzantium plays in white supremacist rhetoric and how these laments feed into these Islamophobic narratives. It is wholly intolerable to overlook the deep entanglements that the conversion of Hagia Sophia has had with ideations of a white ethnostate, genocide, and Islamophobia. Something that the field of Byzantine Studies has yet to acknowledge or reckon with. Before speaking to you today, I wondered if I wanted to present on this difficult material. A large part of me did not want to give voice to such vile hatred in such a wonderfully affirming space, where we come together to carefully share our work on race in the Middle Ages. I am worn down by narratives that revictimize or that callously display the ways in which the Middle Ages, in all iterations, are being deployed today by various white supremacist groups. Yet, I am also conscious that the focus of this conference is Politics, and that this orientation demands me to think of how our work contributes to discussions in our public spheres. In October 2020, I published my book Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages, where I look at matters of sexual consent, reproductive rights, trans identity, queerness, and racialization – particularly seeking to understand how these categories intersect in medieval race thinking. Over the months that have followed, I have spent my time working to produce op-eds that reflect the key themes addressed in my book with the aims of expanding and broadening a public discourse. Of course, I have gotten vitriolic hate emails shortly after each one. And, contrary to what it might seem to many of my white colleagues, this project was not a product of the previous presidency. But directly emerged before that from the various discarded and ignored subjectivities I had seen in the margins of my research across Byzantine Studies. As a queer Latinx person, I long confronted a disjuncture with how my peers were approaching the historical record and their explicit complicities with far-right nationalist groups tied to the Byzantine legacy and the promotion of transphobic and homophobic programs: one person in my field, in fact, has even called for the extermination of all LGBT people. And, several of the Byzantine accounts that were on my hate-speech watchlist in 2017 have concertedly attacked my book and this research since it came out. As all of us here are intimately aware, there is no difference between our medieval research and that on the politics that dominate it in the present. In thinking about medieval race, we find ourselves also bound to its politics today. And I hope that with this paper, you are better equipped to notice forms of Byzantinizing white supremacy and Islamophobia, both in order to call it out and to protect yourselves from it. To me, this research on the far right’s interest in Byzantium is not some curious study into popular culture or historiography, but it is about protecting myself and you (my fellow colleagues) as we work toward a more equitable past and future.

The Far Right's Byzantium | Watch the full talk

Presented by Roland Betancourt at Politics: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Roland Betancourt analyzes contemporary white supremacist invocations of Byzantium. The alt-right ideas of a New Byzantium share links with premodern narratives of defeat and reconquest, including Greek laments from the 15th century accenting the role of divine will in military affairs and prophesying the Christianization of Istanbul. Betancourt demonstrates that these genocidal prophecies are not only active in white supremacist circles today—with roots in Greek, Serbian, and Russian nationalist discourses—but have become interlinked with contemporary MAGA politics and dreams of Trump and Putin together within a conquered Istanbul. Key to these politics is the Hagia Sophia, which is imagined as a site of conquest: a reclaimed, reconsecrated church at the center of a re-Christianized Constantinople (Istanbul). Reviewing memes and postings from alt-right circles, Betancourt argues that “Byzantium” is part of a vocabulary of hatred and genocide. At the same time, he outlines the common condemnations of Byzantium on gendered, racial and religious grounds in medieval and early modern Anglophone discourses. What previously defined US imaginings of Byzantium may now play into white supremacist rhetoric, and medieval scholarship and contemporary politics are necessarily intertwined.

Medieval
Art History
Transnational studies
Activity
Kim F. Hall

BIPOC lives in the English archives

This assignment asks students to investigate online databases in search of BIPOC who lived in England between 1500-1700.

This assignment asks you to investigate online databases in search of BIPOC who lived in England between 1500-1700. Imtiaz Habib notes in Black Lives in the English Archives that some of the difficulties he encountered when looking for Black lives were beginning to be somewhat alleviated by increased digitization of catalogs and archives themselves. With the celebrations of the abolition of the British slave trade in 2007 and the later interest in what is known as the Windrush generation, UK scholars and activists have been working for decades to make Black history more accessible online. You will be able to take advantage of their labors to help us think in concrete terms what it meant to live as a person of color in early modern England. The most centralized database is British History Online, but you might come across other local databases or databases devoted to slave trading.

This is an exploratory assignment, which means you will be assessed on the thoughtfulness of your approach and the clarity of your write-up rather than on the specific outcome. Your paper should include answers to the questions marked with an asterisk. Given that some of the questions are about process, I advise you to take notes during or immediately after your search sessions.

Who is the person you found? What can you tell about this person from the document you discovered? What did you want to know that you couldn’t find out/What context did you need for greater understanding? What in the archive or in your search caught your attention? How did the document connect to other things you read or experienced this semester?

What search term/s did you try? What archive did you use? Did you look at other sources besides your original document (for example, a map of early modern London, a scholarly book on the Black presence)?

What problem or challenges did you encounter in your search? (For example, when I was looking for examples of Black history digital archives, the most promising sites had broken or inactive links and it was a big letdown.) Was there a challenge you felt you didn’t overcome? How did that make you feel? Was there an obstacle that surprised you? Why?

Where can the "document" (or record of the document) be found? Is the original archival document available for download? Is there a transcription?

What did you learn from your search? (This might be covered in earlier questions.) What perspective did this exercise give you on Habib's book?

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Discussion questions
Chouki El Hamel

Race-making and the myth of Ham discussion questions

To begin a classroom discussion about the curse of Ham myth, undergraduates can consider what they know about stories and histories and what they understand as truth.

To begin a classroom discussion about the myth (or curse) of Ham, undergraduates can consider what they know about stories and histories and what they understand as truth. In the case of Ham, the claim is for an explanatory truth: why it’s reasonable, even righteous, to enslave other people. A premodern critical race perspective on such a claim looks to where the idea comes from, what it has influenced, and how it has evolved. The myth of Ham can help students consider the origins of culturally determined truths.

Starting with student experience

Students are often more engaged when they start with their own experiences. As societies change so do people’s understanding about the meaning of events in the past. On an individual level, students might share ideas about a historical event that they understand differently now than what they remember learning in elementary school. Example: causes of the U.S. Civil War.

Destabilizing history

Sometimes history is used as a substitute for causality: because this happened, things are the way that they are. Students can consider how the lens of premodern critical race scholarship on the myth of Ham turns this idea around. 

  • Which came first: slavery, or the idea that slavery is divinely sanctioned?
  • How does tracing the origins of the myth of Ham provide evidence that stories about the past don’t just change—that they are purposefully retold in ways that suit the needs of the storyteller? 
  • Do students see history(ies) as fundamentally unstable and multi-vocal? How do the variations in the stories about Ham and the curse expand student thinking about how truth, or beliefs, evolve over time?

Racialization as marking

Thinking about racialization means wondering about how the “marking” of a person (or a kind of person) would cause people to judge an individual or group. 

  • What is a somatic normative? 
  • Do students see modern variations in social attitudes toward eye or nose shapes?
  • Is there a standard of beauty? Standards about tattoos? Or suntans? 

History as a record of idea shifting

Students can think about history as a record of people’s changing ideas, not just events that happen to groups. A discussion related to the myth of Ham could include:

  • What kinds of new knowledge about the world probably caused new perspectives on food, dress, or language?
  • How might changing perspectives on the world cause individuals to seek scriptural passages that would explain why some groups had more power than others? 

How do we counter historical narratives?

Because the myth of Ham has been “wielded to justify by divine decree the colonization, enslavement, and oppression of Black Africans,” what do students think they could or should do (as writers, or activists, or in other roles) to counteract this racist rationalization? Is there a Throughline to today’s influencers and the impact of social media?

Ancient
History
Religion
Syllabus
Dennis Britton

Teaching the Reformation

A unit from Dennis Britton's "Survey of British Literature" course on the Reformation and the understandings of religious and racial difference in the period.

An excerpt of “Survey of British literature 1: From Beowulf to Shakespeare” (a second-year survey course)

Course description

This course will traverse nearly 900 years of literature written in Britain, from Old English to early modern English literature. Of course, 900 years of literature cannot be thoroughly covered in a semester. Hence, this course will introduce you to works that capture important literary developments and social concerns at various historical moments. The literary works are diverse not only in time period and genre (e.g. epic, romance, lyric, and drama), but also in their authorship and their encounters with race, gender, religion, and nationality. We will investigate how the representations of these encounters—in their various generic forms and historical contexts—work to define “Englishness.”  

Reformation unit

Day 1: Conversion, race, gender, and nation: introduction to the Reformation and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

A brief lecture on the Reformation: Luther’s 95 theses, Henry VIII's separation from the Roman Catholic Church, Marian Counter Reformation, Elizabeth’s reestablishment of Protestantism. (There are also many good short overviews of the Reformation on YouTube that can be assigned instead of giving a lecture).  

John Foxe, “The First Examination of Anne Askew” (in John Foxe, Book of Martys, ed. John King, Oxford University Press, 2009), 22-34.

Day 2: Persecution and antisemitism: Foxe’s Book of Martyr’s continued

The Guernsey Martyrs (in John Foxe, Book of Martyrs, ed. John King, Oxford University Press, 2009), 198-203.

“the wicked Jewes at Lincoln” and “a certain Jew…fell into a privy” (I use EBBO-TCP, a good way to introduce students to this resource)

Day 3: Refusing to convert: selections from Luther’s On the Jews and their Lies and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta

Selections from On the Jews and their Lies (Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies)

The Jew of Malta (act 1)

Day 4: The Jew of Malta continued

The Jew of Malta (acts 2-3)

Day 5: The Jew of Malta continued

The Jew of Malta (acts 4-5)

Early Modern
Literature
Religion
Essay
Chouki El Hamel

Ham and the rationale for colonization

The Hamitic myth was used as a justification for the colonial endeavors of European countries in the late medieval period. This rhetoric traveled to the Americas and became a theological reasoning for the institution of American chattel slavery.

Ham and the rationale for colonization

European Christian nations used the Hamitic myth as a rationale for slavery and the colonial endeavors of various empires. In the 15th century the Portuguese began a regular program of slave-raids. Gomes Eannes de Azurara, a scholar in the court of Prince Henri the Navigator, references the curse of Ham in The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, a travel narrative that glorifies the nation of Portugal and the colonization of Africa:

Black were Moors like the others, though their slaves, in accordance with ancient custom, which I believe to have been because of the curse which, after the Deluge, Noah laid upon his son Cain [sic], cursing him in this way: that his race should be subject to all the other races of the world. And from this race these blacks are descended, as wrote the Archbishop Don Rodric of Toledo and Joesphus in his book on the Antiquities of the Jews, and Wlter, with other authors who have spoken of the generations of Noah, from the time of his going out on the Ark.


George Best, a chronicler of travel narratives, also used the curse theory to define racial difference. These texts were hugely influential in early modern England, and helped create British society’s understanding of a larger world they had never seen. George Best, in A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie. . . (1578) wrote:

Blacknesse proceedeth of some naturall infection of the first inhabitants of that Countrey, and so all the whole progenie of them descended, all still polluted with the same blot of infection. Therefore it shal not be farre from our purpose, to examine the first originall of these blacke men, and how by lineall discente, they haue hitherto continued thus blacke.


Best then goes on to recount what had become a common argument, that God cursed Ham’s son, Chus [sic], and his descendants with Blackness. He thus concludes,

And of this blacke & cursed Chus came al these blacke Moores which are in Africa... the cause of the Ethiopians blacknesse, is the curse & natural infection of bloud, & not the distemperature of the clymate.


In her 1969 article, “The Hamitic hypothesis; its origin and function in time perspective,” Edith Sanders writes, “It becomes clear then that the hypothesis is symptomatic of the nature of race relations, that it has changed its content if not its nomenclature through time, and that it has become a problem of epistemology.” This story lingers in the minds of Europeans, moving outward, adapted as needed, while the colonial occupation of most of the world continues—like a virus, it spreads.

Chouki El Hamel writes in Black Morocco:

Not until the Western European Enlightenment and the rise of empirical science did the religious account of the origins of race start to crumble, only to give rise, unfortunately, to racist pseudoscientific concepts of human classifications based on the unfortunate distortion of Darwin’s theory, namely social Darwinism. But even the conceptual revolution of the Enlightenment did not prevent the 19th century European travelers to Africa from referring to the Hamitic theory in their travel accounts. As contemporary historian William McKee Eans concluded: ‘By studying the shifting ethnic identifications of the ‘sons of Ham,’ by following their journey in myth from the land of Canaan to the land of Guinea, we can perhaps learn something about the historical pressures that shaped modern white racial attitudes.'


Just as spices travel so does the sinful idea of the Hamitic curse. The Hamitic myth and its racist connotations were used in the religious and cultural history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Ham, chattel slavery, and the Americas

The curse of Ham mythology, a mainstay of early modern European thought around race and national identity, was a primary tool of propaganda in early America to condone and ensure the longevity of chattel slavery. Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning gives some brief examples of this transfer of thought from Europe to America and its weaponization in the infant nation:

In a 1615 address for the planters in Ireland and Virginia, the Reverend Thomas Cooper said that White Shem, one of Noah’s three sons, ‘shall be lord over’ the ‘cursed race of Cham’—meaning Noah’s son Ham—in Africa. Future Virginia politician George Sandys also conjured curse theory to degrade Blackness. In a 1620 paraphrase of Genesis, future politician Thomas Peyton wrote of Cain, or ‘the Southern man,’ a ‘black deformed elf,’ and 'the Northern white, like unto God himself.’ Five years later, Clergyman released the gargantuan four-volume Hakluytus Posthumus of travel manuscripts left to him by his mentor, Richard Hakluyt. Purchas blasted the ‘filthy sodomits, sleepers, ignorant, beast, disciples of Cham . . . to whom the blacke darknesse is reserved for ever.’ These were the ideas about African people circulating throughout England and the English colonies as African people were being hauled into Britannia on slave ships.


Frederick Douglass, in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1849, writes of the curse of Ham’s fragility, and the unstable border between white and Black, in a specifically American context:

Every year brings with it multitudes of this class of slaves. It was doubtless in consequence of a knowledge of this fact, that one great statesman of the south predicted the downfall of slavery by the inevitable laws of population. Whether this prophecy is ever fulfilled or not, it is nevertheless plain that a very different-looking class of people are springing up at the south, and are now held in slavery, from those originally brought to this country from Africa; and if their increase will do no other good, it will do away the force of the argument, that God cursed Ham, and therefore American slavery is right. If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters.


This passage from Douglass is significant because it showcases how the instability of race is not only a contemporary concern. These constructions have been built upon shaky ground.

During the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Benjamin Palmer, the “founding father” of the Southern Presbyterian church, a famous orator, and the founder of Rhodes College, frequently leaned on the curse of Ham mythology to persuade the public of his secessionist politics. A vehement supporter of segregation, and in particular, the enslavement of Black Africans, the mythology of Ham became his primary means of the moral and religious justification for slavery in his many sermons.

One of the many examples of these speeches is Palmer’s “National Responsibility before God,” delivered June 13, 1861. Stephen R. Haynes, in his book Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery, notes:

“In ‘National Responsibility before God,’ Palmer relied on Noah's curse to explain the historical position of the African, to confirm the dependency of the American Negro, and to provide a theological justification for slavery. He established the importance of Genesis 9 by noting that ‘if we ascend the stream of history to its source, we find in Noah's prophetic utterances to his three sons, the fortunes of mankind presented in perfect outline.’ The benediction given to Shem, Palmer writes, marks him for a ‘destiny predominantly religious,’ and the divine trust of the Hebrew Semites until the time of Christ was to ‘testify for the unity of God against the idolatry of mankind.’ Turning to the descendants of Noah's son Japheth, Palmer contends that the ‘enlargement’ promised him in Noah's blessing can be seen in ‘the hardy and aggressive families of this stock [that] have spread over the larger portion of the earth's surface, fulfilling their mission as the organ of human civilization.’ According to Palmer, the task of civilizing the world, assigned first to Greeks and Romans and later to the various nations of Europe, has been realized through Japhetic achievements in the scientific, artistic, and public realms. Finally, Palmer delineates the fortunes of Ham as indicated in Noah's prophecy:

‘Upon Ham was pronounced the doom of perpetual servitude—proclaimed with double emphasis, as it is twice repeated that he shall be the servant of Japheth and the servant of Shem. Accordingly, history records not a single example of any member of this group lifting itself, by any process of self‐development, above the savage condition. From first to last their mental and moral characteristics, together with the guidance of Providence, have marked them for servitude; while their comparative advance in civilization and their participation in the blessings of salvation, have ever been suspended upon this decreed connexion with Japhet and with Shem.’”


Ham in our contemporary culture

The curse of Ham mythology is also still a part of our artistic and cultural development, alluded to over and over again in literature, television, and art. Many Black artists, writers, and entertainment creators have used it strategically in their art-making, developing a critical frame in which viewers and readers can question the implications of racial difference, and creating counter narratives to reclaim the story as one of their own. 

Sula by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s Sula alludes to the Hamitic myth from the consciousness of a white bargeman who finds Chicken Little’s drowned body. This is a moment in which Black people’s deaths are not mourned, but are merely an inconvenience to white people:

“A bargeman, poling away from the shore, found Chicken late that afternoon stuck in some rocks and weeds, his knickers ballooning about his legs. He would have left him there but noticed that it was a child, not an old black man, as it first appeared, and he prodded the body loose, netted it and hauled it aboard. He shook his head in disgust at the kind of parents who would drown their own children. When, he wondered, will those people ever be anything but animals, fit for nothing but substitutes for mules, only mules didn’t kill each other the way n—s did. He dumped Chicken Little into a burlap sack and tossed him next to some egg crates and boxes of wool cloth. Later, sitting down to smoke on an empty lard tin, still bemused by God’s curse and the terrible burden his own kind had of elevating Ham’s sons, he suddenly became alarmed by the thought that the corpse in this heat would have a terrible odor, which might get into the fabric of his woolen cloth. He dragged the sack away and hooked it over the side, so that the Chicken’s body was half in and half out of the water.”

The Malediction of Cham 

Visual and performance artist Marielle Plaisir’s series The Malediction of Cham, reimagines Blackness—the black in the paintings is created through the layering of many colors, rather than using black paint straight from the tube. Plaisir shows the multitudes that exist in Blackness and questions the history that has pushed Black people into a realm of difference. 

Black and holy

Nina Peton, an anthropologist who did field work in Morocco in the 1950’s, collected a narrative on the Blackness of the Harratin in the Draa valley: 

“The Harratin relate that they are the descendants of Noah’s second son, Ham, and that once upon a time they used to be white. One day, however, Ham protected his head during a heavy rain-storm by carrying the Koran on top of it. The rain was so heavy that it washed all the characters of the holy book on to Ham’s skin; these characters, being sacred, were inedible, and so they turned Ham and his offspring black forever!”


This is the power of bringing truth to the stories we are given. In this counter narrative, Blackness is no curse, it is a sacred gift.

Works cited

Best, George. A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, for finding of a passage to Cathaya by the Northwest, under the conduct of Martin Forbisher Generall: Divided into three Bookes. London, England: The Argonaut Press, 1938.  

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston, MA: Anti-Slavery Office, 1849.  

Eannes de Azurara, Gomes. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea. Translated by Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage. London, England: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1896.  

Haynes, Stephen R. Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002.  

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York, NY: Bold Type Books, 2016.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.  

Sanders, Edith R. “The Hamitic Hypothesis; Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective.” The Journal of African History 10, no. 4 (1969): 521–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/179896.

Ancient
History
Religion
Video
Scott Manning Stevens

Race and indigeneity

When teaching about indigeneity and the rise of that term in the early modern period, we must aim for a level of disambiguation concerning the term "race."

At times it feels like we are living through a crisis of terminology. Contemporary society is deeply divided by labels, names, and categories—all as they relate to identity. In the United States the terms denoting race, ethnicity, and indigeneity remain simultaneously foundational to our identities and yet often in flux. In order to understand how these terms are conflated, we must first recognize that the concept of “race” has a long and complex history of its own, with its meaning shifting over the centuries. Likewise, the category of indigeneity has evolved alongside it and come into prominence over the latter part of the 20th century in larger discussions of Native identity, primarily in relation to those regions also colonized by Europeans in the early modern period and beyond. When teaching about indigeneity and the rise of that term in the early modern period, we must aim for a level of disambiguation concerning the term “race.” Scholars such as Margo Hendricks, Ivan Hannaford, and Kim F. Hall have contributed much to our understanding of how the concept of race developed within Western culture from the late medieval period, into early modernity, and beyond to the present. The etymological roots of the term are based in the Old French and Italian words race and razza, respectively, which indicated groups of people connected by common descent. Notions of kinship prevailed over attention to outward appearance or phenotype. As contacts with distant geographical locales became more frequent in the 15th and 16th centuries with increased European trans-oceanic navigation and trade, hitherto unknown populations encountered one another more frequently. Eventually the term race was more often attached to differences of physiognomy and skin color than mere ethnicity, which was associated with a region, language, and religion more so than physical attributes. Race took on a pseudoscientific valence during the 19th century, which drew on the hierarchized taxonomies of the 18th century and added biological components to them. It was also during the early modern period that the term “indigenous” entered the English language. From the earliest uses of the term, it is associated with the relationship of a people to a place. The Indigenous population of a region has an identity uniquely connected to the land with an autochthonous quality of having originated from the place they inhabit rather than having moved to it. Terms such as “native” and “aboriginal” are synonyms and have sometimes been used interchangeably when referring to members of a particular society original to a region or locale. But even in the 17th century, when one the first recorded uses of the term “indigenous” appears in print, in Sir Thomas Browne’s Psuedodoxia Epidemica (1646), it is already enmeshed in a discourse on race. In Browne’s essay, “On the Blackness of Negroes,” he compares the skin color of tropical Africans with that of what he calls “the indigenous or proper natives of America” living at the same tropical longitude. As the author speculates on the differences in skin color among humanity, he also frames both Native Americans and Africans as distinct others from Europeans. An earlier occurrence of a variant term, “Indigenae, or people bredde upon that very soil,” occurs in the writings of Richard Hakluyt where, in discussing the native peoples of the Arctic regions of Russia and Scandinavia, the Samoyed and the Samí respectively, he links indigeneity with barbarism or the primitive. The term seems never to have been used with a neutral value attached to it, but rather placed within a hierarchy of human societies at the level of the primitive. While the contemporary uses of the term “indigenous” in cultural studies and elsewhere continue to refer to the original inhabitants of a specific place, it has taken on a more narrowly defined valiance within such fields as critical Indigenous studies. This owes much to the articulation of the notion of settler colonialism in the late 1990s and early 2000’s. Scholars such as Patrick Wolfe did much to distinguish between the extractive colonialism, practiced by several European nations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and the settler colonialism they inflicted on large portions of the Americas, Australia, and parts of Oceania. Unlike extractive colonialism, settler colonialism meant to eliminate the Indigenous population and replace it with European settlers on a permanent basis. In such regions the term Indigenous (capital I) has come to be the shorthand for indicating not merely the aboriginal population of a region, but those peoples who are native to a place and experience an on-going settler colonial existence, wherein they have become a disenfranchised minority in their own homelands. This is of course true of the Indigenous peoples of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, portions of Oceania, the United States, and Uruguay. At the same time mestizo and mixed-race majority populations add yet another layer of complexity to the concept of indigeneity in Latin America. While often conflated, the terms Indigenous and race are not interchangeable; the Samí of northern Scandinavia, though Caucasian in contemporary racial parlance, are recognized as an Indigenous people. In my classes, I ask students to contemplate the fact that in each settler colonial nation state the Indigenous population was once 100% of the population before the coming of Europeans and their descendants, and today they are often less than 10% of the general populations in those same countries. Like critical race theory, which attends to the socially constructed underpinnings of racism, critical Indigenous studies acknowledges the impact of such concepts as race while also using Indigenous ways of knowing to challenge the hegemony of Western epistemology. Typical of critical Indigenous studies is a turn to the authority of collective knowledge from our communities and based in our own epistemes. Indigenous peoples were made racially Other by European notions of physiognomy and culture even as the perpetuation of settler colonialism continues to support the hierarchical structures that deny Indigenous legitimacy politically and intellectually. We should look back to the early modern period, and the rise of European global imperialism, as the instantiation of notions of white supremacy and the delegitimization of Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty.

The concepts behind the terms "race" and "indigeneity" are intimately linked and can be traced back to early settler colonial projects in the 17th century. As the system of settler colonial rule was being established, Europeans began to build a theory of race based on physiognomy and skin color. Likewise, the term "indigenous" was used to denote the vast populations of people in the Americas with whom Europeans were making first contact. Understanding the relationship between race and indigeneity is imperative to understanding how Europeans leveraged these categories in order to undermine Native populations' knowledge and sovereignty. 

Early Modern
Literature
Indigeneity
Essay
Chouki El Hamel

Race-making and the myth of Ham

The curse of Ham mythology is a persistent and deeply rooted part of our contemporary consciousness, manifesting itself in literature, film, politics, and popular entertainment. But what is the “curse of Ham,” and how did it take shape?

The biblical origins

The “curse” of Ham mythology begins with the Old Testament. The story goes: Ham sees Noah sleeping naked and tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth. His brothers then cover up Noah’s nakedness with a cloth. When Noah wakes, he blesses Shem and Japheth for covering him, but curses Ham’s son Canaan, and thus his whole lineage, to be servants of his brothers.  

King James version - Genesis 9:22-26  
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.


Canaan’s associations with Blackness, with Africa, with nations and racial categories do not exist in the Bible’s telling of the story. The initial connections with race and the categorization of people by race comes from retellings and manipulations of this story in the Talmud, medieval Islamic scholarship, and early history texts.  

The myth rears its ugly head

In the Babylonian Talmud, a collection of rabbinic writings that date back to the 6th century, racial distinctions are clearly evident with respect to the sons of Noah. In the rabbinic debates of the 2nd-5th centuries, early scholars were trying to develop an understanding of the peoples of the Earth and of the world around them. They used the only framework they had and knew: the Bible. Attempting to classify people who didn’t fit the somatic image of themselves—in particular, Black people—they rationalized this difference as being a result of the curse.  

Yaakov ven Yitzchak Ashkenazi (1550-1628), an expert in rabbinic literature, wrote (as translated by Paul Isaac Hershon), “Noah said to Ham, ‘Thy children shall be dark and black.’ These are the Ethiopians and the Negroes, which have descended from Ham, on account of the curse.”

In some translations of the Babylonian Talmud, there is an assumption or conflation that Ham was blamed for castrating his father Noah—not just seeing him naked. There are many different versions of the myth, with many different implications about what Ham “did” to Noah upon seeing him naked, from castration and mockery to rape and incest. Regardless of the interpretation, the ends are the same: Ham is no bystander, he is an active agent of sin. Compared to the biblical version, this is a radical revision.  

In a 20th century translation in Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, Noah said:

“‘Now I cannot beget the fourth son whose children I would have ordered to serve you and your brothers! Therefore it must be Canaan, your first born, whom they enslave. And since you have disabled me from doing ugly things in blackness of night, Canaan’s children shall be born ugly and black! Moreover, because you twisted your head around to see my nakedness, your grandchildren’s hair shall be twisted into kinks, and their eyes red; again because your lips jested at my misfortune, theirs shall swell; and because you neglected my nakedness, they shall go naked, and their male members shall be shamefully elongated!’ Men of this race are called Negroes, their forefather Canaan commanded them to love theft and fornication, to be banded together in hatred of their master and never to tell the truth.”


This is the seed of the story as we now know it. Ham’s curse of servitude was racialized.  

The tendrils of this implication are wildly pervasive: Blackness, as a result of this story, is a curse, meaning it is associated with sin, with evil. And to widen that scope, the connection between Blackness, sin, and nations—“These are the Ethiopians and the Negroes, which have descended from Ham, on account of the curse”—means that entire nations and communities of Black people are condemned to servitude, and to the assumption that they are, by Godly decree, inferior.    

Ham, race, and the early Islamic world

Evidence of the acceptance of the Hamitic story can be found in the work of early Muslim scholars. In Arabia in the 9th and 10th centuries, the majority of enslaved people were Black Ethiopians whose subjugation was justified because of their Blackness and the negative cultural perceptions that being Black had in Arab culture.  

The racial aspect of the Hamitic curse was adopted in Arabic literature in a manner that allowed race to become associated with slavery and lesser peoples. The so-called “Hamitic curse” was interwoven with social status and pre-existing racial prejudices to justify racial discrimination at odds with the principles of Islam.  

Various scholars such as al-Yaqʿubi and al-Tabari mention the curse of Ham in their histories and incorporate a racialized worldview, wherein the sons of Noah make up distinct racial categories or nations. In Tarikh al-Tabari, the Hamitic myth is used to classify people into good and bad races, Semites and Hamites, reinforcing not only a racial division, but a national one.  

“Nuh awoke from his sleep and learnt what had happened he cursed Kan‘an b. Ham but did not curse Ham. Of his posterity are the qibt, the Habasha, and the Hind. Kan‘an was the first of the sons of Nuh to revert to the ways of the sons of Qabil (Cain) and indulged in distractions and singing and made flutes, drums, guitars and cymbals and obeyed Satan in vain amusements. Nuh divided the earth between his sons, assigning Sam the middle of the earth…and to Ham the land of the west and the coasts (sawahil) [...]. After they had crossed the Nile of Egypt the descendants of Kush son of Ham, namely the Habasha and the Sudan, split in two groups. These were the Zaghawa, HBSH, Qaqu, Marawiyyun, Maranda, Kawkaw and Ghana”
- al-Yaʿqubi

“Ham begat all those who are black and curly haired, while Japheth begat all those who are full-faced with small eyes, and Shem begat everyone who is handsome of face with beautiful hair. Noah prayed that the hair of Ham’s descendants would not grow beyond their ears, and wherever his descendants met the children of Shem, the latter would enslave them…. Shem begat the Arabs, Persians, and Byzantines, in all of whom there is good. Japheth begat the Turks, Slavs, Gog, and Magog, in none of whom there is good. Ham begat the Copts, Sudanese, and Berbers.”
- al-Tabari


As people of the Middle Ages were sorting out the concepts of nations and continents, arranging them by their peoples and their religions, the concerns of national division became a larger part of the ever-evolving mythology. These decisions are inconsistent among texts and authors, and frequently texts contradict themselves, evidence that this was a changing, chimera of a story.  

By defining “good” nations and “bad” nations, medieval scholars were developing religiously based rationales for racial, ethnic, and religious differences—many rooted anti-Blackness.

Works cited

al-Tabari, Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad b. Jarir. The History of Al-Tabari: Prophets and Patriarchs, vol. 2. Translated by William M. Brinner. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986.  

al-Yaʿqubi, Abu l-ʿAbbas Ahmad b. Abi Yaʿqub. Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. Edited by J. F. P. Hopkins and Nehemia Levtzion. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981.  

El Hamel, Chouki. Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013.  

Graves, Robert, and Raphael Patai. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964.  

Yitzchak Ashkenazi, Yaakov ben. Tzeénah Ureénah: “Go Ye and See”: A Rabbinical Commentary on Genesis. Translated by Paul Isaac Hershon. London, England: Hodder and Stoughton, 1885.

Ancient
Religious Studies
Religion
Transnational studies
Reading list
Adam Miyashiro

Reading the medieval epic

A reading list to expand students' understanding of the medieval epic by incorporating texts that decenter Europe.

Primary Works

The Song of Roland. Trans. Glyn S. Burgess. Penguin Classics, 1990. ISBN: 978-0140445329

The Song of the Cid (PenguinClassics) A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text. Trans. Burton Raffel. Penguin Classics, 2009. ISBN: 978-0143105657

Niane, Djibril Tamsir, and G. D. Pickett. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Revised Edition, Pearson College Div, 2006.  ISBN: ‎978-1405849425

Secondary Works

Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. “From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation.”

The Postcolonial Middle Ages (2000): 19–34. New Middle Ages (NeMiA).

Burman, Thomas E. Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Carpenter, Dwayne E. “Social Perception and Literary Portrayal: Jews and Muslims in Medieval Spanish Literature.” Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain. Ed. Vivian B. Mann, Thomas F. Glick, and Jerrilynn D. Dodds. New York: George Braziller, 1992. 61–82.

Chism, C. “Arabic in the Medieval World.” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 624–631.

Cobb, Paul M. The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. The Postcolonial Middle Ages. First Paper. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Constable, Olivia Remie. Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Davis, Kathleen. Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Davis, Kathleen. “Time Behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now.” The Postcolonial Middle Ages. New York, NY: St. Martin’s, 2000. 105–122. New Middle Ages (NeMiA).

Davis, Kathleen, and Nadia Altschul, eds. Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” Outside Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Ganim, John M. Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Khaldūn, Ibn, and Franz Rosenthal. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958.

Kinoshita, Sharon. Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Kinoshita, S. “‘Pagans Are Wrong andChristians Are Right’: Alterity, Gender, and Nation in the Chanson De Roland.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001): 79–112.

Lampert-Weissig, Lisa. Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,2010.

Maalouf, Amin. The CrusadesThrough Arab Eyes. New York: Schocken, 1989.

Menocal, María Rosa, and Raymond P. Scheindlin. The Literature of Al-Andalus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Nesbitt, Nick. “Resolutely Modern: Politics and Human Rights in the Mandingue Charter.” The Savannah Review 14 (2014): 11-19.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Medieval
Literature
Poetry
Transnational studies
Video
Seeta Chaganti

Chaucer, Virgil, and erasure poetry

Teaching Chaucer's House of Fame alongside contemporary Nisga'a poet Jordan Abel's The Place of Scraps allows students to consider the issues of source, adaptation, colonization, and race in our literary lineage.

The House of Fame’s strangeness is largely explained by the density and even compulsivity of its allusions and citational practices. This poem, a dream vision in which a poet finds himself in a hall of images of famous people from the past, asks the reader to think about the power dynamics involved between authors who influence each other. While it is clear that Chaucer is dealing with his own anxiety of influence, my approach to teaching this text is to focus on community and solidarity as part of the analysis of power dynamics in this question of “influence.” In one portion of the poem, there is a retelling of the Dido and Aeneas story from Virgil’s Aeneid. Before working on this section of House of Fame, I assign students to read a prose translation of the sections of Book IV of the Aeneid that correspond to Chaucer’s retelling. This comparative reading helps students see where and how Chaucer is changing the story. What’s really interesting about this, though, is that as the figure who initiates that crucial theme, Dido is both a racialized character, from Lebanon, and a settler herself, in Carthage. Many complex questions emerge in this specific narrative phenomenon that combines adaptation of source with what we might call an adaptation of race. One dilemma that students tend to bring up in this comparative exercise is the question of what the representation of Chaucer’s Dido does to the sense of power we might associate with her in Virgil’s tale. The register of Virgil’s Dido, angry and imperious, contrasts with the domestic and intimate language of Chaucer’s Dido, and her plaintive use of “swete herte.” Does this mean that Chaucer is defusing Dido of a strength that Virgil recognized in her? Or are we simply looking at two different kinds of distortions? To turn this discussion toward something that advances a project of liberatory politics, I create another untimely juxtaposition. I set this section of the House of Fame alongside the erasure poetry of Jordan Abel, a Canadian Indigenous poet. Jordan Abel is a contemporary Nisga’a poet from British Columbia. His first book, The Place of Scraps employs the technique of erasure to adapt a 20th century anthropological work, Totem Poles, by the white Ottowan settler Marius Barbeau. This is a very complicated shift, with a lot of potentially misaligning compass points – Chaucer and Abel’s positionality vastly differs. Abel’s poems speak to the issues of source, adaptation, colonization, race, specifically by needing to erase what are essentially the colonizing erasures of Barbeau. Chaucer does not need to concern himself with erasure in the same way – he is trying to enter a lineage he feels comfortable with and wants to be a part of. I assign my students a project in which they redact Chaucer’s House of Fame to create their own poetry. Making this exercise a creative one allows for some space to mark the complexity between the two texts. This exercise helps students think through adaptation, influence, erasure, and distortion.

Chaucer's House of Fame is a strange poem, one that is compulsive in its use of allusions and citations. The poem is a dream vision in which a poet finds himself in a hall of images of famous people from the past, asking the reader to consider the power dynamics involved between authors who influence each other. Teaching this poem alongside contemporary poet Jordan Abel's book The Place of Scraps helps students imagine the links between influence from Chaucer to now. Abel, a Nisga'a poet from British Columbia, wrote his collection through the erasure of a 20th-century anthropological work, Totem Poles, by the white Ottowan settler Marius Barbeau. Putting Abel and Chaucer in conversation allows students to consider the issues of source, adaptation, colonization, and race in our literary lineage.

Medieval
Literature
Poetry
Essay
Kyle Grady

Social organization in The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice is a key text for demonstrating that race was inextricable from early modern considerations of societal organization.

The Merchant of Venice is a key text for demonstrating that race was inextricable from early modern considerations of societal organization. Shakespeare stages his Venice with complex and interconnected economic, legal, and social systems, each of which take difference into account. The play considers these systems in both local and global terms, particularly given Venice’s position as a center for trade in an expanding mercantile and colonial economy. The play is also attentive to the intercultural, interreligious, and interracial entanglements inherent to such a space.

Social organization and the other

Merchant includes a number of moments that bring these dynamics into light. I often draw students’ attention to Antonio’s rationale for why Shylock’s bond will likely be upheld. As Antonio explains,

The Duke cannot deny the course of law;
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of the state,
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations.

 
Antonio describes a Venice that takes its treatment of “strangers” into careful consideration to serve particular priorities. The moment allows students to see that the play weighs the affordances and limitations of extending rights to those it otherwise marginalizes. In tracing how Shylock is ultimately denied legal recourse on the basis of his Jewish identity in the subsequent court scene, students can also see how rapidly such priorities shift, with the maintenance and reinforcement of hierarchical power structures taking precedence.

Racialization at the margins

Even and sometimes especially when positioned at the margins, discussions of race in the play carry particular significance to broader societal issues. A key example is the exchange between Jessica, Lancelot, and Lorenzo, in which Lancelot disparages Lorenzo’s marriage to Shylock’s daughter and Lorenzo in turn reveals that Lancelot has been engaged in a relationship with a Moor.

The moment can be an uncomfortable one, especially for a modern-day reader. It trades on racism, antisemitism, and misogyny for an attempt at humor. Lorenzo, for example, is characterized by Lancelot as being "no good member of the commonwealth, for in converting Jews to Christians [he]raise[s] the price of pork.” Lorenzo’s reply, that he “shall answer that better to the commonwealth than [Lancelot]” because “the Moor is with child by [Lancelot]” prompts the clown to attack the woman’s character by mobilizing her difference.

When teaching this moment, I ask students to hold its flippant tone in tension with its evocation of the “commonwealth.” Interracial and interreligious relationships are both the subject of ridicule and a formation deemed of interest to broader Venetian society. Considering the exchange’s equivocal tenor can help students recognize that early modern English culture, and Shakespeare, are familiar with concepts of race and racial mixing. It shows students that there was historical attention paid to concerns about social organization and race—how are hierarchies disrupted when received racial boundaries are blurred?

Separating citizens from strangers

Shakespeare’s Venice groups its characters into a limited set of racial and religious categories, despite a range of ongoing and potential intermixture in the play. These intermixture possibilities include Morocco’s courting of Portia as well as the recurring suggestion that Shylock is not Jessica’s father.

Lancelot and Lorenzo’s discussion might be understood as representative of ongoing procedures that reconcile mixed identity to Venice’s overarching racial schema. In that sense, this brief exchange highlights a key site through which Venice separates its citizens from “strangers,” creating the kinds of divides its economic and legal systems pivot around. Even as Lancelot and Lorenzo engage in the only explicit discussion of “commonwealth” in the play, their partners in the intermixture that occasions that discussion appear to be excluded from that grouping.

Engaging these moments in Merchant can help students get a sense of why and how discrete racial categories arise and are reinforced, particularly in contexts where such boundaries otherwise routinely collapse.

Doing so can also encourage students to trace the histories that engender the categories our own 21st-century societies tend to recognize and operate around. When teaching Merchant, I ask students to reflect through journaling exercises on the recurring inability of such categories to account for the complexity of many peoples’ actual heritage. Thinking through these questions with The Merchant of Venice can help demonstrate that these categories have a long history of being constructed, and, maybe more importantly, their constructions have historically been grounded in maintaining and reproducing particular structures of power.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Syllabus
Ruben Espinosa

Revising the Shakespeare survey

Ruben Espinosa's annotated syllabus offers entry points to broaching conversations about race and racism within a course that isn’t necessarily devoted to Shakespeare and critical race studies.

An annotated syllabus created by Ruben Espinosa

I recognize that it isn’t always possible to offer a special topics course on Shakespeare and race, and as such, this syllabus offers a way to engage critical race studies within a Shakespeare Survey course. What I offer below are entry points to broaching conversations about race and racism within a course that isn’t necessarily devoted to Shakespeare and critical race studies.

Course description

This course is an introduction to Shakespeare’s plays and poetry. This semester, we will critically read, analyze, and interpret the works of Shakespeare to develop a greater understanding of his dramatic works and poetry. We will study plays from the genres of history, comedy, tragedy, and romance. In the process, we will examine the cultural forces in Shakespeare’s England, and scrutinize how his works register attitudes and apprehensions surrounding religion, race, gender, immigration, xenophobia, imperialism, and national identity. More importantly, we will consider how Shakespeare’s attention to these issues bears significance in our present moment, and we will explore how our own views of these issues influence the ongoing making of Shakespeare in our time.

Primary readings

  • Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Selections: Although my intent is not to be prescriptive, as I recognize people will be drawn to particular sonnets when teaching, these are the sonnets I typically assign – 1-5; 18-21; 55; 73; 106; 127; 129-131; 138; 152)
  • As You Like It
  • The Merchant of Venice
  • Henry V
  • Hamlet
  • Othello
  • The Tempest

Rationale for selections

While there is quite a bit from which to choose, I select these works to trace across them sustained attention to issues of race and racism. While I note in my course description that we will consider a host of issues, ALL of those issues can point back to structures of power and racism, and as such I search for that thread. As opposed to focusing the course on understood “race plays”—that is, plays that feature non-white characters—I try to show how whiteness, and structures of white supremacy, are taking shape in these works.

I begin with the sonnets because the first line of the first sonnet in the sequence is telling: “From fairest creatures we desire increase.” I let students explore what “fair’ means here, and after expected ideas about beauty and virtue, I draw on Kim F. Hall’s work to show students how fairness equates to whiteness. As such, we establish early on in the class that the literary work, something as simple as a sonnet, is advancing notions of white supremacy.

Establishing how the text identifies the value of any given person (and the devaluation of those who diverge from that standard) is key for me. In this way, my class can explore how notions of belonging depend on who is deemed valuable, and who gets to establish such worth. In the sonnets, the young, noble, white man is the epitome of beauty and is invaluable. The dark lady, not so much. The sonnets are a starting point for us to begin having these conversations. As we move into Shakespeare’s plays, then, we can see this paradigm at work more fully.

As You Like It commits itself to thinking about gendered hierarchies, tyranny, and immigration. The Merchant of Venice is deeply invested in considering insider/outsider status, and while it is clearly a play focused on antisemitism, it is also makes clear the role of racism through the character of Portia. Henry V is a play that expounds a sense of English nationalism, but it undermines this through the questionable actions of Henry and through the cultural confidence of Fluellen. In Hamlet, I find value in tracing how patriarchal structures of oppression dominate the play (from Hamlet’s Ghost to Polonius to Claudius). Beyond the play, though, I like to trace how Hamlet exists, to the present moment, as a play focused on the struggles of a privileged white man. When we take some lines out of the mouth of a white Hamlet and imagine them through the voices of people of color, Hamlet’s deep sense of isolation and unbelonging offer rich possibilities.

When I arrive at Othello, I like to play an excerpt of Ayanna Thompson’s interview, “All that Glisters is not Gold,” on NPR’s Code Switch where she discusses why staging Othello is so problematic. Up front, I want students to recognize the racist structures both within and beyond the play. This allows students to see how Shakespeare was engaging with racism, and how Shakespeare is used (still, to this day) to promote racist perspectives. I finally arrive at The Tempest, and here I can consider all the salient topics of discussion that I outline in my course description and demonstrate how Shakespeare’s work are in fact thinking about the awful realities of imperialism. That imperialism defines us today, but it does not have to define the way we understand and find value in Shakespeare.

Secondary readings and sources

For Shakespeare’s Sonnets

  • Kim F. Hall, “These Bastard Signs of Fair: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Postcolonial Shakespeares (ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin)
  • James Baldwin, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare”

For As You Like It

  • Ruben Espinosa, “Chapter 6: The Dangers of Indifference,” in Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism. [Note: I don’t assign my own work, but I do draw on it in class discussion]
  • Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (Chapter 5 and/or Chapter 7)

The Merchant of Venice

  • Qualities of Mercy Project, Texas A&M San Antonio video (on YouTube)
  • Katherine Gillen, “Language, Race, and Shakespeare Appropriation on San Antonio’s South Side: A Qualities of Mercy Dispatch,” in The Sundial
  • Kim F. Hall, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice

For Henry V

  • Scott Newstok, “‘Step aside, I’ll show thee a president’: George W as Henry V?”
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The First White President,” in The Atlantic

For Hamlet

  • Richard Dyer, White (Introduction and Chapter 1)
  • Peter Erickson, “Can We Talk About Race in Hamlet?”
  • New York Public Theater video, #ToBeBlack (available on YouTube)

For Othello

  • Ian Smith, “Othello’s Black Handkerchief”
  • Ayanna Thompson, “All that Glisters is not Gold” NPR Code Switch interview
  • Toni Morrison, Desdemona (Acts 1, 2, 8, and 9)
  • Keith Hamilton Cobb, American Moor (pp. 14-22)

For The Tempest

  • Indira Karemcheti, “Caliban in the Classroom”
  • Ruben Espinosa, “Beyond The Tempest: Language, Legitimacy, and La Frontera” [Note: I don’t assign my own work, but I do draw on it in class discussion]

I realize that it might not be feasible to assign all of these readings, especially for an undergraduate class. Some of these readings (like Karemcheti) are short and digestible, while others are not as short. What I often do is offer particularly poignant excerpts from the secondary readings and allow students to discuss these in small groups before asking them to share their thoughts on these excerpts. Often, if I assign the full readings, many students are underprepared. When I have students read excerpts together in class, in real time, they engage more meaningfully with the ideas because we are all on the same playing field. Fortunately, the readings offer quite a bit in the way of provocative arguments. The idea is to use these sources as a starting point for class discussions.

Possible assignments

Public facing project (in lieu of a traditional essay and often much, much cooler)

For this assignment, you will be asked to craft a public facing essay that uses any work of early modern literature as a vehicle to explore a contemporary social issue. Please take time to look at the short essays published in ACMRS’s online journal, The Sundial. These public facing works will give you a sense of what is possible and possibly inspire the approach you take to this assignment. Your essays should be 750-1000.  

Video adaptation project

Students will collaborate to perform and film a rendition of a scene from any of the Shakespeare plays we cover during the semester. These films should not be more than five minutes in length, should employ at least some of Shakespeare’s original dialogue, and should find a way to speak to contemporary/regional social issues. Beyond these guidelines, you have absolute creative license for the production of these films. Students will submit a 1-page written “reflection” about the cultural significance of their production, and the groups will present their film near the end of the semester.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Essay
Dennis Britton

Spenser and his racializing influences

Comparing episodes from The Faerie Queene with episodes from the works that inspired Spenser, in particular excerpts from Ariosto’s and Tasso’s works, is a productive way to draw attention to how racialization travels and mutates across national traditions.

Comparing episodes from The Faerie Queene with episodes from the works that inspired Spenser, in particular excerpts from Ariosto’s and Tasso’s works, is a productive way to draw attention to how racialization travels and mutates across national traditions.

Take, for example, Duessa’s relationship to her literary predecessors, Alcina and Armida, in The Faerie Queene. Duessa, falsifying her identity under the name Fidessa, is the “faire companion” of the “Sarazin” Sans Foy, whose name means without faith. Before discussing Duessa, however, we need to examine her “Sarazin” companion. Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh has argued that the term denotes Muslims who lie about their racial lineage and claim to be descended from Abraham’s wife Sarah: “Every time the label is pronounced, Muslims are presumed guilty of fabricated genealogy, of co-opting Christian history, of misrepresenting themselves and their faith, of manipulating those around them.”

Spenser’s name for this Muslim character, Sans Foy, effectively binds faithlessness to Muslims: Islam is not a faith in the poem’s estimation. This Muslim knight, like all Muslims in the general estimation of early modern Christians, cannot be trusted because he belongs to a race that falsifies their genealogical origins. The same is also true for his brothers, Sans Joy and Sans Loy. In the Sans brothers we see many of the same racist tropes applied to Muslims to this day.

Catfishing whiteness as the ultimate evil

But back to Duessa. The story of Duessa turning Fraudubio into a tree closely imitates Alcina turning Astolfo into a tree in Orlando Furioso. In OF, Astolfo tells the knight Ruggiero (Rogero in John Harington’s translation, quoted below):

[Alcina] and Morgana were in incest gotten.
And as their first beginning was of sinne,
So is their life vngodly and defamed,
Of law or iustice passing not a pinne.


Alcina and her sister Morgana are characterized through one of the logics of race: their character is predetermined by the circumstances of their birth. But the real problem is that Alcina appears beautiful and desirable—she seems to be white!

Although Astolfo warns Ruggiero about Alcina, Ruggiero is unable to resist her beauty in canto 7. There we get a seven-stanza blazon, in which Alcina bears all the conventions of white, feminine beauty: in stanza 11 alone she is described as having long blond hair “As might with wire of beaten gold,” as having “lovely cheeks” that “With roses and with lilies painted are,” and has having a “forehead faire and full of seemely cheare, / As smooth as polish Ivoried doth appeare.”  

But both Ariosto and Spenser will make it clear that Alcina and Duessa only seem to be beautiful white women. Both poems strip the sorceress of whiteness and allow the heroes and us as readers to see who they really are.

In OF, a magic ring given by the good sorceress Melissa reveals Alcina’s true nature:

Her face was wan, a leane and writheld skin,
Her stature scant three horseloaues did exceed:
Her haire was gray of hue, and very thin,
Her teeth were gone, her gums serv'd in their steed,
No space was there between her nose and chin,
Her noisome breath contagion would breed,
In fine, of her it might have well bene said,
In Nestors youth she was a pretie maid.


Alcina is primarily revealed to be disgusting because she is old. But the reference to “painting,” cosmetics, also draws attention to the fact that here beauty and whiteness were artificial.

Spenser goes further to make Duessa an object of disgust. Una, who really is white, reveals Duessa’s true nature:

Her craftie head was altogether bald,
  And as in hate of honorable eld,
  Was ouergrowne with scurfe and filthy scald;
  Her teeth out of her rotten gummes were feld,
  And her sowre breath abhominably smeld;
  Her dried dugs, like bladders lacking wind,
  Hong downe, and filthy matter from them weld;
  Her wrizled skin as rough, as maple rind,
So scabby was, that would haue loathd all womankind.
Her neather parts, the shame of all her kind,
  My chaster Muse for shame doth blush to write;
  But at her rompe she growing had behind
  A foxes taile, with dong all fowly dight;
  And eke her feete most monstrous were in sight;
  For one of them was like an Eagles claw,
  With griping talaunts armd to greedy fight,
  The other like a Beares vneuen paw:
More vgly shape yet neuer liuing creature saw.


Duessa is described in more disgusting detail, and Spenser’s narrator draws the reader’s attention to Duessa’s “neather parts,” reveling that Duessa is a monstrous animal, not just an old woman. Like Alcina, her whiteness was only superficial. Both Ariosto and Spenser render pagan and Muslim women as incapable of being suitable sexual partners; they are old and non-human and thus unable to be bearers of white, Christian children.

It is important to also draw students’ attention to the fact that Spenser didn’t have to write the story this way. He could have followed Tasso’s example, in which the blond Muslim sorceress, Armida, is converted to Christianity (she is described at length in canto 4, stanzas 24-32). Tasso takes a different approach—in his epic, it seems that Armida becomes a Christian because she is beautiful and white—whiteness is a necessary precondition for conversion.

Nevertheless, what is true in all these epics is that white skin is almost always assigned to Christians or characters who will become Christians.

Lechery, the allegory

More episodes ripe for comparison are Ariosto’s “Ethiopian sodomite” and Spenser’s allegorical character, Lechery. In canto 43 OF, a black man offers a white Italian man, Anselmo a sumptuous palace in exchange for sex:

[Anselmo] sees a Gipsen standing at the doore,
All blab-lipt, beetle browd, and bottle nozed,
Most greasie, nastie, his apparell poore,
His other parts, as Painters are disposed,
To giue to Esop; such a Blackamore
Could not be seene elsewhere, as he supposed,
So vile avilage, and so bad a grace,
To make eu'n Paradise alothsome place.


(Note: Harington’s translation refers to this character as a “gipsen” [Egyptian] and a “Blackamore,” while Ariosto calls him “uno Etiopo.”) This Black man is a figure that is supposed to inspire the reader’s disgust, and this feeling is supposed to be intensified upon imagining Anselmo having sex with him.  

In Book 1, canto 4 of FQ, Duessa leads Redcrosse to Lucifera’s House of Pride. There, Redcross sees the seven deadly sins. Following Gluttony is Lechery:

And next to him rode lustfull Lechery,
   Upon a bearded Goat, whose rugged haire,
   And whally eyes (the signe of gelosy,)
   Was like the person selfe, whom he did beare:
   Who rough, and blacke, and filthy did appeare,
   Unseemely man to please faireLadies eye;
   Yet he of Ladies oft was loved deare,
   When fairer faces were bid standen by:
O who does know the bent of womens fantasy?


Whether or not Spenser is directly recalling this moment from Ariosto, comparing the two characters allows us to discuss further how the feeling of disgust sticks to specific bodies—pagan and Muslim women, and now to Black men. Additionally, these Black male characters are also defined in relation to sexual proclivities that are supposed to rejected by the white Christian reader.

Race and sexuality are linked in Spenser. In the production of allegory, the allegory sutures lechery to a Black man. A Black body is the most suitable body for the English reader to understand lechery.

Malignant influence

It is key for students to see the way Spenser’s influences are taken into The Faerie Queene, and how racialization is developed through this process of either intentional reimagining or cryptomnesia. By reading Spenser’s poem alongside excerpts of Orlando Furioso and Jerusalem Delivered, students can begin to trace the network of influence and the adaptation of thought in the signifying of racial difference across national and cultural divisions.  

 

Resources

Britton, D. "From the Knight’s Tale to The Two Noble Kinsmen: Rethinking Race, Class and Whiteness in Romance.” Postmedieval 6(2015): 56-78.

---. “Teaching Spenser’s Darkness.” In Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide, edited by Matthieu Chapman and Anna Wainwright, 67-85. Tempe, AZ: ACMRS Press, 2023.

Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh. “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure.” Literature Compass 16.9-10 (2019): 1-8.

Sanchez, Melissa E. “‘To Giue Faire Colour’: Sexuality, Courtesy, and Witness in The Faerie Queene.” Spenser Studies 35(2021): 285-90.

Early Modern
Literature
Poetry
Religion
Activity
Kyle Grady

Journaling through questions of race

The journal is a place where students can engage in dialogue with themselves. This kind of reflection helps students track how their understandings of race develop over time.

I routinely ask my students to keep a journal. As difficult as it can sometimes be for students to discuss race in the classroom, they have also rarely been asked to take note of and reflect on their own experiences, beliefs, and questions when it comes to race and racial difference. The journal is a place where students can engage in dialogue with themselves. I find this kind of reflection essential, not only for fostering a more open classroom conversation, but also as a way for students to track how their understandings about issues of race develop over time.

In addition to take-home prompts, I dedicate class time throughout the term for students to reflect in their journals. Prompts generally ask students to work through their own experiences or understanding as a way into a particular early modern play. They can be either open-ended or more specific, depending on the week’s lesson.

Before beginning Titus Andronicus, for example, I ask students to spend ten minutes journaling about their thoughts on mixed-race identity. I give some framing questions—for example, where and how do you see mixed-race identity represented in the world around you?—but I remind students to take the initial prompt in whichever direction is most generative. As much as possible, I want students to follow, catalogue, and interrogate their own thoughts.

Even for more specific prompts, I tell students to free-write when they feel stuck. When asking students to write about how and where they see different essentializing discourses overlapping in the world around them—a prompt I generally employ later in the term, and one that helps inform analysis of a play like The Merchant of Venice—I explain that not every person will immediately have an example to work from. For those students, it might be helpful to instead reflect on why they find the prompt difficult to respond to, or, more generally, what thoughts the prompt immediately brings to mind.

I keep a journal and reflect alongside my students. This practice is about more than modeling the importance of dedicated self-reflection. I follow my own prompts, think through how a lesson plan relates to a project I’m working on, and reflect more broadly on how our classroom conversation has impacted my understanding of different issues. I also share with my students how the writing process has helped me think about a given topic. Engaging in this practice helps me track just how much my thinking benefits from teaching and from being in dialogue with my students. 

I do not collect students’ journals. I find it is important that students have a place to write and think about race without the pressure of assessment. This also encourages students to work through ideas that aren’t fully formed or are more personal. It’s not uncommon for students to see questions or issues they weren’t comfortable raising outside of their journal emerge in classroom discussion. Whether or not those students then join the conversation—and they often do—they can track the class’s dialogue relative to what they’ve been thinking through in their journal.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Intro to premodern critical race studies
Video
Dan-el Padilla Peralta

[Re]constructing disciplines

What do we mean when we talk about classics or the classical? Dan-el Padilla Peralta deconstructs the history of the field of classics and its investment in hegemony, and how it carries with it an assignment of value.

When we talk about the classics, or when we talk about the classical, we are necessarily in the business of assigning value, because the term in anglophone and non-anglophone contexts, carries with it a certain set of assumptions. One of them being, that the Classical is, by the sheer fact of being designated as such, automatically higher or better or more valuable or more worth preserving or excellent, or more ideal than anything deemed non-classical. As such, the field of classics is almost unique in being one of the few disciplines that writes its own claim to distinctiveness and to value into its very own professional identity with a name. One of our responsibilities is to continuously make an affirmative and powerful case for what it is that we do, one that does not depend on the rhetorical sleight of hand of calling our field Classics, and simply leaving it at that. And to that end, I think it is important to reflect on whether there are other names that enable us to enter into the space of defining and calibrating the study of the ancient Mediterranean world without already importing into that study a preconceived understanding of that study's value. One of the features of the field of classics that has proven most recalcitrant in the face of calls to transform or re-imagine the field is precisely the idea that the value of the classics should be self-evident, should not need justification, because of the lack of any tools within the discipline for thinking seriously and critically about the production of value. Classics and Classicists have been seriously underpowered when it comes to thinking about, let alone acting on, race and racial formation in the field and its constitution. This manifests in a number of settings. So, for one, there is the lingering, persistent inability of most classicists to engage earnestly and rigorously with work on race and racial formation as being undertaken in other pre-modern fields—although that state of affairs is improving. Where matters in some respects are more dire, is in the capacity of Classicists to apprehend that some of the very tools that they work with are bound up in histories of racialization. Failing to understand those histories of racialization necessarily consigns them to replicating and reproducing patterns of racial formation that they might otherwise see themselves as standing against. We might also think about how the discipline of Classics and its adjacent disciplinary formations, such as classical archeology, become embroiled and entangled in some of the race-making projects of the 19th and 20th centuries. Because of the belief, prevalent in many Classicist circles in the Euro-Americas, that the practitioners of classics in the 19th and early 20th centuries were these models of objectivity, whose researches could be sundered from the contingent historical circumstances in which they lived, relatively little attention is devoted to the extent to which their research replicates forms of distinction and division that were aided and abetted by European racializing and settler colonial projects.

What do we mean when we talk about classics or the classical? Dan-el Padilla Peralta deconstructs the history of the field of classics and its investment in hegemony, and how it carries with it an assignment of value. How do we, in the 21st century, relinquish ourselves from this long history of aesthetic sleight-of-hand?

Ancient
History
Intro to premodern critical race studies
Reading list
Seeta Chaganti

Teaching Chaucer and justice

A list of contemporary readings on critical theory and justice frameworks that help us reimagine ways to teach Chaucer in the 21st century.

The following works have informed both the way I conceive of the goals of my Chaucer class and the way I present the Chaucer material itself to my students. Many students have already had exposure to this area of thought and criticism, as well as to many of these authors and their major influences. In a number of instances, they will have more background knowledge than you do as a medievalist, which is a wonderful situation for you and the students to be in. This list is highly impressionistic and not meant to be exhaustive in any sense—they are the books that were paramount for me when teaching my most recent Chaucer class.

 

Baldwin, Davarian L. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering our Cities. New York: Bold Type Books, 2021.

Burton, Orisanmi. Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. California: University of California Press, 2023.

Clover, Joshua. Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. London: Verso Books, 2016.

Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Darwish, Mahmoud. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems. California: University of California Press, 2013.

Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011.

Davis, Angela Y. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

Di Prima, Diane. Revolutionary Letters. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1968, 2021.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Writings. New York: Library of America, 1986.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963, 2004.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. California: University of California Press, 2007.

Hall, Stuart, et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Palgrave: 1978, 2013.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. New York: Penguin Random House, 2002.

Maher, Geo. A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete. London: Verso Books, 2021.

Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Murakawa, Naomi. The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Neocleous, Mark. The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power. London: Verso Books, 2021.

Okihiro, Gary. Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983, 2020.

Rodríguez, Dylan. White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020.

Medieval
Literature
Poetry
Intro to premodern critical race studies
Video
Larissa FastHorse

Creative practices as an act of service

Collaborators Larissa FastHorse, Michael John Garcés, and Ty Defoe discuss the principles of their creative practice, which are based on listening to and meeting the needs of the community.

Creative practice as an act of service with Larissa FastHorse, Ty Defoe, and Michael John Garcés Transcript Michael John Garcés: We started with processing community, or a communal process. I think the beautiful part of a process like that, and it's not dissimilar from some of the processes we used at Cornerstone (and other processes we've all been involved in, in different contexts), is that there is a desire in the process for there to be an outcome. We just don't presume to know what the outcome is going be. So the outcome could look like a play, where we all get on stage and we're talking to each other and we have feelings about each other. It works out because we're acting, right? There is a desire for an outcome. So it could look like a play, or it could look more like a different kind of event. Or the outcome could be the community coming to the conclusion that we don't want to do a play, we don't want to have an outcome. That would be the outcome of that process. That rarely happens. I can think of maybe one or two times in my entire time doing any kind of engaged work. Then the community, after a relatively positive thing, decides it just didn't make sense to have an outcome. Some of the plays we've done, or some of the projects we've done have not really looked like plays to a conventional theater goer at all. They've been -- there's a word that people often misapply right now, in my opinion: everybody uses the word immersive. “We're doing immersive theater, it's immersive.” But really, theater that's happening around and through a group of people, when it's not even clear where the play begins and our interaction ends, is stuff we've done before. Sometimes it looks more like: I come to see other people perform a story. Right? So I think we're open: it could be something more communal, like a creative dinner, or a really engaged creative civic conversation that comes out of this process and doesn't look like a play at all. It's not really particularly performative. It could be a lot of different things, depending on where the play and the conversation with the community naturally evolves. But we do imagine that there will be an outcome to the process, as opposed to a process that's never-ending. Unless, I suppose, the community really wanted to have a never-ending process, in which case we would try to put that perpetual motion machine into motion and kiss it up to the heavens. So anyway, it could be a lot of different things, but there is the idea of an outcome as opposed to a process for the sake of process, in my mind at any rate, unless, again, that were to be what people wanted. Larissa FastHorse: There's just no pre-defined end. Each day is different. The processes are our art, because it isn't a separate thing. For instance, when we were up in Apache country we spent the day winterizing. And in the evening we served food at a sobriety meeting. And the next day we spent the day winterizing elder's homes. That was a process that, I would argue, is more important than the thing we finally did, the presentation of work we did at Steele Indian School Park and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. Michael John Garcés: The stories that were shared during that time, and the interactions, and how people were sparked with the idea that we were there with the idea of doing a play (people were like, "What?") -- that constellation of experience and constellation of connections that happened throughout are hugely important parts of the process. The little and big creative moments that happen during the peak can really be spectacularly beautiful in ways that have been instigated by the process. And those all form the ultimate thing that has been made in communal practice and interaction over two or three years. Larissa FastHorse: I think what is hard sometimes, especially with funders or producing organizations, is understanding that we had a transformative experience with one young woman in a basement in South Dakota, which sounds horrible, but it was a basement of a school. It was a transformative experience that we still talk about all these years later. We do. That was one human we saw that day and spoke to, but it had a lasting effect on us and our process and the artistic outcome for years. Telling a funder that we talked to one person today, that we flew all the way to South Dakota and talked to one person -- it sounds like failure, in the metrics of how we define success in funding and research and whatever. When we have a day where we have three meetings and 50 people come to all of them, or we do a talk and all these things happen: that looks like a successful day. But we may not have gotten anything important artistically, because we didn't have the time and the ability to really interact. The kind of human interaction we need to create work together and understand what people really want? Maybe we did, but sometimes we didn't. Numbers don't guarantee more success, but that's how this world is set up. So the process of being with this young woman in a basement for hours and hours and hours is that she never stopped talking, and it was huge. It had such an effect on our lives and our artwork, ultimately, and also how we work. We realized there were things we had to adjust in our protocols of how we work, so many things were learned from that day. But I'd say to 99% of academic and professional institutional metrics, that was a failure day. Some money spent to connect to one human, is that enough? Ty Defoe: I think this idea of narrative reparations and fostering narrative relations is the most important thing. If we are living in a story right now, we can tell the story of this day and share it with others. There's a quality to that, because theater itself is an ephemeral art. You do the show and it's gone. The process is whatever aliveness comes that day. Like the weather: you don't know what the weather's going to be (I guess here in Arizona it's going to be sunny, but it might be cloudy, right?). Given that idea, I think there's something about staying alive in the moment to radically give yourself to others. With the hopes that they also show up and give back. There's this exchange that happens in terms of story and whatever comes out of it. You don't know. I think that's the unknown factor, like the mystery of it: something wonderful and amazing is going to come out of it. If you bake a cake or make food or plant seeds: something may happen when you put time and intentionality and ritual into it, and all these really good ingredients. I wanted to share that because I think it's so important. This idea about valuing the interpersonal stories matters so much, and years later, you are not even talking about the show. You're talking about meeting inspiring young people, inspiring people that might not know a world different from their own. And that's humanity, right? That's the humanities. I get excited about it. Larissa FastHorse: So much of our work, too, is about what's common (which sounds silly) in the world. We talk a lot about not having an ego: you have to be able to put aside your ego. When I show up in community, I may spend all my time cooking or child-minding, or something. Things that maybe I personally as a human don't feel really called to. But that's what, in that community, that's the role. That's what I'm seen to be doing. Walking and holding babies is just not my thing, but there I was in a kitchen, with women holding babies, because in that community, that's what needed to be done. Not to be a playwright. Not to be any other thing that I might want to call myself. On the other side, we were just talking yesterday about when he and I were in Fiji on this grant, and we got to the University of the South Pacific, and the person who invited us was gone and didn't tell anybody we were coming. Here we were anyway. And so we asked, "what do you want us to do?" We're here to work with you. They wanted me to teach them Balanchine ballet classes specifically, because these were performers who are incredibly gifted dancers. They sometimes get trips to the United States and they want to take a ballet class where they don't know the protocols of how class works and what the formality is. Okay, I tell them: here's what happens in the dressing room. Here's what happens when you sign in. We went through all that. And then I taught them a Balanchine class. And that was the last thing in my life I expected to be doing in Fiji, teaching Balanchine ballet classes to people who don't have ballet shoes, and on these scary wood floors. It was not what I would have thought I would go to Fiji to do with indigenous people, but that's what the community needed, and that's what they wanted. And so that's what I did. Which fortunately was of interest to them. But if it had been of interest to them to have me sweep out the dressing rooms, then that's what I would've done. My dear Michael has spent much time notoriously cleaning a lot of rat poop off risers so the children would be healthy and safe. He spent a day, with a massive mask on, doing simply the work that needed to be done, so the children could be safe and healthy. That's what he did. That was being of incredible service to that community, and to the art that community was creating that day.

For the past several years Larissa FastHorse, Michael John Garcés, and Ty Defoe have been traveling around the world, visiting various Native communities to lend their expertise in theater and multidisciplinary arts.

The creative principles that guide FastHorse, Garcés, and Defoe offer insights into how to approach any creative endeavor, including pedagogy. At the center of their practice is a deep humility and interest in restoration and care. Focusing on listening and offering their support in roles that may appear to stem beyond the boundaries of theater-making, they demonstrate how attention, connection, and curiosity infuse creative spaces with value that cannot be quantified.

Early Modern
Performance
Indigeneity
RaceB4Race Highlight
Sierra Lomuto

Performing diversity work in medieval studies

Sierra Lomuto examines the field of medieval studies and how it privileges whiteness in knowledge production. The Global Medieval/Early Globalities as a methodology can open up current structures and create a spacetime beyond Europe.

I was originally going to focus the topic of my talk today on how medieval studies continually appropriates and erases the work of medievalists of color, specifically within the field's recent movement for racial justice. This is a dynamic that I have noticed, and I know many of us in this room have noticed as well. It angers me a lot, and I know it angers many of you. But in the course of writing that paper, I realized I wanted to actually pivot away from my anger, or perhaps better put, I wanted to use my anger to help me pivot towards something more hopeful, and toward radical transformation. So, although I will open my talk with a discussion about this appropriation of medievalists of colors' work, it is only a starting point, because ultimately, I want to think about how this appropriation is perhaps inevitable within our current system. And if this is the case, this inevitability, then what I really want to focus on are strategies for the radical transformation of that system. Last October, Florida University Press released a collection of essays titled, Whose Middle Ages?. The collection introduces the Middle Ages to students and other non-experts, while also foregrounding the harmful ways that white supremacist movements have appropriated the Middle Ages throughout various points in history. I love this concept, and of course, I think it is precisely the way that the Middle Ages should be taught and presented. In fact, for all of those reasons, I decided to blurb the book when they asked. But nonetheless, it is not perfect. And one significant problem, which I did discuss with the editors, is that even as it aims to fight against white supremacist appropriation, it is itself engaging in a harmful act of appropriation. Its entire existence was made possible through the antiracist discourse that medievalists of color have been forging for years now. Yet it only includes two essays by medievalists of color. And just to put all of my cards on the table here, I really felt this on a personal level, because even though my work is cited in the book as inspiring some of the essays, and even though I was asked to blurb the book, I was not asked to contribute an essay and have my voice directly inform its discourse. Instead, the introduction was written by a white male scholar, thus, once again, positioning the white male voice as authoritative even in a discussion about racism. To my mind, this book seemed a glaring example of precisely the problem of white medieval studies capitalizing on the anti-racist work medievalists of color have been doing for a long time – well before the topic became a hot one. In an email exchange with Seeta Chaganti, who is right over here, Seeta helped me to understand the dynamic at play here. In an email to myself and the editors, she explained that the publishers seemed to rush production because of their "perception that this is a hot and profitable topic they should claim for themselves as quickly as possible." And I should note that I did get Dr. Chaganti's permission to share this email. Dr. Chaganti then went on to analyze the title itself, highlighting how quote, "the possessive adjective [whose] reveals more than It no doubt intends about the role of property, ownership, and profit in all of it." Thank you, Seeta. This collection, despite its undeniably good intentions to do important antiracist work, nonetheless could not escape the talons of racial capitalism. What Seeta's words here helped me see was that it was less about doing antiracist work and more about owning ideas and discourse, specifically from medievalists of color. Work that in the past could ostracize us in this field has actually become a hot commodity. And the question of who gets to control and own this commodity is very much at stake. We saw something similar play out with the Dating Beowulf collection where Adam Miyashiro's work was appropriated. Now this is a sinister form of plagiarism, where one is actually left without avenues for legal or formal redress. Yesterday I sent this paper to my friend, one of the RaceB4Race executive board members, Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, because I needed a trusted pair of eyes before coming up here in front of you all. She sent me back a reply, offering me this quote from Sara Ahmed's new book, What's the Use? On the Uses of Use. “Appropriation is justified as getting the most use from what is available to use, as stopping what is held in common from being wasted or becoming waste.” And in our dialogue, Shokoofeh also offered the astute analysis that I would like to share (and I got her permission as well). “What is so haunting about this definition is that in appropriating the work of medievalists of color without including them, they essentially show that they believe that this work will become waste, unseen, or unread, if it is not reinscribed through whiteness. And what is scary about this, is that it is true! Because of the way the field is set up. We speak, but in this field as it is structured, unless white people listen, unless white people ‘use’ what we speak and make it a product through their whiteness, it is as if we have not spoken.” She uses the word haunting here, and I think there is really no better word to describe this dynamic. But as I said, I do not want to only lay out my grievances about this, but to also understand why this keeps happening and how we can change it. In my own efforts to better understand this issue, I want to turn to the work of Paula Ioanide, which helped me view the dynamics of this appropriation through an ontology of whiteness, through white supremacy itself. In her article, "Defensive Appropriations," Ioanide deconstructs how the police, white student unions, and the alt-right use appropriative tactics to fabricate self-victimization, and thereby take a defensive stance against people of color. For example, she delineates the way the creation of the phrase Blue Lives Matter invents a false equivalence between Black and brown people's hyper-vulnerability to police killings and police officers' vulnerability to dying in the line of duty. Ioanide's formulation of “defensive appropriations” works well for understanding why and how white supremacists fashion themselves into victims and embattled minorities, fighting against this myth that they have called white genocide. As many of us know, as white supremacists converged in Charlottesville in the name of protecting what they deem white heritage, they did so wielding confederate flags and medieval imagery. Featured prominently was the Othal rune, meaning heritage and inheritance, particularly in relation to homeland. This rune was the official symbol of the Prince Eugen wing of the Nazi party in Croatia. And here you can see a Nazi officer wearing it as an insignia on his collar. Today it is featured heavily within white supremacist circles as it has become the emblem of the neo-Nazi national socialist movement. It is a common tattoo and has even been commercialized. One company, named Tightrope Records, sells products branded with various white supremacist symbols, including shirts and buttons with the Othal rune, a Thor hammer with runes on it, and a shirt that overlays the Confederate flag on the Celtic Cross. The company's tagline is, “it's not illegal to be white .... yet,” which reflects the myth of white genocide. And the rhetoric of legality here is very telling. They fear losing the power that their whiteness gives them, and they understand the centrality of the legal system in upholding that power. Whiteness is a category defined by, “the right to use and enjoyment,” as Cheryl Harris has put it. Ioanide draws on Harris's foundational theory of whiteness as property to explain that “this is a form of property that gives whiteness the exclusive right to move about the world unrestrained—the right to leverage one's will and privileges, to enjoy life as one sees fit without being encumbered on the basis of race.” She further explains, “The fusion between white identity and property is so tightly bound that when white property advantages and entitlements suffer from the effects of de-industrialization, globalization, climate chaos, the corporate elite's greed, as well as demographic, cultural and political shifts that de-center whiteness, white identity loses the primary basis on which it has historically constructed its self-worth and hope.” I should pause here, crucially, and say that I do not want to elide the differences between liberal academia and white hate groups. These differences are huge and very, very important, of course. But what I do want to do is push the idea that it is whiteness that structures both of these things: they manifest differently, but it is the same structure. Insofar as white supremacy is the hegemonic system in which we all live and work. Whether we are looking at a hate group or a field of study, the property of whiteness will necessarily govern our social, economic, and personal relations. Within this system, racial justice movements are appropriated to serve, not tackle, the white hegemony. As infuriating as this is, it is not unusual. Even the best of us become trapped by its mechanics. When the editors and publisher of Whose Middle Ages? put together their volume, they did so within a field of study governed by a capitalist white supremacist system. And within this system, the kind of antiracist discourse we have been building becomes a commodity to be owned and profited from, rather than used to build new structures. Ioanide ends her article on defensive appropriations with this very eloquent and hopeful passage, which I want to offer as a way of framing how we might envision the radical transformation of a field that is moored by the same ontology of whiteness that has fabricated white dispossession within hate groups. Intracommunal movement building is where transformations in ways of seeing, being, and relating have the potential to take place. It is where everyday people who are enraged by the injustices, they witness come to figure out the difficult work of transforming local institutions, consider tactical ways to hold police departments accountable, and (most pertinent to us here) create educational settings for people to deepen their analysis. It is where people determine whether they are capable of trusting and loving each other in ways that are fundamentally anathema to the ontology of whiteness, which privileges forms of relating that breed division, hierarchy, and individualist self-aggrandizement. I'm going to come back to this quote at the end, but I want to shift a little bit to thinking about the global turn in medieval studies, and how the global has perhaps the potential to transform our field. What I want to emphasize is that this process of transformation requires that the global is not simply, as someone put it yesterday, a euphemism for diversity: we all know that it is being used that way, that it is not simply a rebranding of the same old system. In fact, the oxymoron of the term “global medieval” needs to be taken very seriously. At the last RaceB4Race, Mary Rambaran-Olm powerfully announced her resignation as second vice president of the organization formerly known as the International Society of Anglo-Saxon Studies, which immediately inspired a long overdue and important conversation about the politics of naming. ISAS became ISXX, as the organization tried to rebrand itself by shunning the part of its name that carries and perpetuates legacies of racism and white nationalism. But as Dr. Rambaran-Olm has emphasized, the problem isn't only the name, a topical issue that can easily be remedied with a simple name change. The organization's name, and indeed medieval studies itself (my argument) is intimately wrapped up in the project of white identity creation, one that relies on a partnership between knowledge production (academia) and sociopolitical power structures (white supremacy). The controversy over naming ISXX exposed academia's investment in white supremacy, not only because a medievalist organization still used a racist term, but also because what that term named—the institutional production of white heritage—could not be easily dislodged. In an effort to break from conceptions of the Middle Ages as a white space and time that witnessed minimal cross-cultural contact, the larger field of medieval studies has attempted this global turn. But as this new field emerges, and the global medieval becomes ubiquitous, it may be time to query whether medieval and even the Middle Ages are limiting terms that name racist epistemologies. As we know, medieval is a temporal construct that is inextricably tied to the spatial constructs of Western Europe. Speculum, which is issued by the Medieval Academy of America, and is considered by many in the field to be the most prestigious journal that we have, describes the traditional purview of the field on their webpage guideline for submissions, which I want to read to you. Speculum, published quarterly since 1926, was the first scholarly journal in North America devoted exclusively to the Middle Ages. It is open to contributions in all fields studying the Middle Ages, a period ranging from approximately 500 to 1500. The primary emphasis is on Western Europe, but Arabic, Byzantine, Hebrew and Slavic studies are also included. The language of publication is English. The Middle Ages as a concept centers Western European history and culture. While other specific studies are included peripherally, they are not the emphasis of the journal, just as they are not captured by the construct of the Middle Ages. According to Speculum's self-description, unless it were linked back to Western Europe, an article on the Mongol Yuan dynasty, for example, would not be published in this elite journal. The medieval is not merely a designation of time, but one of space as well. The space it marks is specifically Western Europe, and just as Western Europe has been constructed through what bell hooks has so incisively named “the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” so too does the medieval carry this valence of power and oppression. The MAA, and the field more broadly, is adopting the discourse and frameworks of the global in order to disrupt this current notion of the Middle Ages as white, European and geographically isolated from the African and Asian continents. At the same time, this global turn has become a method by which medievalists aim to foster inclusive classrooms and thereby cultivate a more diverse pipeline into the professoriate. But adding global to medieval offers a tenuous solution, I think: Europe is never going to not be signified by the medieval and centered within its framework. It is a construct that is only legible within European time and space. Even as the global medieval expands the traditional purview of medieval studies outward, it brings the world centripetally back to Western Europe and risks enabling a new method of epistemological colonialism. Geraldine Heng, who brought this concept to the forefront of the field and has thought about the global medieval for decades, has suggested that we move toward the term “early globalities” as an alternative, thereby shunning a restrictive Eurocentric term when studying an interconnected past. But I want to ask, to what extent does eliminating medieval erase the concept that it names—to go back to Dr. Rambaran-Olm's point about ISAS—that is, to what extent does the field still remain marked by an ontology of whiteness? In the wake of Charlottesville, public medievalist discourse quickly established a dichotomy between us and them. Addressing his fellow academics, historian David Perry offered guidance on, “What to Do When Nazis Are Obsessed with Your Field.” That's the title of his article. Before discussing his own realization that his love for medieval castles was shared by white supremacists on Stormfront, he describes an innocent field beset by racism: “There have been some bad actors among the profession, and there's a collection of right-wing thinkers in certain subfields, but mostly we're just a collection of predominantly white scholars who are surprised and disturbed to discover our classes and books might be well-received by white supremacists. Having discovered it, the question is what to do.” Having rhetorically pushed racism outward, and reduced what remains to a batch of bad apples, Perry focuses on the insiders who are left to mobilize against an external threat. He ends his essay with an action plan for his colleagues: “Our solutions to this problem include explicitly signaling our rejection of racism and working harder to diversify the field, but also dethroning the very notion of the Middle Ages—mostly Christian, mostly located in western Europe, isolated from other peoples." Perry's three-pronged plan is precisely right, but missing is an analysis of how this notion of the Middle Ages that he's talking about is intimately linked with the field that created it, and how his call to dethrone it also depends on dethroning the notion of white innocence, or here, medievalist innocence. In On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Sara Ahmed has eloquently described the predicament Perry's essay exemplifies. She writes, “The reduction of racism to the figure of 'the racist' allows structural or institutional forms of racism to recede from view, by projecting racism onto a figure that is easily discarded (not only as someone who is ‘not me,’ but also as someone who is 'not us,' who does not represent a cultural or institutional norm.” Right after a racist incident, people will often say, “this is not who we are,” but there is something about who we are that engendered the incident in the first place. This rhetoric serves an important function. As Ahmed puts it, “One of the best ways you can deflect attention from racism is to hear racism as an accusation. When racism is heard as accusation, then public relations becomes an exercise: the response takes the form of a defense of individual or institutional reputation. The language of diversity becomes easily mobilized as a defense of reputation (perhaps even a defense of whiteness).” In many ways, I think we can understand the global turn in medieval studies as a diversity initiative that addresses the problem of white supremacist appropriation. It accomplishes the aim of dethroning the idea that the Middle Ages was white, Christian and Western European. It invites the participation of more scholars of color in doing both of these things, and it also seems to signal a rejection of racist ideologies. But does it interrogate the uncomfortable ways in which white supremacy underscores medieval studies? As Ahmed's work warns us, an emphasis on diversity can inadvertently lead us to develop more robust ways of protecting the exclusionary power structures we think we are fighting against. Diversity initiatives often prioritize an institution's reputation—in this case, that of medieval studies rather than the targets of racism. When diversity becomes a strategic tool of response towards bad will, as something that garners goodwill between institutions and the public, it can mask the racism that continues to operate beneath the surface. Disrupting the narrative of a white Middle Ages, or dethroning it, to use David Perry's term, protects medieval studies from accusations of racism, but it does little to address racism itself. Racism is about the structural ways in which people of color have been disenfranchised by various forms of violence and oppression. Antiracist strategies for correcting racist appropriations must necessarily address structural change within the institutions that have facilitated racist appropriations to begin with. In other words, as we assert that medievalists don't only study and promote the histories of white people, we also overlook how we do promote whiteness through the disciplinary construct of the medieval. As educators and researchers, as knowledge producers, we have the power to make change. This is where we can find the hope. We have this power, but we have to remember that white supremacy is not something remote. It isn't them versus us. It's right here it is medieval studies. If we want to be antiracist, we need to start thinking more radically about how we can reformulate our field, in our teaching, graduate training, and public outreach. These priorities will necessarily require structural transformation and institutional change. For the global medieval to affect antiracist change within medieval studies, its formulation must exceed curricular diversification and confront how whiteness adheres within the medieval. That is, the global cannot merely mark a project of spatial expansion, even as that is necessarily part of it. Whether we name the shift in the field “global medieval” or “early globalities,” which I do like, the central aim must be to critique medieval Europe's position in space and time. Geraldine Heng has adopted Wai Chee Dimock's formulation of deep time to theorize the temporal implications of the global medieval. She argues that global temporalities break down narratives of European and modern exceptionalism, making space for non-Eurocentric epistemologies to emerge. We may also borrow from Michelle Wright's theory of epiphenomenal time in Black studies, which models how space-time can disrupt oppressive narratives of knowledge, specifically in regard to racial identities. Wright's conceptualization of Blackness, which transforms it from a what to a when, or where, is born through the epiphenomenal framework, “in which the past, present, and future are always interpreted.” Wright locates “the Black Collective in history, and in the specific moment in which Blackness is being imagined, the now through which all imaginings of Blackness will be mediated.” This framework can help us think through how to study race using the global medieval as a methodology, where as a methodology it can open space-time beyond Europe and beyond the medieval, while accounting for an embodied present and envisioning a different future at the same time. I did not want to write a paper only about the appropriation of our work within the field, and in the profession that operates through racial capitalism, because honestly, I am tired of feeling hopeless. I am tired of feeling resentful of the state of the field, about both its legacies of racism as well as its current structures of racial inclusion. So, with this aim and desire toward hope, I want to emphasize Ioanide's point about intercommunal movement building. I want to reread a section from that quote: “Intercommunal movement building ...is where people determine whether they are capable of trusting and loving each other in ways that are fundamentally anathema to the ontology of whiteness.” I noticed yesterday and today what is so wonderful about this event is how, while we have senior scholars and various established scholars here, we also have lots of students, both undergraduate and graduate, and we have high school teachers. There is really a diversity here of intergenerational expertise and knowledge. I want to ask all of you to talk about different strategies and methods that you have used, from your particular vantage point, that have been helpful in building these intercommunal sorts of movements, and whether they worked or didn't work. Because I think we learn as much through our struggles and our failures as we do through our successes.

Antiracism or Appropriation?: Performing Diversity Work in Medieval Studies | Watch the full talk

Presented by Sierra Lomuto at Appropriations: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2020

Sierra Lomuto examines the field of medieval studies and how it privileges whiteness in knowledge production. She argues that whiteness is a structure that informs the engagement of nationalist hate groups and liberal academia with the Middle Ages despite the differences and opposition between the two. However, Lomuto contends that the Global Medieval/Early Globalities as a methodology can open up current structures and create a spacetime beyond Europe and beyond traditional periodization that can challenge the ontology of whiteness.

Medieval
Literature
Intro to premodern critical race studies
Syllabus
Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Citizenships ancient and modern

This course, developed by Dan-el Padilla Peralta, maps a history of citizenship as a concept and an institution from the ancient Mediterranean world to the 21st century.

Course description

The extrajudicial murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor have brought renewed and overdue attention to the fatal designs of civic inequality. These designs—and the debates over the assignment, withholding, or deprivation of citizen status and civic protections from which they emerge—have a long and violent history. In this course we will attempt to map a history of citizenship as concept and institution from the ancient Mediterranean world to the 21st century. Some of the questions to be tackled include: who/what is a citizen? What are the prerogatives and rights that come with citizenship? Who is eligible to be—or become—a citizen? (How) are racial and gendered exclusions wired into the historical legacies and present-day practice of citizenship? How is citizenship imagined and narrated? What does it mean to be a global citizen? Although we will make much fuss over the ancient Mediterranean in the first half of the course, one objective of this course is to determine whether and to what degree such an orientation makes sense. To arrive at this determination, we will experiment with a range of different historical and conceptual genealogies for modern frameworks of citizenship. Our readings will run the gamut from poetry and narrative fiction to political theory and narrative nonfiction.

Course expectations and policy

For our Zoom lectures and precepts, we do not have policies on clothing: wear whatever you want, so long as you’re comfortable (but wear something). And while we would love to see your radiant facial expressions, we also understand if you need to turn your camera off for all or a portion of a Zoom. Please feel free to use a background filter; we are happy to supply themed ones. If, at any point, the course content or discussions make you so uncomfortable that you feel the need to turn off the camera and/or disconnect from the call, please touch base with us afterwards via email. If it’s concerning a subject that you would rather not address with us directly, please consider consulting with me.

Grading

Weekly journaling

We ask that, starting in Week 2, you initiate a conversation with someone not enrolled in the course (a member of your family or your community; a friend; a mentor) about one of the readings for that week; and that you then write a short paragraph about this conversation, not to exceed one page double-spaced, in which you summarize how you explained the reading to your conversational interlocutor and what their response to that summary was. The choice of conversational medium (face-to-face, phone, Zoom/Skype, email etc.) is entirely up to you and can vary from week to week. We’ll provide you with a link to a Google Drive folder for uploading your paragraphs, which you should aim to do no later than the end of day each Friday. Your instructors will check this folder three times to track your progress: at the end of Weeks 4, 8, and 12. With your permission (which we will solicit in advance), we may quote from your paragraphs in lecture and discussion. The end-of-term grade for this unit will be a holistic assessment of your paragraphs. You’re allowed to miss two weeks out of eleven (i.e. we will evaluate only nine of your paragraphs).

Take-home midterm

This open-book exam will be administered in two parts. Part A will consist of two argumentative essays that you’ll write in response to set prompts (we’ll give you four options). Our expectation is that you take two hours on Part A. Part B will consist of two creative essays: for the first, you’ll draw up a dialogue with one of the authors you’ve read up to that point in which you criticize their position on a specific aspect of citizenship (and they respond in turn to your criticisms); for the second, you will write in the style of another of the authors you’ve read, expanding and elaborating on one of their main points. Our expectation is that you take two hours on Part B as well. 

Take-home final

This open-book exam will consist of three parts: a reflection on your journaled conversations in which you take stock of directions taken and not taken; a design project in which you draw up a constitution for a new national government; and an argumentative essay that asks you to critique an author from the course’s first half from the position of an author in the course’s second half. Our expectation is that you take three hours on this exam.

Classroom culture and expectations

In order to build and maintain a collaborative and affirmative environment, we encourage you to practice care and generosity in your interventions; always to make space for others to participate equitably in the conversation; and to be on guard against those habits of discourse that militate against inclusion. Please hold us, your instructors, to that same standard as well.

Your ability to access the course material on your own terms and engage with it to the maximum extent possible is of paramount importance to us. We’re always happy to discuss your learning needs and how best to accommodate them.

Finally, we wish to draw attention to the presence in many of our readings of practices and language that are implicated in or actively embrace colonialism, slavery, and sex- and gender-based violence and discrimination. We will need to practice special care, for ourselves and each other, when subjecting this material to critical scrutiny.

Course texts

Euripides, Complete Tragedies III (Chicago)
Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (Penguin)
Aristotle, Politics (Hackett)
Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (Norton)
Vitoria, Political Writings (Cambridge)
Rankine, Citizen

Ancient
Literature
Transnational studies
Video
Adam Miyashiro

Comparative epics: Teaching La Chanson de Roland

Contextualizing the political and racializing mission of La Chanson de Roland offers students a perspective on how epics shaped
—and were shaped by—the values of their historical moment.

Comparative epics: Teaching La Chanson de Roland Adam Miyashiro When I teach La Chanson de Roland—The Song of Roland—I need my students to understand the historical context surrounding the poem and its many iterations. La Chanson de Roland is a 12th-century verse narrative written in Old French that recounts a version of a historical event, the Battle of Roncevaux on August 15, 778. The poem depicts the divinely inspired Christian army going to battle against a monstrous, “pagan” enemy, who is ambushing them in a pass through the Pyrenees mountains as Charlemagne returns from Spain to France. The actual events of that fateful day in 778 were much different, according to Charlemagne’s personal biographer, Einhard. Upon Charlemagne’s return to his capital in Aix-la-Chappelle, the rearguard of his army is attacked, not by Muslims, but by Gascons, who were Christian. In Einhard’s recounting, the Basques attack swiftly and disperse widely, so Charlemagne could not locate them. Einhard’s contemporary account records that Roland dies in the attack with a few others. It is neither heroic nor dramatic, and the description of the battle and its aftermath lacks any details. Despite this, the story is transformed over the course of the next four centuries into the text we have today. The Basques are replaced by “pagans,” assumed to be Muslims in al-Andalus, and their belief system is caricatured in almost cartoonish ways, as they worship Muhammad, Apollo, and a purely fictional deity named “Tervagant.” Characters like Olivier and Roland’s traitorous uncle, Ganelon, are added, and the king Marsile and his queen are mirrored by Charlemagne as his court. What I want my students to ask is: why was this poem so radically revised from its history? Beginning in 1095, the pope Urban II issued a call for a Crusade at the Council of Clermont, upon meeting a delegation sent by the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Comnenus His call to crusade invoked Muslim atrocities of various sorts, proto-national and ancestral pride and supremacy, and the merger of religion and violence with Christian crusader martyrdom. The Song of Roland was composed and written down almost immediately after the First Crusade. In the poem, Roland is portrayed as a holy warrior for Christianity who is carried up by the Angel Gabriel upon his death in an act of crusader penitence. The character of Archbishop Turpin, who leads masses before battles and prays to kill the pagans, embodies the crusader Christianity that imbued the propagandistic rhetoric of crusading. Likewise, Ganelon, who privately liaises between Charlemagne and Marsile, is portrayed as a traitor, who faces a trial by battle and loses, resulting in the execution of his entire family. In addition, the captured pagan queen, Bramimonde, is forced to convert to Christianity by the end of the poem. The literary enmity between Charlemagne and the Arab-Muslim world couldn’t have been more historically inaccurate. Charlemagne, in fact, had a good relationship with the Abbasid dynasty, under the caliph Harun al-Rashid, to whom he sent gifts and delegations, which were reciprocated. In the year 801, an Asian elephant was sent to Charlemagne and this is maybe why the most identifiable object that symbolizes Roland’s status is in fact an oliphant, a horn made from elephant ivory. This object is inherently African and has close ties to the Arab-Muslim and Byzantine world. The Song of Roland, which symbolizes so closely a European and Christian identity in the modern era, has at its core an African object. Further, the text was promoted to the level of a national epic during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, while simultaneously colonizing Algeria. In 1870, France passed the Cremieux Decree, which granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews, but not Algerian Muslims. This decree helped to instigate the 1871 Kabyle Revolt, where over a third of Algeria’s population rose up against the French colonial settlers. It was at this time, during the German siege of Paris in December 1870, that the French medievalist literary scholar Gaston Paris gave a series of lectures at the Collège de France called “La chanson de Roland et la nationalité française.” At its core, The Song of Roland was a product of both European nationalist and colonial aspirations.

La Chanson de Roland, written in the 11th century, recounts the battle of Roncevaux in 778 CE. Teaching this epic functions as a baseline from which to compare and expand on the epic tradition in the medieval world. La Chanson de Roland praises the valiance of crusading and the moral superiority of Christianity, while villainizing an imagined Muslim enemy. Contextualizing the political and racializing mission of the poem offers students a perspective on how epics shaped and were shaped by the values of their historical moment.

Medieval
Literature
Poetry
Religion
Video
Leslie Alexander

Enslavement and uprisings

In the years before independence in the US there were over fifty documented conspiracies, rebellions, and plots by enslaved peoples in resistance to slavery. Unfortunately this history has been largely overlooked.

Historians have traditionally downplayed the significance of armed rebellions against slavery. We now know that white settlers faced a continuous stream of slave revolts throughout the colonial period. In fact, there were over 50 documented conspiracies against slavery in the years before 1790. And yet three rebellions in particular shook the slave system to its core in the colonial era, demonstrating enslaved people's deep commitment to gaining their freedom and destroying the institution of slavery. Contrary to what you might expect, the first major rebellion occurred not in the southern colonies, but in the north. On April 6th, 1712, approximately 24 enslaved Africans, men and women, gathered in the heart of New York City at about 2:00 AM, armed with a variety of weapons, including guns, axes, and knives. Likely enraged by the English authorities' recent decision to pass a series of restrictive laws, these freedom seekers resolved to go to battle against slavery. In the early morning hours, the rebels set the city ablaze. During the ensuing hysteria, they ambushed and killed nine white people and wounded seven others. Interestingly, the rebels drew heavily on African cultural and spiritual practices. During the rebellion, when preparing to launch the revolt, the conspirators turned to a known African spiritual leader: a conjure man, known as Peter the Doctor, who rubbed a mysterious powder on their clothing to make them invincible against their enemies. The 1712 conspirators also took a loyalty oath, sealing their pact by drinking from a potion that included blood from each other's hands. Now, this might seem shocking in the 21st century, but similar oathing ceremonies were common among West African peoples at this time. Societies such as the Akan believed that drinking a bit of each other's blood bound people together in a political community, transporting that notion from Africa across the sea. Rebels in New York, Jamaica, Antigua, and elsewhere in the Americas used similar powders, potions and loyalty oaths when sparking revolts. But despite the rebels' best efforts, white colonists quickly squashed the 1712 rebellion, and the authorities' response proved quick and brutal. A few rebels committed suicide rather than be captured. But approximately 70 others faced trial on charges ranging from conspiracy to murder. All but one suffered conviction. Twenty one suffered horrifying executions. Some were burned at the stake while others were hanged in chains or had their necks snapped. One died an excruciating death after being broken on the wheel, a gruesome process in which a person is strapped to a large stone wheel. Then every bone in their body is broken with a wooden mallet, and the person is left to die. White colonists then placed the rebels' decapitated heads on display for weeks in an effort to dissuade future uprisings. Immediately thereafter, colonial leaders also passed a new set of oppressive mandates. The new laws prevented Africans from freely associating with each other and authorized slave owners to beat enslaved people without cause. The regulations also forced enslavers to post a bond of 200 English pounds before setting an African free and forbade free Black people from owning property. Authorities in the New York colony obviously hoped that these regulations would deter future insurrections, but they were sorely mistaken. In fact, another conspiracy emerged in New York approximately thirty years later. Between March and April of 1741, ten mysterious fires burned throughout New York City. The first, on March 18th, targeted the colonial governor's home, setting the roof ablaze. The fire quickly spread to Fort George, which was the colony's ammunition storehouse, and its main political and military center. Over the next few weeks, fires broke out in homes, warehouses, and stables throughout the city. Although colonists did not immediately make the connection between these events, they eventually realized that enslaved Africans and their white allies had intentionally set the fires as part of a coordinated plot. One terrified witness who saw a conspirator set a fire ran from the scene yelling, “The Negroes are rising!” Much like the 1712 revolt, compelling evidence of African cultural practices appeared in the court records. Again, the rebels consulted a conjure man: this time, an enslaved man named Doctor Harry, who concocted the incendiary substances that caused the fires. He also gave the lead conspirators poison, which they could use to commit suicide if they were captured. Even more fascinating, however, was the existence of yet another oathing ceremony involving blood and graveyard dirt. According to the Akan peoples of West Africa, a pact forged with grave dirt creates an unbreakable bond between the participants, because it links the ancestral spirits with the living. But once again, their efforts failed. One hundred and fifty enslaved people faced trial and conviction, with 70 sent to slavery in the Caribbean and the rest subjected to painful executions. Thirteen were burned at the stake. Sixteen were hanged, and two were starved in chains. One man's body hung in chains for eleven weeks as a symbolic reminder to other enslaved people about the consequences that awaited them if they attempted to engage in similar behavior. While white northerners struggled to repress slave uprisings in their territory, southerners also succumbed to rampant rebellion. Prior to the American Revolution, over 25 revolts or conspiracies rocked the southern colonies, nearly half of which occurred in the decade between 1730 and 1740. But none compared to the events beginning on September 9th, 1739, when enslaved Africans commenced an attack in the countryside just outside of Charleston, South Carolina -- which later became known as the Stono Rebellion. Beginning with only about twenty participants, rebels gathered near the Stono River, about 10 miles from Charleston, led by a man named Jemmy. They raided a local store where they obtained weapons and ammunition. Strategically marching from plantation to plantation, they burned and raided property and killed nearly 30 slaveholders. Using drums and other musical instruments, the rebels attracted supporters, and the uprising blossomed to more than a hundred. According to at least one source, the rebels stopped in a field, where they called out "Liberty!" while singing, dancing, and drumming. Much like the uprisings in New York, rebels incorporated various elements of their African cultural heritage in this revolt, particularly the use of music, song and dance, which were crucial carryovers from West and West Central Africa. Many Africans enslaved in South Carolina originated from the Congo Angola region, where drums and dance were specifically used for military purposes, with certain dances being reserved for military training and declarations of war. Therefore, in colonial South Carolina, rebels used music to signal rebellion and to call upon the gods for their assistance against their enemies. As you might expect, however, the local militias soon caught wind of the rebellion and hunted down the freedom-seeking Africans. After extensive skirmishes, the militia successfully quelled the rebellion, leaving at least 40 enslaved people dead. Unsatisfied, the militia continued their bloody quest for more conspirators for months afterwards. By 1740, South Carolina officials had arrested more than 150 Black people, and they publicly hanged 10 victims per day in a gruesome scheme to deter future uprisings. Despite the grim conclusion to colonial era rebellions, enslaved people's quest for freedom could not be stopped. Instead, Black people found ways to leverage the American Revolution to their advantage, finding new and creative paths to freedom. And even after the war's end, when slavery expanded aggressively across the south, enslaved people never stopped dreaming, hoping, and plotting for their liberation.

In the years before independence in the United States there were over fifty documented conspiracies, rebellions, and plots by enslaved peoples in resistance to slavery. Unfortunately, this history has been largely overlooked. Many historians have dismissed incidents of slave insurrections as insignificant, or too small to qualify as acts of political resistance. This dismissal devalues the self-awareness enslaved people had for their position in colonial society.

By studying these rebellions and the unique political climate in which they took place, we can better understand the ways in which enslaved people strategically worked against and resisted slavery since its inception. We can also trace how anti-Black racism is deeply embedded into the foundations of U.S. legal code and law enforcement.

18th Century
History
Black Atlantic
Video
Suzanne Coley

Shakespeare and the art of bookmaking

Suzanne Coley offers her creative insights on interpreting Shakespeare’s sonnets through the art of bookmaking.

“Shakespeare and the art of bookmaking” Workshop transcript Suzanne Coley: I'm Suzanne Coley and thank you for coming here and allowing me to talk about my process and how I go from the actual text to the books. What I normally do is I start off with reading the sonnet and I see what images come to mind or pop out to me, or things that make me pause. We're going to start out with Sonnet 136. If thy soul check thee that I come so near, Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy will, And will, thy soul knows, is admitted there. Thus far for love my love-suit, sweet, fulfill. Will will fulfill the treasure of thy love, Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one. In things of great receipt with ease we prove Among a number one is reckoned none. Then in the number let me pass untold, Though in thy store’s account I one must be. For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold That nothing me, a something, sweet, to thee. Make but my name thy love, and love that still, And then thou lovest me, for my name is Will. If you saw a book made with this poem, what color do you think it would be? How would it feel? Do we really need words to tell a story? Can we tell this story with just imagery? There's no wrong or right answer. So you, what color would you, what color comes to mind? Workshop participant: For some reason, blue and I have no idea why. Blue. I agree blue. Suzanne Coley: I agree: blue. And you? Workshop participant: I'd say golds. Suzanne Coley: Golds. It's interesting because - I don't want to jump ahead - but in the other sonnet, he talks about the mask, you know, brocades and damask - it's a material, and he uses it as a verb. But we won't jump there. So gold: it just reminds me of that one. And you - what color? Workshop participant: Blue. I see blue as well. Workshop participant: I was thinking red and purple. Suzanne Coley: Red and purple. Workshop participant: I was in the red and purple camp. because I think - it's not an image - but love: "My love" "Sweet. Sweet. Fulfill" Suzanne Coley: “Sweet, sweet fulfill.” What does that look like? Workshop participant: It feels really rich and kind of fruity. You know, kind of red and purple to me. Suzanne Coley: This is the cover of my process book. And it's so funny how you said purples. So these are some of the things that I was thinking. And this is the final book that I made based on this. And I called it, Soul Check 136, because: what does one soul look like? If we had a photo of it or an image of it? I really wanted to explore bringing it into something very tangible and textile.

As a book artist specializing in printmaking, poetry, embroidery, and bookbinding, Suzanne Coley reimagines the words of Shakespeare through the medium of book art. Her work brings Shakespeare into the contemporary world and reshapes his texts into culturally and socially significant art objects. In the last 10 years she has made over 500 unique traditional hardback books expanding the traditional bookbinding and book arts practices. Suzanne's art combines painting, poetry, printmaking, and textile manipulation to examine the human condition and modern-day social justice issues.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Reading list
Ian Smith

Reading the violent Black man myth in Hamlet

Suggested readings from Ian Smith for interrogating the role of race and the violent Black man myth in Hamlet.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Great Fire.” Vanity Fair, August 24, 2020. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/ta-nehisi-coates-editor-letter 

Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.  

Parker, Patricia. “Black Hamlet: Battening on the Moor.” Shakespeare Studies 31 (2003): 127-164. 

Smith, Ian. “White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage.” Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 33-67.  

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
RaceB4Race Highlight
Andrea Myers Achi

Rethinking race in museum exhibitions

Exhibition curation can function as a pipeline to diversify the field, introducing prospective students to medieval materials and helping them build their CVs, but there needs to be cross-institutional collaboration.

The prompt for this conference asked us to interrogate how we teach our fields, why we teach our fields, and whom we implicitly and explicitly include and exclude in the process. I approach this question through my curatorial work. I view my work as a teaching tool for a broad range of learners. A diversity of peoples walk through The Met's galleries: kindergarteners from the upper east side of Manhattan, undergraduates from Brooklyn, international retired scholars from France, and all in—between, locally, nationally, and globally. Through these galleries, many people first encounter the medieval world, and we are privileged to make these encounters an accessible public resource. As a tool to teach the public about our field, the curatorial practice goes beyond permanent collection and large-scale loan exhibitions. We do this work also through our outreach, partnerships, and programs. In this talk, I will discuss how curators have expanded the medieval world's purview by deepening and disseminating knowledge through scholarly research and balancing our commitment to object-centered work with a concern for larger historical and theoretical questions that address a broader context that is multidisciplinary. I will begin by presenting an overview of past medieval exhibitions that have done this type of work: Exhibitions that pushed the boundaries of the medieval world. Then, I will talk a little bit about how exhibitions can be viewed as pipelines to medieval studies and how we can practically use curatorial practice to diversify the field of medieval studies. I will end with brief case studies on two museum objects I've been thinking a lot about. These late Roman artworks have representations of Africans. I will discuss how curators and scholars have approached these objects and the potential for displaying objects like these to show the diversity of the premodern world. Over the past twenty-five years, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's medieval department organized multiple exhibitions that did this type of work: pushing boundaries and showing diversity. Of course, I am biased but, Helen Evans' four exhibitions expanded our field. In the next few slides, I am going to read the exhibition descriptions of her shows. 1997 - The Glory of Byzantium explored four interrelated themes: the religious and secular culture of the Second Golden Age of the Byzantine Empire; the empire's interaction with its Christian neighbors and rivals; its relations with the Islamic East; and its contact with the Latin West. Bringing together the contributions of fifty-nine scholars and art historians, most of them working in the United States, the exhibition explored the complex currents of Byzantine civilization in its myriad facets. More than 350 works of art assembled for the exhibition from 119 institutions in 24 countries were discussed and illustrated in the catalogue. 2004 - Byzantium Faith and Power focused on the exceptional works of secular and religious art produced by Late Byzantine artists. These works were emulated and transformed by other Eastern Christian centers of power, among them Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Armenia. The Islamic world adapted motifs drawn from Byzantium's imperial past, as Christian minorities in the Muslim East continued Byzantine customs. From Italy to the Lowlands, Byzantium's artistic and intellectual practices deeply influenced the development of the Renaissance, while, in turn, Byzantium's own traditions reflected the empire's connections with the Latin West. Fine examples of these interrelationships are illustrated by important panel paintings, ceramics, and illuminated manuscripts, among other objects. 2012 - Byzantium and Islam - This groundbreaking volume explores the epochal transformations and unexpected continuities in the Byzantine Empire from the seventh to the ninth century. As the period opened, the empire's southern provinces—the vibrant, diverse areas of North Africa and eastern Mediterranean—were at the crossroads of trade routes reaching from Spain to China. These regions experienced historic upheavals when their Christian and Jewish communities encountered the emerging Islamic world, and by the ninth century an unprecedented cross-fertilization of cultures had taken place. Other Medieval shows, such as the Jerusalem exhibition, also presented new possibilities in understanding medieval art. And, again, I'll read the description: "Beginning around the year 1000, Jerusalem attained unprecedented significance as a location, destination, and symbol to people of diverse faiths from Iceland to India. Multiple competitive and complementary religious traditions, fueled by an almost universal preoccupation with the city, gave rise to one of the most creative periods in its history." My colleagues at the Getty, of course, organized exhibitions that created entry points to many of the topics driving out field now, such as global Middle Ages, outsiders, trade routes, etc. Most recently, Caravans of Gold organized by Kathleen Bickford Berzock, highlighted the connections between the medieval world and west Africa. Whereas scholarship on Medieval Africa has been ongoing, her exhibition brought the topic to the public. The description: Travel with the Block Museum along routes crossing the Sahara Desert to a time when West African gold fueled expansive trade and drove the movement of people, culture, and religious beliefs. Caravans of Gold is the first major exhibition addressing the scope of Saharan trade and the shared history of West Africa, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe from the eighth to sixteenth centuries. Weaving stories about interconnected histories, the exhibition showcases the objects and ideas that connected at the crossroads of the medieval Sahara and celebrates West Africa's historic and underrecognized global significance. In all the exhibitions, regions not usually considered to be part of medieval or byzantine studies were seamlessly incorporated. These exhibitions stretched what is deemed to be Byzantine or medieval art by creating new frameworks to understand these works in their original contexts. With each of these exhibitions, I know we all felt the ground of our field sightly shift. Children and teenagers encountered new ways of thinking about the medieval world, and these exhibition catalogues began to show up on undergraduate and graduate surveys; the exhibition narratives became woven within the scholarly discourse. But these exhibitions and their subsequent publications are not only crucial for our field, but they are also untapped opportunities to encourage more students to pursue medieval studies and art history. Because of these reasons, I consider exhibitions to be pipeline initiatives. We can take a two-tiered approach to this idea. First, as I mentioned, exhibitions are a public educational resource for k-12, academia, and the general public. And we know this, but I think museums can be more strategic about their programming to open up the possibilities of the field. Second, exhibitions have long lives beyond the three months that the installation is open, and the planning process provides training opportunities to help create an inclusive and equitable field. These exhibitions championed sustainable partnerships with both local and international communities. For example, during the development of the Glory of Byzantium, Helens Evans developed a conservation training program for Egyptian students. The program participants are now in influential positions related to museums and cultural heritage management in Egypt. The exhibitions I mentioned earlier provided training opportunities for diverse groups to collaborate on exhibition development, catalogues, and programming. Each of these opportunities helps with applications to graduate school, CVs for the job market, and so on. Indeed, we can't depend on one or two institutions to do this work of creating an inclusive space to allow BIPOC students to thrive, but what if keepers of every medieval collection viewed their upcoming exhibitions as an opportunity to diversify our field? What if we worked together—universities, colleges, particularly HBCUs, museums, and libraries to help students get hands-on training with object-centered research. And our interns don't have to start as medievalists, but we can introduce them to the work. I am going to use The Met as an example again. Here we have educational programs for K-12 students. In these programs, we can use the opportunity to tell the stories of the medieval objects and help students think critically about their relationship to these objects—we discuss original contexts and how the artworks got into the museum. We have high school, undergraduate, and graduate internships. We can mentor these students and encourage them to take Latin and Greek, and other necessary courses to graduate school. These internship projects are often tied to the development of exhibitions or permanent collection installations. The internships allow students to engage with primary sources and objects in ways that might be challenging to do within typical coursework. In short, exhibitions can help create multiple entry points into our fields. Okay, so far, I've talked about exhibitions over the past 25 years that have helped usher the so-called global turn in medieval studies. I've also discussed how these exhibitions establish frameworks to create sustainable pipelines into the field. I am going to step in a different direction for a moment and discuss two objects, both currently in museums. These objects touch upon topics of race and ethnicity in the space between the Mediterranean and the red sea. I will discuss how I have been highlighting representations of Africans within my galleries as a way to disrupt and unsettle narratives usually told about these objects. I hope that this type of work encourages a more diverse generation of students to enter the field. On June 9, 2020, a New York Times article, "Evoking History, Black Cowboys Take to the Streets," highlighted the history of African American cowboys and how their presence "challenged the traditional idea of what a horse rider could look like." An integral presence in the Black Lives Matter protests from Compton to Houston, and the riders "reclaimed the traditional role of mounted riders in demonstrations in urban communities." Just as these cowboys draw attention to Black cowboys' presence in American history, the recent social upheavals have prompted museums to share narratives of Black peoples present in their collections. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection, we depict Black mounted riders on a tapestry-woven textile from Egypt's late antique period. These mounted riders, woven in black wool, appear to race across the textile with their hunting dogs. Nude and harnessed, the men hold stones and bows. A sloping Phrygian cap, associated with the Near East, rests on their heads. Hunting in such images was a prevalent theme in late antique art and appeared across the Mediterranean in a wide range of media. Aristocrats flaunted excess through the slaughter of animals for sport. To Christians, men on horseback also gained an eschatological meaning, hoping for an ultimate victory soon to be won. Men on horseback have traditionally represented symbols of political, military, or religious power. The other figures in the textile, winged women and an additional rider were sewn with pink and white threads. Accompanied by depictions of auspicious baskets of fruit, floral bands, and roundels of plumped checked ladies, these images are depictions of victory, success, and prosperity. The textile itself shows signs of wear with both ancient and modern repairs. Although we do not know exactly where it was found, it was likely excavated from an Egyptian cemetery in the early twentieth century. Textiles like these were wrapped around deceased bodies and were preserved by Egypt's dry climate. The fabric's weight and motifs suggest the textile was a wall hanging for a domestic context. It is almost impossible to know what messages the Black figures would have conveyed to late antique viewers. The people living in Egypt during this period belonged to a multicultural society. Evidence of Egypt's multiple cultural spheres can be found both in the visual arts and in texts. Multiculturalism is also evident in the numerous languages spoken and written in the late antique and medieval periods. Latin, Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Old Nubian are found on written materials from the region. In late antique texts, authors noted skin color when describing people. The literature discusses the otherness of blackness, the negativity of blackness. In the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, prejudice was a means to humiliate a Black monk, Abba Moses, in a monastery in Egypt: Another day when a council was being held in Scetis, the Fathers treated Moses with contempt to test him, saying, "Why does this black man come among us?" When he heard this, he kept silent. When the council was dismissed, they said to him, "Abba, did that not grieve you at all?" He said to them, "I was grieved, but I kept silence” According to tradition, Abba Moses was a reformed robber who lived in the monastic community of Nitria. He eventually became one of the leaders of this community and a revered martyr in the Coptic Church. While ascetic humility was a valued component of monasticism, the color prejudice used to enact this lesson is telling. The short parable suggests the possible otherness of Black bodies in private, late antique Egyptian spaces. It offers insights into the reception of the mounted riders, with their foreign dress and skin tone, on The Met's textile in an elite private home. To date, scholarship has not addressed the presence of figures with multiple ethnicities in the textile. Without knowing more about its original context and purpose, it is difficult to say anything more about how the original maker and viewer would have understood the textile. However, given the prominent and deliberate inclusion of figures with different skin tones, we should take a moment to reflect on why it mattered to make these distinctions. The recent focus on racial justice has prompted art historians and museums to reexamine our assumptions about our collective history and culture. This urgent call to correct narratives provides an opportunity to address the multiculturalism in Mediterranean societies, such as Egypt, and to recognize the different experiences Black communities had during the period. Like our modern Black cowboys, the presence of the Black mounted riders on the textile forces us to acknowledge a part of history that is little known and waiting to be told. But just as we are focusing on this history, museums are grappling with how to describe these figures on their labels. To be inclusive, they are often removing the words Black or African from the object's metadata. As we think about the consequences of removing descriptive ethnic terms from these objects, I want to turn to a quote from Frank Snowden: Regardless of modern opinions as to the precise racial identity or proper anthropological classification of Kushites, Nubians, or Ethiopians, the blacks of ancient artists often bear a close similarity to racial types designated in the modern world as "colored," "black," or "Negro." –Dr. Frank M. Snowden Jr., Before Color Prejudice Dr. Snowden (1911–2007), a professor of Classics at Howard University, was integral to identifying the presence and contributions of Africans in the ancient Mediterranean world. His formative books Before Color Prejudice (1983) and Blacks in Antiquity (1970) were revolutionary. He highlighted black and white interactions in classical antiquity by analyzing Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artistic and textual sources. Snowden emphasized that blacks in antiquity were multicultural and multiethnic, a point reflected in the variety of Africans known to the ancient world, including the Aethiops, Blemmyes, Nubians, and more. It is within this context that this bust of an African child was published and celebrated. Currently, nestled in a vitrine of Greek and Roman vases and figurines, this work represents the diversity and breadth of the classical world. The provenance of comparanda falls within the Roman provinces, including Britain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Germany, Syria, and Egypt. These vessels depicted mythological gods, fantastical creatures, boxers, and Africans. A distinctive feature of these vessels was the ways in which they symbolized otherness. In any place in the Roman Empire, this child would have been distinguished by his or her African features. In other words, the ethnic identity of the child is integral to understanding this work's original function as an object that signified an "other." The child's African features prejudiced modern interpretations of the vessel. The object card describes the youth as "Negro head perfume vase." In RISD's Handbook of the Museum of Art (1985), an entry describes the child as both a "Nubian youth" and "negro captive" who "turns his head angrily, staring up contemptuously at his captor, his lip parted and brow furrowed." This fictional description hinges on the blackness of the child and memories of a colonial Africa. While derogatory descriptions of such objects abound, representations of blacks in the corpus of classical art symbolize a pre-colonial history of black peoples, a history not often taught or honored. In Hands of Ethiopia, W. E. B. Du Bois (a colleague of Dr. Snowden) remarked on the displacement of Africa from the history of Western civilization: "there are those who would write world history and leave out of account this most marvelous of continents." This bust of an African child prompts viewers to integrate Africa into the ancient world and situate it within a history before colonialism. In many ways, this child defiantly forces the viewer to wrestle with ideas of race in Western civilization and history. Yes, in its Roman context, this child likely symbolized an "other," but the nuanced representation, too, bears a close similarity to racial types designated in the modern world. I know that many museums are trying to decide how to labels objects like these, and many recently have removed ethnic words from the label. So, for example, some curators are pushing to title this object: Bust of Child. To me, I think the lack of description further erases this child from history because that removes the object from the corpus of other similar representations of the Africans. Recently, I have been pushing to tell these complicated interpretations of objects like these on labels, through programming, in talks, in small exhibitions so that these Black peoples are fully seen in these spaces. So that other people of color can see themselves in these western-focused galleries. By doing this, we can highlight little known stories that might encourage people to want to know more about the period. My talk today addressed three aspects of curatorial work. The first, the development of exhibitions as a means to present the global Middle Ages to the public. Exhibitions are the first entry point to the medieval world for many people, and we have the opportunity to share the multifaceted perspectives of the medieval period. Then, I discussed how exhibitions and their development could provide opportunities for more BIPOC to enter the field. Still, no one museum can do this type of work alone, and we will have to collaborate across institutions, museums, and universities to develop a diversity pipeline program. I concluded with two short case studies about how I am thinking about race in my own field and how I incorporate stories of Africans within my gallery spaces. There's much more work to be done, but I am optimistic that in the future, we will look at this moment in our field as an essential turning point.

The Global Turn in Medieval Exhibitions: Diversifying Medieval Studies through Curatorial Practice and Critical Race Art History | Watch the full talk

Presented by Andrea Myers Achi at Education: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Andrea Myers Achi discusses the role of museum exhibitions in introducing audiences to a global medieval world. She argues that exhibitions often offer people their first encounter with the premodern and that multifaceted perspectives on West and North Africa and Western Asia should expand the geographic boundaries of medieval and Byzantine art. Exhibition curation can function as a pipeline to diversify the field, introducing prospective students to medieval materials and helping them build their CVs, but there needs to be cross-institutional collaboration. Within an analysis of two late Roman artifacts depicting Black people exhibited in Western-focused galleries, she discusses the challenges of rethinking museum labels that assume a normative white race.

Medieval
Art History
Transnational studies
Video
Seeta Chaganti

"Merciless Beauty" and carceral justice

“Merciless Beauty” is a poem written in a late 14th-century English that may or may not be Chaucer’s but is highly comparable to Chaucer’s usage. Reading the poem alongside the film The Prison in 12 Landscapes, students are asked to make connections between the poem and the film and their formal examinations of time, incarceration, and repetition.

“Merciless Beauty” is a poem written in a late-fourteenth-century English that may or may not be Chaucer’s but is highly comparable to Chaucer’s usage. So several of its features make it an excellent poem to begin a Chaucer class that is reading the texts in Middle English. I usually begin the class by discussing Chaucerian English through a short history of the language presentation, asking students to consider the number of seemingly redundant terms we have with Germanic and Romance roots, how they have or have not diverged from each other, and what this means for someone who is writing in the fourteenth century as this language actively and visibly changes and exhibits new loanwords and forms. Because of the rondel form, many lines repeat, so that once students have translated a line or couplet once, they don’t have to do it again. This kind of in-depth translation exercise gives students the sense that we are learning the material in an incredibly grounded way, so that when I introduce them to my “untimely juxtaposition” method, they don’t feel disoriented. I ask students to note the poem’s use of a metaphoric prison and that this metaphor is repeated because of the rondel’s form. This conversation is then where I introduce the film “The Prison in 12 Landscapes” as an untimely juxtaposition. This exercise has meaning and context for me because I have been studying and practicing abolitionist aims for several years. It is the central way I engage in what we tend to call anti-racism. For medievalists new to this topic, there is a lot of ground to cover to educate yourself and it can feel daunting. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that many of your students might already be well-versed in prison and police abolition and the militant strategies connected to it. For example, my students will often bring up texts like Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? that they’ve studied in other courses as we begin this juxtapositional dialogue. “The Prison in 12 Landscapes” consists of short vignettes all showing, in extremely different ways, the social and economic impact of the carceral system on individuals, families, and communities—particularly upon Black, brown, and Indigenous people. Like “Merciless Beauty,” it is consciously and tightly formal, and its form foregrounds a meditation on the passage of time and the different ways that this is experienced. Both artifacts will often lead students toward thinking about the apparent inescapability of their forms. I have some priorities in our discussions that I bring up in the classroom. The first is how the formalist examination of time and repetition across the two works can help students think through the condition of being trapped within an institution or an ideology, and what would have to happen to escape it. The other is the meaning or ethics of using prison as a metaphor for something else. To what extent is the film creating metaphors to describe prison, vs. Using the prison itself as a metaphor for other things? How does that complicate using the prison as a metaphor for love, as in “Merciless Beauty”? This untimely juxtaposition, like all of them, leads teachers and students toward an important confrontation with the possibilities of talking about things vs. doing things, language and action.

“Merciless Beauty” is a poem written in a late 14th-century English that may or may not be Chaucer’s but is highly comparable to Chaucer’s usage. Several of its features make it an excellent poem to begin a Chaucer class that is reading the texts in Middle English. By asking students to translate the poem, they develop their skills for reading Middle English and become intimate with the formal structure of the rondel. Once they've gained an intimacy with the poem and feel comfortable with its language, the untimely juxtaposition is introduced: the film The Prison in 12 Landscapes. In this moment, students are asked to make connections between the poem and the film and their formal examinations of time, incarceration, and repetition.

Medieval
Literature
Poetry
Essay
Scott Manning Stevens

The legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery

How an obscure piece of Renaissance era religious doctrine—the Doctrine of Discovery—infiltrated the United States’ legal system and justifies the seizure of Native lands to this day.

Indigenous legal scholar Robert Miller begins his chapter on the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny with:

The United States and most of the non-European world were colonized under an international legal principle known as the Doctrine of Discovery, which was used to justify European claims over the indigenous peoples and their territories. The doctrine provides that ‘civilized’ and ‘Christian’ Euro-Americans automatically acquired property rights over the lands of Native peoples and gained governmental, political, and commercial rights over the indigenous inhabitants just by showing up. This legal principle was shaped by religious and ethnocentric ideas of European and Christian superiority over other races and religions of the world. When Euro-Americans planted their flags and religious symbols in lands they claimed to have discovered, they were undertaking well-recognized legal procedures and rituals of discovery that were designed to establish their claim to the lands and peoples.


The straight-forward language of the Doctrine of Discovery might tempt readers to accept it uncritically as an obscure legal artifact of the past. But in fact, much more is at stake here. The concept of Euro-Christian supremacy over religious, political, and property rights derives from a series of 15th-century Papal declarations and has authority only insomuch as one grants the Vatican the authority to make such universal laws. There is no actual reason the European claims of supremacy, be they religious, racial, or social should be seen as anything more than a dangerous manifestation of chauvinism.  

What should strike us as even stranger is that this doctrine, formulated by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the relationship between Christian polities and non-Christian nations, should be presumed to apply to Protestant states after the Reformation.  

It was clear from the brutal sectarian wars fought between Catholics and Protestants across Europe for over a century that even the definition of the Christianity was not something upon which there was universal agreement. However, regardless of how they felt about the hierarchies of Christian denomination, European nations all held the equally prejudicial belief that they were the primary representatives of civilization.  

We might ask: did the absence of certain socio-political hierarchies or the lack of specific technologies mean that a society lived in a state of savagery? Students should be encouraged to critically consider and discuss these notions because they are still handed down from one generation to another. How did salient cultural differences in the realms of religion and technology help to legitimize the enslavement and dispossession of Indigenous societies around the globe that fell under European hegemony?  

By examining the formation of the legal structures that supported and continue to uphold white supremacy, like the Doctrine of Discovery, it should become clear to students how arbitrary the legacy of “legally-sanctioned” colonialism is.  

It is also important to note that the Doctrine of Discovery was used by many imperialist-minded realms and nation states, many of whom the Doctrine never directly intended to legitimize, to legally condone the conquest of indigenous lands around the world.

Spain and Portugal, in their rivalry for overseas possessions, were addressed in the Papal bulls issued by Nicholas V and Alexander VI, claiming each nation’s rights to particular lands in the Americas. One might be surprised to learn that, though English Christians were still under the authority of Rome when Henry VII sent John Cabot to explore the North American coast, the English did not cite the Doctrine in that venture. However, regardless of the outcome of Protestant Reformation and the movement away from the Vatican, the Doctrine of Discovery was referenced in United States jurisprudence in the early 19th century. This set a foundation of legal precedence in the United States, which remains with us to this day. For example, as recently as 2005 in the City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, the Supreme Court ruled against the Oneida’s attempt to regain their traditional lands based on a number of factors, including the Doctrine of Discovery—cited in a footnote in the court’s written decision, authored surprisingly by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  

Works cited

Miller, Robert J. "The Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and American Indians." Why You Can't Teach United States History Without American Indians, 2015.

Early Modern
Literature
Indigeneity
Video
Kim F. Hall

Blackness and Shakespeare's sonnets

Shakespeare’s works at large, and early modern literature more broadly, all deal with constructions of race. Shakespeare’s sonnets are especially fruitful for considering how the languages of fairness and darkness are used in nuanced ways to develop particular understandings of race.

When we think of race and Shakespeare, we often think of Othello or a handful of the other so called “race plays.” The truth is, Shakespeare’s works at large, and early modern literature more broadly, all deal with constructions of race. In my classes, I find Shakespeare’s sonnets especially fruitful for considering how the languages of fairness and darkness are used in nuanced ways to develop particular understandings of race. Early in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence – in the procreation sonnets – Shakespeare uses fairness and whiteness in connection with ideologies of nationhood and physical beauty. In his opening sonnet, he writes,​​ “From fairest creatures we desire increase.” On the surface, fairness is equated with an abstracted ideal of beauty, but the conjunction of fairness with increase or breeding racializes the meaning behind this. If fairness registers both whiteness and moral goodness, then we begin to see this pairing as a social quality to be desired – one worthy of increase. To begin with this understanding and then attend to the ways that the procreation sonnets engage concerns of land-owning classes, inheritance, and gendered hierarchies is to open Shakespeare’s sonnets to a rich understanding of the poetic uses of fairness as an emergent ideology of white supremacy. With this approach students are able to trace the ways the sonnet sequence elevates male fairness while imagining female fairness as an abstraction, since the only woman in the sequence is deliberately made, not fair, but black. Take, for example, Sonnet 20: “A woman’s face. With nature’s own hand painted Has thou– the master mistress of my passion / A woman’s gentle heart —but not acquainted With shifting change – as is false woman’s fashion.” This sonnet manages to posit the young man’s fairness as both extraordinary and natural – the first line suggests that the man’s fairness is noteworthy in direct contrast to women who are often disparaged as falsely fair. Their fairness is artificial because enhanced with cosmetics. Not insignificantly, sonnet 20 is seen as a turning point in the sequence, as the poet gives up on arguments for procreation and focuses on the power of poetry. It initiates what is a recurring anxiety in the sonnet sequence –the young man’s fairness is such that the poet’s words will never be able to convey it. His fairness becomes the ultimate–yet unattainable–desire. When we consider how the dark lady sonnets racialize blackness—through descriptions of her hair like “black wires” in sonnet 129, or eyes “raven black” in sonnet 127 – and juxtapose this against the sonnets that define beauty, nobility, and purity as white, we can help students see the poetry identifying certain bodies not only as desirable, but as entitled to increase – increase of offspring, wealth, land, and power. Simultaneously, we can help students to see that the sonnets identify other bodies as dangerous to that entitlement. When in sonnet 127 the poet says, “in the old age, black was not counted fair,” and goes on to show that the dark lady’s beauty defies this idea, we see an ostensible challenge to notions of fairness as whiteness. And yet, the dark lady threatens the entitlement of whiteness, and that very idea presents a profound danger to those with dark bodies in the sonnets, in the early modern period, and as we all know too well, in our world today.

Shakespeare’s sonnets allow for generative conversations about the way perceptions of fairness and darkness inform understandings of race in the early modern world. Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets, in particular, tether whiteness not only to physical beauty but to national identity for the English. By attending to the way the sonnets deploy whiteness to consider social and gendered hierarchies, we are able to see how uses of fairness reveal emergent ideologies of white supremacy. As a result, Kim F. Hall explains, we find that the dark lady sonnets threaten the entitlement of whiteness, rendering a real danger for those with dark bodies.

Early Modern
Literature
Poetry
Shakespeare
Video
Adam Miyashiro

Comparative epics: Teaching El Cantar de Mio Cid

A mainstay of medieval literature classrooms, El Cantar de Mio Cid expands upon crusades rhetoric in the multicultural and multilingual Iberian Peninsula.

La Cantar de Mio Cid is often taught alongside La Chanson de Roland as a study in Crusades epics. However, when I teach La Cantar de Mio Cid, I want my students to see the connections between the poems and their Arab influences. Medieval Iberia is the most common location for medievalists to look toward a multicultural, multilinguistic, and multi-confessional society in the premodern period. From the invasion of Visigothic Hispania by the Arab armies in the years 711 to 1492, the Arabs made an incalculable impact in every way on the Spanish nation that later emerged, but also through all of Europe. The Iberian Peninsula is where the Golden Age of Arab culture in the Ummayyad and Abbasid periods met the early European culture emerging from the Germanic migrations and invasions of southern Europe. It was also a time when Arab-Muslim cultures were firmly placed and had an indelible influence on the intellectual development of western Europe. Greek philosophy, preserved in Arabic translations, along with the development of poetic forms, such as the muwashahat and zajal, profoundly changed European thinking and the literary arts. Papermaking, silk spinning, and other Asian innovations such as the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, were first encountered in Iberia among the Arab intellectuals and their European counterparts. The 13th-century heroic narrative, La Poema de Mio Cid, was set in this culturally diverse landscape in the late 11th century. The titular character, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, or “The Cid,” from the Arabic honorific al-Sayyid, was a historical figure of the late 11th century, leading military campaigns against Alfonso VI of Leon as well as against Muslim kingdoms in al-Andalus. He was appointed Alférez, “a knight,” in Alfonso’s court until after his exile in 1081, when he moved to work for the emir of Zaragoza, Yusuf al-Mu'taman ibn Hud, who ruled between 1081-1085. In this kingdom, The Cid Rodrigo Diaz commanded both Muslim and Christian soldiers, some of whom were from the Kingdom of Mali and Morocco. In 1094, The Cid conquered the coastal city of Valencia, whose Muslim ruler, Yahya al-Qadir, was his tributary. As ruler of Valencia, which would revert to Almoravid rule after his death in 1099, The Cid continued to carry out attacks against the Almoravid Berbers outside of Valencia. The epic poem, La Cantar de Mio Cid, or La Poema de Mio Cid, was written down more than a hundred years after his death, and is an incomplete text, starting in media res. Unlike The Song of Roland, The Cid’s exploits have a distinctly picaresque quality to the storytelling style. One early episode has The Cid swindling two figures assumed to be Jewish moneylenders, Raquel and Vidas, with a trunk full of sand he convinces them is a tribute payment for safekeeping, while they lend him money. Despite the comparisons with The Song of Roland of a medieval knight fighting Muslims, there is little in common between the two texts’ renderings of Arab Muslim identity. First, The Cid is married with two daughters, entrusting them to his Arab Muslim friend and ally, Abengalbon, a fictional character who may represent a number of The Cid’s Muslim allies. Secondly, money is an important feature in this story: The Cid constantly worries about paying his soldiers, and the poet evaluates the worth of goods in monetary units. This may be because the Iberian Peninsula in the middle of the 13th century was part of the large and vibrant western Mediterranean maritime trade routes. Spanish participation in Mediterranean trade—with North Africa, Southern Europe, and the Byzantine East—reached its peak in the middle of the 13th century, with many Iberian Christian rulers establishing diplomatic ties with the Sultan of Egypt and various polities in the Maghreb. Students reading this text would be able to see The Poem of the Cid in a wider context of the medieval Mediterranean and see how, for example, realpolitik may function between the Middle Ages and now. Looking at how The Cid’s motivations are not necessarily religious or ideological, but rather practical and economic, shows how medieval Iberian cultural and religious interactions differed from those presented in The Song of Roland, where any relationship with Muslims is considered traitorous. The early 20th-century scholarship by Ramón Menéndez Pidal about The Song of the Cid solidified The Cid into the canon of medieval Castilian literature and was used by the fascist dictator Francisco Franco to buttress a Spanish national identity based on Catholicism, despite Pidal’s opposition to Franco. The ultra-nationalist, fascist dictatorship of Franco attempted to erase all traces of Muslim and Jewish history in the country but also attempted to subdue the non-Castilian communities (such as the Basques, Galician, and Catalan) and to impose Castilian language and cultural norms throughout Spain. Understanding the reception history of La Poema de Mio Cid in the 20th and 21st centuries can teach students how a literary text from the 13th century can play a role in shaping and developing national imaginaries and identities—many times skewing the text towards exclusionary goals, which would be anachronistic and erroneous. Medieval Iberian cultures, in their plurality, give us vibrant stories about historical figures which help liberate the text from parochial and narrow perspectives.

The 13th-century heroic narrative, El Poema de Mio Cid, was set in the culturally diverse landscape of the Iberian Peninsula. It takes place in the late 11th century, during the southward expansion of the Kingdom of Castile. When teaching The Cid, it is important to pay close attention to the differences in how Muslims are depicted in this poem, particularly in comparison to how they are represented in La Chanson de Roland. Students are asked: what work is the poem doing within its historical context? How is this text later used to develop a Spanish national identity?

Medieval
Literature
Poetry
Religion
Video
Scott Manning Stevens

The Doctrine of Discovery

A brief history of how the Doctrine of Discovery became legal precedent for the seizure of Native lands across the world.

Ask the average educated person what the Doctrine of Discovery is or how it applies to life in the United States, and you will likely get a baffled reply. But this early modern doctrine, emanating from a series of papal pronouncements at the dawn of the European Age of Exploration, stands behind many colonial establishments and retains a disturbing legal legacy in the United States. The doctrine came about because of competition between the two Iberian leaders in maritime navigation: Spain and Portugal. As the two kingdoms sent ships out into the Atlantic during the 15th century, new claims and conquests were made by each kingdom. Spain would invade and conquer the Canary Islands, while Portugal took both Madeira and the Azores. Eventually, both countries would begin to look south toward the African Atlantic coast, and this would set the stage for possible colonial conflicts regarding access to, and hegemony over, coastal regions of Africa. In 1452 and 1455 Pope Nicholas V issued Papal Bulls granting Portugal the right to claim lands along the West African coast and to enslave non-Christian Africans. Such rulings by the pope gave legitimacy to Portugal’s early colonial ventures and were duly noted by officials in Spain. When Spanish ships reached the Western Hemisphere in 1492, vast new regions seemed open to colonialism, but with lands being claimed on behalf of the two Iberian powers, conflict was inevitable. It was with this in mind that court diplomats turned to the Vatican to arbitrate on the issue of potential colonial footholds and the right to foreign riches. The result was Pope Alexander VI’s Papal Bull, which established the infamous Line of Demarcation, dividing the globe on an east/west axis between Spain and Portugal. A year later the Treaty of Tordesillas would adjust that line in favor of the Portuguese which allowed for their claims over the region that would become Brazil. As a result of these rulings and treaties, countless millions of humans, and their respective societies and nations, were said to be rightfully under the control of two Christian kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula. The Church’s rationale for such a grand gesture was that these declarations would ultimately thwart paganism and extend the sway of Christendom in the West, amidst the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the East. Collectively the rights granted by these Papal Bulls to Christian monarchs became known as the Doctrine of Discovery. The doctrine offered the patina of legality to European conquests in the Americas and elsewhere and allowed for the forced conversion of whole populations of non-Christians or, should they resist, their conquest and enslavement. Before the Papal Bulls articulating the Doctrine Discovery as a justification for the Christian colonization of foreign lands, the de facto right of conquest was all that was needed to justify the forceful acquisition of territory or even whole realms by a stronger power. The Norman Conquest was the result of a dynastic dispute between aristocratic houses over competing claims on the English throne—as such, the Norman victors required no elaborate justification. Successive Norman rulers attempted further conquests of the British Isles by invading the neighboring realms of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland—all with mixed success. The Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland began roughly one hundred years after the Norman Conquest in 1169, but now reputedly armed with a papal justification known as the Laudabiliter, a bull issued by Pope Adrian IV, the only English pope. English church leaders in Rome at the time had described the Irish as a “barbaric and impious people” thus in need of English oversight and reform. With the blessing of an English pope, thus began the long and painful struggle of the Irish for self-rule. English hegemony over Ireland was piecemeal at best throughout most of the Medieval period, but the region known as the Pale, surrounding Dublin provided England with a land base from which they would attempt to expand. Other portions of Ireland were under the control of Anglo-Irish lords loyal to the English king, though frequently the sites of uprisings and rebellions. It was in this atmosphere that the Tudors launched their invasion of Ireland in 1536. The island was to remain in a state of conflict on and off until 1603, and it was in this period that we see English notions of settler colonial policy come into being. Rather than simply defeating their Irish enemies, the English pursued a policy of ‘planting’ English and Scottish émigrés on Irish lands. During the Desmond Rebellions of Elizabeth I’s reign, the English practiced a scorched-earth policy all in the name of pacifying and civilizing the native Irish. One English participant in the colonization of Ireland was the poet Edmund Spenser, who was also in Ireland during the rebellions. His 1596 political pamphlet, A View of the Present State of Ireland, has become infamous for its advocacy of colonial brutality in the suppression of Irish sovereignty. The pamphlet, in the form of a humanist dialog, describes the supposed barbarity of the Irish and the need to extinguish their laws, customs, religion, and language. Spenser sets out to portray the Irish as a brutish people in need of civilizing colonial rule, even as he advocates starving them to death to lessen their numbers, forcing them to learn English in order to assimilate them to their conquerors’ culture, and converting them to the Protestant faith. The dual projects of civilizing and salvation would become numbingly familiar justifications for most European colonial ventures. In 1496 an English expedition under the authority of King Henry VII sent Giovanni Cabota (a.k.a. John Cabot) to explore the northeast coast of North America and claim it on behalf of England, so long as it did not interfere with Spanish or Portuguese claims. The letters of patent issued by the crown follow the precedent set by the Doctrine of Discovery and allowed England to establish its claims to Newfoundland and the fishing banks of what is now Atlantic Canada. Once established, this means of justifying the seizure of lands and the enslavement of peoples in distant territories was deployed by various European nations whether or not they had a Papal Bull specifically giving them permission to do so. To be Christian and to be civilized were taken to be the same thing, and so all societies that lacked one quality were seen as lacking both—thus justifying the imposition of colonial rule. Even after the Protestant Reformation, when many kingdoms denied papal authority outright, the guiding principles underpinning the Doctrine of Discovery continued to be invoked by Protestant powers in their own colonial ventures. Thus, the English, the Dutch, and the Swedes, though all thoroughly Protestant by the 17th century, still invoked their status as Christian and civilized as having preemptive authority over the polities they would encounter in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. This authority, claimed by European powers, meant that peoples indigenous to a place that did not practice Christianity, and thus were not recognized as civilized, had no right to title over their lands. It was simply acknowledged that they occupied them, but in the face of ‘true religion’ and the civilization of which it was a part, Native nations had no inherent rights. Thus, complex societies, such as the Aztecs or Incas, could be utterly destroyed in the name of Christian civilization. Likewise, because Christianity was co-opted as a solely European faith, it became enmeshed with the roots of white supremacy. Once racialized, the Doctrine of Discovery was even more toxic to those deemed racial others. In fact, by 1726 the Anglo-Irish author, Jonathan Swift, satirized the template of European colonialism in the conclusion of Gulliver’s Travels, writing: Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people! The legacy of the Doctrine lies in the fact that many people have internalized its presumptions without any knowledge of the Doctrine’s existence. American school children are not asked to consider whether Europeans had the right to take the lands of others; it is presumed, perhaps passively, that Europe’s civilizing mission was its justification. The Doctrine of Discovery also found its way into American law at the highest levels. In “Johnson v. McIntosh,” a landmark case that came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1823, the court was asked to adjudicate a case where both parties claimed ownership of the same piece of land. Johnson’s party claimed to have purchased it directly from the Piankeshaw Nation, while the McIntosh party claimed to have received it from a government land patent. The court in essence had to resolve who had rightful title to the land and therefore could sell it. Chief Justice John Marshall’s ruling was unprecedented in U.S. law because he drew on the Doctrine of Discovery to deny aboriginal title to lands in the United States. By Marshall’s peculiar logic, the various colonial powers inherited the authority of the Doctrine and could enforce it when they made a ‘discovery.’ He reasoned that the English were the true discoverers of what became the United States, and therefore when the United States became independent it inherited this right from England. This piece of juridical legerdemain has remained one of the cornerstones of Federal Indian Law ever since. As recently as 2005, in the City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, the Supreme Court ruled against the Oneida’s attempt to regain their traditional lands based on a number of factors, including the Doctrine of Discovery— cited in a footnote in the court’s written decision, authored surprisingly by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. What many people might presume is an obscure piece of Renaissance era religious doctrine—the Doctrine of Discovery—infiltrated the United States’ legal system and exercises judicial authority to this day.

The Doctrine of Discovery is one of the oldest and continuously cited legal precedents in the Western Hemisphere. First issued as a series of papal bulls to settle disputes between two Iberian Catholic colonial powers, Spain and Portugal, the doctrine rippled across colonial law for centuries. This doctrine offered the patina of legal legitimacy from the Catholic Church to all colonial projects across both Africa and the Americas. Colonial conquest became inextricably linked to the expansion of Christianity across the world. Equating Christianity with civilization meant that peoples indigenous to a place that did not practice Christianity were not recognized as civilized and had no right to title over their lands. 

Early Modern
Literature
Indigeneity
RaceB4Race Highlight
Brenna Duperron

Red-reading medieval texts

Brenna Duperron invites scholars to engage with Indigenous theories and frameworks to help recognize and reduce the latent colonialist tendencies of medieval studies.

Thank you to the RaceB4Race executive board and organizers for inviting me to join this exciting and illuminating conversation. I would [also] like to begin by acknowledging that the land from which I am speaking is the traditional unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq Peoples, colonially known as Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada. This territory is covered by the “Treaties of Peace and Friendship” which Wəlastəkwiyik (Maliseet), Mi’kmaq and Passamaquoddy Peoples first signed with the British Crown in 1726. The treaties did not deal with the surrender of lands and resources instead it recognized Mi’kmaq and Wəlastəkwiyik (Maliseet) title and established the rules for what was to be an ongoing relationship between sovereign nations. Medievalists who take a critical race studies approach—such as Dorothy Kim, Geraldine Heng, Cord J. Whitaker, many of my fellow invited speakers, and among our listeners here as well—stress the importance of recognizing the imperialist and colonialist leanings of medieval studies in our efforts to decolonize and reshape our methodologies. I contend that by inviting Indigenous theories and frameworks into our field we can take steps towards not only recognizing but reducing these latent colonialist tendencies. In this talk, I will discuss the wider implications of “Thinking Indigenously” as a scholar and educator as well as provide a brief case study by applying an Indigenous methodology to The Book of Margery Kempe. This is a small part of a much larger project. However, I invite us to slow down and learn to think with both of our eyes. I do hope that this initial work sparks a curiosity in my listener. That you consider how you could potentially work with both of your eyes open as well. And I wish to remind us not to be afraid of the unfinished, the fragmentary, or the beginnings of our academic explorations. So, what then does it mean to think with both of our eyes? It comes from the Mi’kmaq theory of etuaptmumk or two-eyed seeing. Etuaptmumk is a reconciled pedagogical approach that integrates Western/European academic systems with Indigenous ways of knowing coined by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall. In other words, it is an integrative knowledge system that allows for seeing with both the Western/European eye and the Indigenous eye. Marshall explains it as… Two-Eyed Seeing is hard to convey to academics as it does not fit into any particular subject area or discipline. Rather, it is about life: what you do, what kind of responsibilities you have, how you should live while on Earth … i.e., a guiding principle that covers all aspects of our lives: social, economic, environmental, etc. The advantage of Two-Eyed Seeing is that you are always fine tuning your mind into different places at once, you are always looking for another perspective and better way of doing things. Mi’kmaq story-keeper Trevor Gould describes how the idea of etuaptmumk was born out of Marshall’s residential school experiences when he was required to learn how to think differently. He reconciled these two ways of knowing through the holism of etuaptmumk. For our purposes, etuaptmumk provides an avenue for thinking Indigenously for both settler and Indigenous peoples alike. This hybridity of thinking differently is at the heart of the approach, which wishes to promote and elevate Indigenous methodologies as equivalent to those with a settler-Western weji-sqaliatek—cultural memory, kinship or birthplace. At the heart of etuaptmumk is that the approach is meant for all peoples: Indigenous and settlers alike. I want to clarify, however, that etuaptmumk is not about using one ethno-valuation system as a means of understanding another group. It is about equalizing Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies with those traditionally understood as “academic,” “scientific,” or Western. Any sense of this being an act of simple gaze reversal would be a result of my potential awkwardness at applying these ideas in my work. The Mi’kmaq invitation to Indigenous and settler peoples to engage with etuaptmumk is a positive result of educators engaging with the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which called for a reconciliatory curriculum. Section 62 calls for the integration of Indigenous knowledge systems into the Canadian post-secondary institution. Well, okay, I may be twisting this a teensy bit as they are explicitly calling for the funding to educate teachers of post-secondary institutions “on how to integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms.” While funding is of obvious necessity, we also need to slow down and consider how we as educators can invite Indigenous knowledge into our classrooms and academic work. As Elizabeth Edwards and I write, in a forthcoming article for Exemplaria—I apologize for the potential arrogance of self-citation; however, I am still early enough in my career to be excited to be in print: Any efforts to deploy both Western and Indigenous knowledge systems will have lasting impacts on the decolonization of the academy. We recommend that settler and Indigenous scholars alike be explicit with their positioning and connection to the knowledge systems that they are using. It is of vital importance that we always acknowledge where knowledge comes from, and that we do our best as scholars to not displace or erase the genealogy of the knowledge being passed down and disseminated. It is a crucial step towards recognising Indigenous and Western knowledge systems as alternate but equal ways of knowing. For my purposes, I must acknowledge the weji-sqaliatek of both my theoretical approach and my positioning to it. Etuaptmumk was not a word that I had come into contact with until I began my PhD at Dalhousie University, which resides on Mi’kmaq territory. Shortly after my arrival on this land, I had the opportunity to hear the words of Elder Dr. Albert Marshall, where he described the idea of etuaptmumk. I approach two-eyed seeing as a young woman raised in a Métis family in a predominantly settler community, who is settler educated, and now living on Mi’kmaq lands. Recently, I have undergone the existential crisis of having my blood ties to métissage become uncertain—something I wish to be transparent about as I parse out the particulars; however, it is still part of my lived story and as such my lived perspective and positioning. It is important when approaching etuaptmumk that you do so from where you stand. From a literary perspective, we approach a text with both of our eyes shut. Using our Eurocentric/Western-trained eye, we analyze. We deconstruct. We use our expensive academic training to take the text apart to understand it. We put the text under a microscope to illuminate its truths. Using our Indigenous eye, we connect. We see the collective. We understand knowledge to be a living force and therefore so is the text. We strive to see the whole and not just the threads that create the picture. We end by closing the book, and with it, our eyes. We need to learn to sit comfortably in the unknown and the known; to let the unknown, the mistakes, the errors, the confusions, or the just plain weird elements of a text sit in their glorious imperfections, and to remain (somewhat) unknown. In a more holistic reading, we do not need to smooth out the contradictions, or correct for perfection, or even edit for clarity. We cannot only allow these moments to exist as part of the whole but to embrace and welcome them. We can sit comfortably in the both/and. This comfort is difficult to achieve and, admittedly, at present highly theoretical—two-eyed seeing is a thorny seat for me, as it moves against years of training and socialization. In other words, I find it can be rather glaring to open both my eyes at once, and it is hard to resist the urge to slam at least one of the eyes back shut. It takes practice to learn to see with both eyes, and I am only beginning this practice. It is a practice to which I must return when I move from seeing to reading. I recognize it as an always-incomplete task. I recognize that it may lead to imperfections in the approach or execution, which is part of the process of shifting perspectives and learning to think and operate with two-eyes. In turning briefly now to my case study with The Book of Margery Kempe, I propose to look through both my eyes by reading The Book of Margery Kempe through Métis scholar Warren Cariou’s depictions of orality. In an Indigenous literature course, Cariou conducted a pedagogical experiment and taught the course without a textbook, employing a local Elder to act as the living textbook for the course. Throughout the semester, Cariou found that the students who were engaged with the speaker throughout his presentations performed better than students who attempted to frantically transcribe every word of the story. These findings led Cariou to argue that the intellectual boundaries surrounding the study of Indigenous literature have long been permeated with a colonial approach to learning that has erroneously conflated “learning with writing.” His work disrupts the hierarchy of writing over orality by demonstrating that consuming the narrative by listening offered a unique style of learning or reading that writing could not access in an oral culture; writing disrupted the flow of knowledge dissemination. In the context of this class, he highlights that writing/reading does not equal learning and that we need to decolonize our pedagogy to account for multiple ways of learning or knowing. My reading of Cariou’s experience is that it highlights the importance of engagement and connection between the speaker and the listener. In other words, it highlights the importance of interaction between educator and student. In turning my eyes to The Book of Margery Kempe, my understanding of her pedagogy is that Kempe alleges a primary miracle for her spiritual purity: her ability to blur the boundaries of language and communication through spiritual connection and engagement. Through the purity of their faith, Kempe and selected good clergy members can overcome the perceived bodily consciousness barrier of language and can perfectly understand one another through the grace of God. The first miraculous occurrence, and the only one to occur for textual, rather than oral, communication, is situated in the proem––to assist with live transcription, I have included the Middle English on the slides and will speak the translations orally: The book was so evilly written that he [the priest] could learn very little from it, for it was neither good English nor German, nor were letters shaped or formed as ordinary letters are. Therefore, the priest believed fully that man should never be able to read it, unless through special grace. . . She [Margery] took the book again and brought it to the priest with good cheer, praying him to do his best, and she would pray to God for him and purchase grace to read it and also to re-write it. The priest, trusting in her prayers, began to read this book, and it was much easier, he thought, than it was before. In this first iteration, it is not only the language that is convoluted but the very text itself is unreadable until prayer and grace allow for the priest to comprehend the written words. This is a recurring trope throughout the text with Kempe returning to this particular ability as proof of her goodness and her unique capacity to access a spiritual consciousness that allows her to interact across the systemic boundaries of knowledge. One such interaction occurs after she is “sorely moved in her spirit to speak” with a good German priest, who happens not to speak any English. The text describes how they first had to interact through an interpreter for she can only speak English and he could not speak any English at all, but after praying for thirteen days, they could understand each other perfectly even though “he did not understand the English that any other man [i.e.: other than Margery] spoke.” The anecdotal miracle is reintroduced about seven chapters later when members of her troublesome fellowship accuse her of being “shriven by a priest who could not understand her language or her confession.” In response to the accusations against her goodness, they devise a plot to prove whether he could understand English or not. The English priests speak English in front of him and to him in order to effectively ‘catch him out,’ but he is incapable of understanding any English. In order to “prove the work of God,” Kempe decides to “tell a biblical story in her own language of English” and the German confessor was able to “in Latin [tell] them the same words that she said before in English.” This incident confirms that the only English that he could understand was from Kempe and the only German that she could understand was through the good priest, for they were linked at a spiritual level, which overcame their bodily boundaries. The ability to transcend the language boundaries between the priest and Kempe implies that the spiritual connection overrides the earthly, or bodily, boundaries of learning. Language is a by-product of orality and literacy, or vice-versa. The inability to communicate across linguistic boundaries is an earthly construct that is in direct opposition to the spiritual holistic approach to knowledge that Kempe advocates in her work. To date, the red reading methodology—a term coined by Jill Carter for reading canon texts through Indigenous methodologies—has been most noticeably used as a means of de-centralizing a Eurocentric reading of Indigeneity in North American literature, in the works of Arnold Krupat, Louis Owen, and Gerald Vizenor, or through the creative adaptation of canon texts. However, if Indigenous theories and methodologies are only used on (so-called) post-contact texts, we risk further marginalizing Indigenous knowledge systems within preset boundaries based on a settler-conceived dichotomy of pre- and post-contact. In an effort towards continuing decolonization, it is important that settler-based institutions and mindsets not control how Indigenous knowledge is used or disseminated. It is our tendency as Western academics to focus on disrupting and complicating previous schools of thought; I suggest that we again expand past any narrow definitions of what constitutes scholarly practice and consider the possibility of disrupting and complicating while illuminating and complementing. It is only by seeing with both eyes that we can move towards understanding the whole picture.

From Both Our Eyes: Red-Reading Medieval Texts | Watch the full talk

Presented by Brenna Duperron at Education: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Brenna Duperron invites scholars to engage with Indigenous theories and frameworks to help recognize and reduce the latent colonialist tendencies of medieval studies. She argues that applying theories like etuaptmumk, or seeing with both the European eye and the Indigenous eye, often goes against years of academic training and socialization but allows for more holistic approaches to texts. Duperron applies this methodology to her reading of The Book of Margery Kempe, a 15th-century autobiography by an English mystic.

Medieval
Literature
Indigeneity
Video
Dennis Britton

Race and religious conversion

Bringing conversations about religious conversion into the classroom can help students see that religion was—and still is for some—more than just about what a person thinks and believes.

Students are usually unaware that in early modern Europe, changing or not changing religions was often a matter of life or death. When teaching early modern texts, I make it clear in the classroom that the Reformation was more than just about Catholic/Protestant conflict. Reading selections from ​​John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs helps students understand the stakes and breadth of religious conversion in this period. While not usually read as a text that has anything to do with race, Book of Martyrs demonstrates that Foxe is aware of the Spanish concept of limpieza de sangre, or blood purity, which rendered Christians with Jewish or Moorish blood as not fully or really Christians. The belief explicitly links religion to race. Foxe’s book also contains stories of Turks persecuting Christians, and of Jews both converting and not converting to Christianity. On the question of Jews converting to Christianity, Foxe seems quite ambivalent. Jews converting or not converting to Christianity concerned many early Reformation thinkers, and their refusal to convert was taken as a sign that they can’t—that is, that there is something about their very being that makes it impossible for them to accept Christianity as true. ​​We see this clearly in Martin Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies (1534), a Reformation text that was not widely circulated in the 16th century and probably unknown in early modern England, but that made a resurgence in Nazi Germany. This text provides many of the Christian justifications for anti-Semitism that circulated in medieval and early modern Europe, to the twentieth century and beyond. At one time, Luther promoted tolerance toward Jews, but this tolerance was based on his belief that Jews would embrace true, Protestant Christianity. When that didn’t happen, he came to believe that Jews were incapable of conversion. Discussing the connection between Catholic and Protestant conversion and Jewish to Christian conversion makes sense for discussing a work like Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. ​​References to Catholic and Protestant conversion and conflict are buried in allusions, and thus can go unnoticed. But in the prologue, Machiavill refers to the death of Henri de Lorraine, ​​​​who oversaw the St. Bartholomew massacre. While the play is clearly dealing with antisemitism, the allusion to this slaughtering of Protestants in Paris underscores the weight of religious conversion. Additionally, in the play, the conversion of Barabas’s house into a nunnery is likely an inverted allusion to ​​Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Although these allusion to Catholic/Protestant conversion are subtextual, their presence strongly suggests that Marlowe was thinking about differ kinds of conversion side by side. Ultimately, I want the focus on religious conversion in my classes to help students see that religion was—and still is for some—more than just about what a person thinks and believes. It’s about the transformation of fundamental aspects of identity. I also want students to pay attention to the fact that many early modern Christians didn’t believe that everyone had—or should have—equal access to this transformation. Whether it was the belief that Jews couldn’t convert, or some Protestants refusing to let the Africans they enslaved become Christians, the capability to become a “true” Christian was not equally accessible to all.

Students are usually unaware that in early modern Europe changing or not changing religions was often a matter of life or death. When teaching early modern texts, it is important to make it clear in the classroom that the Reformation was more than just about Catholic/Protestant conflict. Bringing conversations about religious conversion into the classroom can help students see that religion was—and still is for some—more than just about what a person thinks and believes. It’s about the transformation of fundamental aspects of identity. It is also important for students to pay attention to the fact that many early modern Christians didn’t believe that everyone had—or should have—equal access to this transformation.

Early Modern
Literature
Religion
Poetry
Video
Cord J. Whitaker

Where were the Black people in the Middle Ages?

Records and texts from the period offer insight into a rich and cosmopolitan medieval Europe, where there were not only Black people, but they held positions of power and prestige.

One reason that we are quite often written out of the story of the Middle Ages is because the term itself was developed to describe a period in European history: that very long period between the end of Roman imperial hegemony, the end of overarching Roman power in Europe and early modernity, or the Renaissance, the time of Shakespeare. The period between that, the term "The Middle Ages," also encodes the idea that nowhere else in the world mattered, because nowhere else, not Asia nor Africa, nor the Americas, nowhere else was progressing the same way. Nowhere else was progressing between those same historical and cultural points. The result is you say, "Middle Ages," and it conjures for many people images of Europe and Europe alone, because that's what the word was coined to describe. That Europe would be alone in the period is frankly laughable. Black people, and other people of color too, were in fact in all the same places they are now: both on the continents they came from, and everywhere they also needed to be for business, for family, just where they wanted to be. And yes, for some, even in the Middle Ages, in the places where they were forced to be, through enslavement and other oppressions. It's been shown that the major trade routes bringing goods between Asia and Europe came through Africa. Goods would be brought down the east coast of Africa by sea, across the African continent along the edges of the Sahara, and then northward through West Africa and on to Europe. And where wealth goes, generally so do people. These routes and this trans-African trade surely was the reason some folks of African descent ended up living in European port cities to begin with. So in short, to the question: “Where were the Black people in the Middle Ages?” They were in a whole lot of places.

One of the barriers to teaching race in the European Middle Ages is the predominant cultural image of the period as racially, religiously, and ethnically homogenous. However, records and texts from the period offer insight into a rich and cosmopolitan period, where there were not only Black people in Europe, but they held positions of power and prestige. Cord J. Whitaker explains the vibrant landscape of the European Middle Ages. 

Medieval
Literature
Intro to premodern critical race studies
Video
Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Biopolitics and citizenship in Euripides’ Ion

Who is and who is not a citizen, and how this is determined across national and racial lines, has a deeply rooted history. Dan-el Padilla Peralta takes on questions of citizenship, belonging, and national identity in ancient Mediterranean literature.

With Euripides' Ion, we can explore a couple of features of citizenship: citizenship as security or safety for some and not for others, early definitions of who can be counted as a legitimate citizen and who cannot, and ways that classical Greek ideas about citizenship continue to inform and inflect discussions about citizenship. “And in the third year after this in the archonshop of Antidotos, on account of the multitude of citizens, at Pericles' proposal they decided that no one who had not been born of two citizen parents would have share in the city.” This is a description of the Athenian citizenship law of 451 BCE as preserved for us in the constitution of the Athenians. And this is a law that operates in the background to Euripides' Ion by identifying Athenian or native women as the only women capable of producing Athenian citizens. The law tapped into both gender and ethnic national or racial categories. To put it another way, the law attached ethnic national or racial salience to Athenian women and to their reproductive work. In this way, it created a regime of racialized reproduction. This regime of racialized reproduction is grounded in, among other things, the production and reproduction of myths on stage. And the philosopher Arlene Saxonhouse has given a lot of thought to this in her writing in Fear of Diversity. In particular, she's drawn attention to how the diversity entailed in heterosexual creation is at the center of some of the most anguished debates about citizenship and belonging in classical Athens. Crucial to these debates and to the myths that coalesce around them is the premise that Athenian identity is rooted in the land of Attica. This is a racial script. It is a script of autochthony, of belongingness to the soil, and it's a bedrock principle of Athenian civic identity. But for now, I want to focus on how Euripides' Ion in particular brings out some of the tensions between gender roles and identities in civic space, and how these tensions in turn inform the representation of the biopolitics of citizenship and the biopolitics of race. The Ion foregrounds autochthony as a racial script, before proceeding to more extensive comment on sexual assault and violence as charter myths for the civic foundation story of Athens. Barbara and Karen Fields in their 2012 book Racecraft has race, “standing for the conception or the doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct groups, each defined by inborn traits that its members share and that differentiate them from the members of other distinct groups of the same kind, that of unequal rank.” It's this definition that can help us get a grip on the racializing properties of autochthony as guiding the myths that are told about Athenians, and that Athenians tell themselves about their origin: the collective embrace of the myth that Athenians descend from people who are literally born from the soil. This is the story that, according to some of our sources, begins with the god Hephaestus' effort to rape Athena, and in his failure, his ejaculation on the ground produces Erichtheus, the first Athenian. It is a story that separates Athens from other Greek communities. I've been making use from time to time of the term biopolitics. And in order to clarify how autochthony and racialization work hand in hand, I need to say a few more words about what biopolitics entails, what the regulation of life and reproduction at the hands of the state have to do with the capacity of Athenians to develop and inhabit a biopolitical order. One of the things that is at stake in the interweaving of citizenship and politics in our Athenian and Greek sources is nothing less than the indexing of full civic identity to childbearing capacity. If one cannot have children or chooses not to have children, can one even be a good citizen? Can one even be a citizen in the first place? Does legitimate civic standing require the production of children? We have noted that autochthony, the myth of Athenian rootedness in the soil, is one potent mechanism by which Athenians and other Greek speakers lay out a set of authoritative claims concerning the presumed biological and ontological coherence of a community. One of the tensions that's bubbling to the surface in the period when this play is put on, is how to reconcile the facts of Athenian mobility with the presumed facts of a kind of proto-national ethnic racial coherence. That tension and its foregrounding in Euripides' Ion makes it an exceptionally suggestive text for thinking about dilemmas of citizenship, belonging, and racialization. And its confrontation with biopolitics and the imperatives of reproduction also make it a valuable text for thinking about the overlays and intersections of racialization and gender.

Questions of citizenship, belonging, and ­national identity shape contemporary life. Who is and who is not a citizen, and how this is determined across national and racial lines, has a deeply rooted history. In ancient Greece, tragedians like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides responded to their particular political moment with plays that demanded audiences to consider the nature of citizenship and nationality within their society. Dan-el Padilla Peralta expounds on how Euripides’ Ion deals with the question of citizenship and how it resonates across the long history of racialization.

Ancient
Literature
Transnational studies
Gender and sexuality
Video
Ruben Espinosa

Immigration and Henry V

Ruben Espinosa draws attention to how the English language and the production of English identity are troubled in Henry V and asks students to reimagine their relationship with the Bard and his legacy.

Why Shakespeare? This is the first question I pose to my students every semester. It's a deliberate move to invite them to question Shakespeare's value in our present moment and to debunk the myth that his works are somehow universal and inherently good for us. The question that follows then is not, “Why should Shakespeare matter,” but rather, “Why should Shakespeare matter to us?” Through my experience teaching at Hispanic-serving institutions, I do not try to make students appreciate Shakespeare's language for the legacy it has already left. Rather I invite them to consider how their view of Shakespeare stands to redefine the legacy he leaves in their communities. What does their apprehension of his works have to offer? The key is to allow students to understand that it is their view of Shakespeare that makes his works and words relevant. While race and racism in Shakespeare are consistent topics for class discussions, the fraught nature of linguistic identity is particularly relevant for Latinx students. In communities on the US-Mexico border, the command of the English language is often imagined to be a barometer of one's value and sense of belonging. As a Chicano living in these communities, addressing this in my Shakespeare classes is important to me. When it comes to rich discussions surrounding linguistic and cultural identity, Henry V has been an invaluable play in my teaching. Because of its explicit attention to empire building, the play offers an interesting glimpse into the way language is mobilized. I ask students to consider how the play parodies the English that Katherine, Fluellen, Jamy and MacMorris speak. These characters are objects of derision because of their broken English. Those who have an inexact command of the English language are mocked not only on Shakespeare's stage, but also in our present moment. The English have a clear idea about the way one should look and sound, and many Americans feel the same. The characters in the play, and Latinxs in the US, are so often the objects of ridicule. Outwardly, Henry V seems to be promoting ethnocentrism, but I ask students to consider how the play may be subversive. Not only does Fluellen exhibit pride in his Welsh identity, he goes so far as to steal Henry's thunder when the king claims victory at Agincourt on St. Crispin's Day. In that moment, he reminds Henry that Edward the Black Prince, "fought a most prave prattle here in France" and goes on to say, "if Your Majesty is remembered of it, the Welshman did good service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps, which Your Majesty know to this hour is an honorable badge of service. And I do believe Your Majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon St. Tavy's Day." Just as Henry attempts to memorialize that English victory, Fluellen reminds him of the Feast of St. David, the patron Saint of Wales. He establishes a longer, richer cultural history, traditions and contributions by the Welsh that existed long before the emerging English empire. It is Fluellen's confidence and pride in his cultural identity that resonates with students who so often feel overshadowed by the colonizing energies that persist in our present moment. To be clear, it is much more than Fluellen's act of calling the king's attention to Welsh history that infuses the play with contemporary cultural relevance in La Frontera. It is the everyday mockery that Fluellen endures and his response to that mockery that I find compelling. For example, Pistol publicly ridicules Fluellen for wearing the leek in his cap, honoring St. David's Day. Fluellen endures this mockery until he violently confronts Pistol. He overpowers Pistol, forces him to eat a leek, and injures him to the point of bloodshed. It's so heated that the Englishman Gower says to Fluellen, "Enough, captain, you have astonished him." After Fluellen exits, Pistol claims he will get revenge. But Gower says to him, "Go, go. You are a counterfeit, cowardly nave. Will you mock at an ancient tradition begun upon an honorable respect and worn as a memorable trophy of predeceased valor, and dare not avouch in your deeds any of your words? I have seen you gleeking and galling at this gentleman twice or thrice. You thought because he could not speak English in the native garb he could not therefore handle an English cudgel. You find it otherwise and henceforth let a Welsh correction teach you a good English condition." Many it seems, both in Shakespeare's world and ours, are in need of a Welsh correction. And while I do not encourage violence, we must underscore the importance of demanding dignity in the face of those who seek to devalue your worth. For young Chicanxs, this is critical. Don't abandon your cultural traditions. Don't take down your Mexican flag. Don't forget your language. When I teach Shakespeare, I don't aim to have students gain an appreciation for, or an understanding of his language, only so that they can feel more legitimate in the eyes of others. I bring to the table the long, tired tool of the colonizer, so that my students can unearth therein a Shakespeare of their own, one filled with possibilities and opportunities to speak back and demand dignity in whatever language they find fit.

Henry V can be an incredibly compelling play to bring students into conversations about immigration and nationalism. The play’s concern with crafting an English national identity, especially in comparison to that of the Welsh or French, offers students a way into a discussion about language, belonging, and national identity. Given the urgency of anti-immigrant sentiments and legislation in the US, the idea of who is deemed a legitimate insider is a significant entry point for American students to discussions about national citizenship and race. Notions of legitimacy in the US are often tethered to linguistic identity, so the play’s attention to language is critical for these conversations.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
RaceB4Race Highlight
Nedda Mehdizadeh

Early modern travel writing and race

By attending to the power of composition, Nedda Mehdizadeh highlights the ways in which teaching composition might empower students to work against and past today’s imperial universalisms.

On the first day of my English Composition 5W course, “When East Meets West,” I ask students to analyze a series of premodern maps in small groups. The only information I share with them to begin is a digital copy of the map, (if available) the name of the cartographer who created it, and the date it was made. Together, they make observations about what they see and attempt to derive some significance about those observations based on what they already know about maps. After they’ve wrestled with the image, I ask them to research the map and cartographer with the intention of teaching the class what they’ve learned, including details and information they gathered during their research about the map as well as their initial assumptions from the first part of the activity. The group who is assigned the Hereford Mappa Mundi is often overwhelmed by the image. I usually overhear comments like, “if this is earth, it looks like God, or something, is at the top” or “this part with the fish is obviously the water, and the part with the buildings is the land.” Though I’ve had a student or two who find Jerusalem, the majority tends to wander the Mappa Mundi looking for something recognizable, but can only make sense of the 12th C map after learning that it, in fact, draws a connection between the geographical and the spiritual; it locates scenes from the bible according to its presumed geographical positioning, rather than provides, say, coordinates a traveler could use to find their way in the earthly realm. On the other hand, those who explore the Mercator Projection recognize it as a map of the world, a map that just might help a traveler plan their route to this or that location; it feels familiar, and they have an easier time locating and naming space. What they find most stunning is the contrast between the extensive detail marking waterways, cities, and important landmarks on the map’s eastern hemisphere and the so-called “empty” space and shapelessness of the western hemisphere. In their research about the Mercator Projection, they learn that this image is the basis for modern maps, which is why, they note, it feels more familiar to them. They also learn that Gerardus Mercator, the cartographer, created the map in 1569—this answers their questions about the “empty” Western Hemisphere: “the Americas,” they say, “were only just ‘discovered’ in 1492 by Christopher Columbus, so Mercator probably didn’t have enough information to ‘fill it up’.” And students assigned to navigate Muhammad al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana, dated 1154, similarly seek out what is familiar, like the blue of the water and the yellow of the land, but cannot make clear determinations about what the image intends to portray. When they present their findings, they describe the image as “upside down” or “the wrong way” to communicate that it has rotated 180 degrees from what they are accustomed to, with the southern hemisphere at the top of the image and the northern hemisphere at the bottom. Their classmates immediately tilt their heads, furrowing their eyebrows, as they reorient their bodies to see the map according to a perspective that is familiar to them. “That’s so weird,” one student yelled out. We spend some time debriefing the activity as a large class; for this conversation, I’m less interested in the maps themselves, I tell them, than in our initial assumptions about the maps, the language we used to describe them, and the manner in which we shared the information we learned about them with our classmates. In other words, what narratives might we have inherited that informed the narratives we created about the maps? Students reflect on each group’s move to seek out what is familiar in the face of disorientation, and the accompanying tendency to make a value judgment on what they deem as unfamiliar, such as when al-Idrisi’s map was classified as “weird” because it was oriented in “the wrong way.” They also observe how their descriptions mobilize the sanitized versions of colonization that they learned as children and never really unlearned; for example, by classifying the western hemisphere of Mercator’s Projection as “empty” without offering a critique of this apparent “emptiness,” they unwittingly perpetuated the erasure of native communities who were always there and who were murdered and displaced by so-called explorers from Europe. This first-day activity comes with a realization that maps are not dispassionate geographical depictions of the world but rather geographical approximations that are constructed based on how a person or a group of people see the world. The lines that separate this country from that one, the shapes and sizes that represent landmass and bodies of water, even the orientations of the map itself that inform what we—the consumers and readers of maps—prioritize and how we see, are all manmade. Edward Said tells us this in Orientalism where he argues that the west invents an idea of the east, transforming it into an object of study that can be consumed and dominated. The maps my students examine are tangible representations of this knowledge production; they are borne out of an imaginative geography, to borrow Said’s words, as “distinctive objects… made by the mind…appearing to exist objectively, [but] have only a fictional reality.” The West, then, assumes a position of authority by simply writing their way into it, as a carefully crafted gift they have given to themselves. One such “gift” is Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Nauigations, first published in 1589, with a second, expanded, three-volume edition published beginning in 1598. It is a rich archive with hundreds and hundreds of pages of travel documents, merchant’s letters, ships’ logs, and captured enemy papers from English expeditions to the Americas, Russia, Persia, India, among other places, all amounting to what Nandini Das describes as “the single most significant collection of travel literature ever to be published in English.” We begin our examination of early modern transnational encounter by turning to a familiar and favorite early modern pun: the interplay between travel and travail. Renaissance travel writers really loved that “travail” and “travel” shared the same root; in fact, travel, as the OED tells us, was “originally a variant of travail, now differentiated in form [and sense] …” At its core, “to travail” means “to labour, to exhaust oneself, to struggle;” as a transitive verb, “to harass, torment, distress, [or] trouble [a person];” as a noun, “effort, toil, labour, torment, distress, affliction, woman’s labour [as in childbirth] …exhaustion, weariness.” This shared root gave travel writers the opportunity to emphasize the dangers associated with travel. But the pun, of course, doesn’t end here. Travel writers not only played on the tormenting nature of travel but also the tormenting nature of the act of writing. In my course, my students and I interrogate this relationship between travel, travail, and writing when we discuss the prefatory materials from both the first and second editions of Principall Nauigations, where Hakluyt describes the labor of compiling these documents. In the epistle to the reader in the second edition, we see not only a list of arduous experiences—which you can read here—that Hakluyt weathered in order to “redee[m] from obscuritie” travel documents from English expeditions to far-off lands but also that little has changed in the life of an academic since the early modern period. what restless nights, what painefull dayes, what heat, what cold I haue indured; how many long & chargeable iourneys I haue traveiled; how many famous libraries I haue searched into; what varietie of ancient and moderne writers I haue perused, what a number of old records, patents, priuileges, letters, &c. I haue redeemed from obscuritie and perishing; into how manifold acquaintance I haue entred; what expenses I haue not spared; and yet what faire opportunities of priuate gaine, preferment, and ease I haue neglected; Hakluyt has devoted time to this project—from restless nights to painful days—a continuous temporal range accompanied by adjectives signifying discomfort and difficulty. He likewise transcends linear time by “traveiling” between the ancient and the modern at “famous libraries” as he combs through countless “old records, patents, priuileges, letters, &c. [that he has] redeemed from obscuritie and perishing.” In addition to time, Hakluyt has seemingly been exposed to the elements; strange considering he never actually joined these transnational expeditions. He describes a range of temperatures—what heat, what cold—alluding to the drastic changes in temperature across geographical zones, changes in climate that travelers would have experienced and would have used as evidentiary support in their move to classify human beings according to their phenotypic and behavioral qualities. Finally, Hakluyt describes all he has given up for this thankless job, including “faire opportunities of priuate gaine, preferment, and ease.” The correlation between the travail of travel and the travail of writing often resonates with my students, all of whom are non-majors and most of whom do not necessarily identify as writers when they start my class. I ask them what they think the correlation means; why is this pun effective? Their answers boil down to one main point: the association Hakluyt makes between the labor of his writing and editing process and the labor associated with travel builds credibility with his audience. Just on the surface, my students felt seen: his description of the challenges of creating something connected to their fears about having to spend 10 weeks writing for a required composition course they need for graduation. By using language associated with travel, my students concluded, Hakluyt establishes himself as an expert in travel: he builds a framework for Principall Nauigations with his own act of writing using language appropriate for the subject matter, acknowledging the challenges associated with travel, and doing it—twice! —without any expectations for personal gain, or so he says. The epistle builds trust, and positions Hakluyt as a voice of authority, granting authority to the travelers whom he features in the volume because their travel documents have cleared his vetting process. The trust that he establishes is further emphasized in the quote you see here where he clarifies his reasons for undertaking this burden. Hauing for the benefit and honour of my Countrey zealously bestowed so many yeres, so much traveile and cost, to bring Antiquities smothered and buried in darke silence, to light, and to preserue certain memorable exploits of late yeeres by our English nation atchieued, from the greedy and devouring iaws of obliuion: to gather likewise, and as it were to incorporate into one body the torne and scattered limmes of our ancient and late Nauigations by Sea, our voyages by land, and traffiques of merchandise by both: and hauing (so much as in me lieth) restored ech particular member, being before displaced, to their ioynts and ligaments Not only does Hakluyt wish “to preserue” narratives about English exploration before the “the greedy and devouring iaws of obliuion” gobble them up, but also, in so doing, “to incorporate into one body the torne and scattered limmes…restor[ing] ech particular member, being before displaced, to their ioynts and ligaments.” Just as Hakluyt uses language associated with travel writing in order to establish authority, he likewise uses language associated with empire building to consolidate the fragments of English exploration into one unified body. This rhetoric of empire exposes not only Hakluyt’s desire to preserve English narrative but also England’s desire to expand its imperial reach. These “scattered limmes” that tell the carefully-crafted stories of English adventurers are, in fact, the “distinctive objects… made by the mind…appearing to exist objectively, [but] have only a fictional reality,” that Said warns us about. Produced by and for England, these stories are framed as the property of England—the appendages of a sovereign body. By framing these narrative fragments as such, Hakluyt creates a parallel between those stories and the content of those stories, such as the fertile land ripe for the taking, the “savages” and “barbarians” who must be civilized, the human and non-human commodities that can be domesticated for economic gain, the lives that are destroyed and violated—these, too, become England’s property with the effortless and violent stroke of a pen. Hakluyt’s labor in recovery runs parallel with the explorer’s discovery efforts; the territories and the peoples of these foreign lands become objects of study that now belong to England—they have writing to verify it—and Englishmen like Hakluyt and his travelers are simply putting England back together again, redeeming it from certain oblivion at the hands of natives who are, according to these texts, too inept or dangerous to go uncolonized. The effortlessness with which Hakluyt assumes authority through his writing mirrors the effortlessness with which English travelers justify their movements across borders and the violence they leave in their wake. One of the earliest appeals for geographical discovery, economic gain, and imperial expansion through transnational travel comes in 1527 when Robert Thorne, a London merchant, issued a declaration to King Henry VIII to express the urgency of creating new opportunities for English trade beyond England’s borders, and to provide his king with very detailed instructions on how to proceed to that end. Thorne explains that “[e]xperience prooveth that naturally all princes bee desirous to extend and enlarge their dominions and kingdoms…[and] it is to be maruelled, if there be any prince content to liue quiet with his owne dominions.” Thorne appeals to his sovereign from a place of experience as a merchant, as a voice of authority, on how mercantile development can lead a ruler to fulfill the natural desire to “enlarge their dominions and kingdoms.” Rivals in Spain and Portugal, he warns, have already made significant moves to establishing secure routes to the West and East Indies respectively. But Thorne assures Henry VIII that a northern route has yet to be claimed, and this route eventually led some English travelers to the shores of Canada and other travelers to Russia, through the Caspian Sea, and into Safavid Persia. To help Henry VIII understand the geographical landscape, he encloses what he calls a “Mappe or Carde of the World” which he has drawn himself, and which he accompanies with a written description of the image in a long, very tedious account. I warn my students about Thorne’s self-described “prolixity” in advance of the assignment; while they may be tempted to rush right through the reading or just skip it altogether, I’d like them to consider why this reading is tiring and, quite frankly, boring. What are the features of the text that make it so? What would be the reason I would assign something like this for our course? And I’ll just read a few lines of this passage: Now to know in what longitude any land is, your Lordship must take a ruler or a compasse, and set the one foot of the compasse upon the land or coast whose longitude you would know, and extend the other foot of the compasse to the next part of one of the transversall lines in the Orientall or Occidental part: which done, set the one foot of the compasse in the said transversal line at the end of the nether scale, the scale of longitude, and the other foot sheweth the degree of longitude that the region is in. And your Lordship must understand that this Card, though little, conteineth the universall whole world betwixt two collaterall lines, the one in the Occidentall part descendeth perpendicular vpon the 175 degree, & the other in the Orientall on the 170 degree, whose distance measureth the scale of longitude. And that which is without the two said transversall lines, is onely to shew how the Orientall part is joined with the Occident, and Occident with the Orient. For that that is set without the line in the Oriental part, is the same that is set within the other line in the Occidentall part: and that that is set without the line in the Occidental part, is the same that is set within the line in the Orientall part, to shew that though this figure of the world in plaine or flatte seemeth to have an end, yet one imagining that this sayd Card were set upon a round thing, where the endes should touch by the lines, it would plainely appeare howe the Orient part joyneth with the Occident... My students begin answering my guiding question by addressing the highly technical and almost scientific tone of Thorne’s writing. The details of his instruction guide do not simply complement the map included in his letter, they amount to a map that says something about how Thorne—and, he hopes, his sovereign—sees the world. Bringing together the lessons about maps from our first day and our ongoing discussions about the rhetoric of empire, students acknowledge how Thorne reaffirms the process by which white, cis-het, European men establish authority through the travail of writing. Thorne’s vision of the world depicted on “this Card, though little” is one that imagines the earth as contained and navigable; “the Orient part joyneth with the Occident,” if we can only imagine simply “set[ting] [the map] upon a round thing, where the endes should touch by the lines.” The world is easily manipulable; like puddy in our hands, we can simply make it do what we want it to—and by we, I’m referring to the universal we, the “we” that masquerades as an inclusive collective but really signifies the white, cis-het European men who have granted themselves permission to “enlarge their dominions and kingdoms” as though the world belongs to them. As though they can, like the compass in Thorne’s description, simply set foot “upon the land or coast whose longitude you would know,” another “redeemed” appendage to incorporate into the ever-growing sovereign body. This “we” has to silence any dissent in order to maintain the ruse of universality, and so it “empties” the narrative of any memory of the native stories, bodies, and cultures that expose the violence for what it is, reducing this “universall whole world” to a series of longitudes and latitudes, to a series of arbitrary divisions, that inform how English writers categorized human beings and assigned value to them based on their emerging ideas of race. The long and tedious excerpt I assign from Thorne’s vison of the world encourages students to slow down, to sit with the text to see how whiteness works, to see the rhetorical maneuvers these writers employ to consolidate power. “The white makings of whiteness,” to borrow from Richard Dyer’s book, White, become visible with a slow engagement, an idea we’ve circled back to a few times this week beginning with Ian Smith and Adrienne Merritt on Wednesday, and again with Brenna Duperron’s presentation yesterday. This slow engagement is the foundation of cultivating racial literacy. As Ayanna Thompson explained in her opening remarks on Wednesday, we have to be taught to be actively anti-racist, and for that to happen, we have to begin by unlearning and breaking down the ideas that we have inherited, the ideas that have been ingrained in us without our consent. That unlearning takes time and it takes patience. And it also requires taking responsibility for the vacancies in our curricula that give air to the inherited ideas that erase the pain and violence of colonization and racism. Education can be “a key to unlocking new structures, practices, theories, possibilities,” as Ayanna Thompson said; a critical study of race is an invitation to open urgent avenues of expanding our knowledge and understanding, not foreclosing them. Thinking of studying race as a slow engagement does not only refer to the pace we set in a particular course, but also to the momentum we build over time. Anti-racist pedagogy is urgent work, but it is also a sustained process of undoing and becoming; it isn’t about a quick fix or simply working in a Black or Indigenous author into our syllabi “without producing new approaches to reading,” as Felice Blake argues in her essay “Why Black Lives Matter in the Humanities.” It requires a certain amount of humility, of learning with our students so that we can show up for them with the most ethical teaching philosophy we can nurture. We need to do our homework if we’re going to ask them to do theirs. In her plenary presentation at Race Before Race: Race and Periodization at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, Margo Hendricks discussed the more systemic problem within our field to ignore and erase the foundational intellectual labor of PCRS, or Premodern Critical Race Studies, which she distinguishes from its intellectually-lazy step-sister PRS, or Premodern Race Studies. When our colleagues discredit the work of PCRS as anachronistic in one breath and praise its timeliness in the next even as they claim expertise in a field for which they have not done their homework, it performs the very acts of racism and colonization embedded in our early modern objects of study: PRS is the practice of approaching race studies as if ‘you've just discovered the land.’ Practitioners ignore the preexisting inhabitants of the land or, if PRS scholars deign to acknowledge the land is inhabited, it’s viewed as uncultivated and must be done so properly. In this body of work, all evidence (or nearly all of the evidence) of the work done to nurture and make productive the land is ignored or briefly alluded to. In other words, the ancestry is erased. No articulation of the complex genealogy that produced premodern critical race studies exists, which in turn, drew these academic ‘settlers,’ and I am calling them ‘settlers,’ to premodern race. And just like capitalist ‘White settler colonialism,’ PRS fails to acknowledge the scholarly ancestry (the genealogy) that continues to inhabit and nurture the critical process for the study of premodern race. The academy, therefore, is guilty of reproducing the idea that students internalize throughout their education. And it reaffirms students’ associations to the texts they study—most of which are written by white, cis-het, European men without critical intervention—as authoritative. They learn to look outside themselves and toward an imagined ideal for answers. We need to model critical inquiry for our students, showing how to interrogate the assumed authority of a text. I mentioned that my students are all non-majors and that most of them do not necessarily identify as writers when they start my class. It’s because they see themselves as distanced from the act of writing—from assuming the identity of a writer—because they tend to see the body of writing assigned by their instructor for the course, as a given, as a truth, as objective. Good writing happens out there by the guy who looks like that and not by me. What do I have to say that is of value? That could compete? That would actually matter to anyone? As instructors, we have the opportunity to bring these inherited ideas of what counts as a text and what counts as an author into view. To teach our students how to acknowledge whose voices are amplified and whose are silenced. I want my students to take up space in their own writing, to take risks and fumble their way through to discovering what writing means to them. I want them to trust their ideas and their instincts, not to cede their authority to the status quo or to what they think is expected of them. This is something I can teach them by decentering myself, not seeing myself as ceding my authority in the classroom by flipping it but modeling what it means to have a position of authority and sharing it. I want them to see writing as an opportunity to convey an idea with care and compassion, and, above all, to learn that care and compassion in writing is not antithetical to academic rigor.

Teaching the Travail of Writing: Authority, Empire, and Racial Formation in the (Pre)modern | Watch the full talk

Presented by Nedda Mehdizadeh at Education: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Nedda Mehdizadeh unpacks how English travel writing not only mirrors imperial adventurism but participates in the formation of empire itself. Taking as a starting point Edward Said’s comments on “fictional realities” in Orientalism (1978), Mehdizadeh models pedagogical techniques which demonstrate how cartography is not a reflection of an external world but a constructed discipline, doing so through the Hereford Mappa Mundi (c. 1300), the Mercator Projection (1569), and Muhammad al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana (1154). Mehdizadeh then turns to Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589), a compendium of travelogues, and Robert Thorne’s Mappe or Carde of the World (1527) to illuminate the key role played by writing in processes of conquest and early capitalism. By attending to the power of composition, Mehdizadeh also highlights the ways in which teaching composition might empower students to work against and past today’s imperial universalisms.

Early Modern
Literature
Transnational studies
RaceB4Race Highlight
Eric L. De Barros

White-washing educative adaptations of Shakespeare

Eric L. De Barros critiques educative adaptations of Shakespeare plays that seek to create social change through art but instead are too reverential of Shakespeare, especially its poetic language.

In Jason Zeldes’s Romeo is Bleeding, a 2015 documentary film about an urban adaptation of Romeo and Juliet entitled Té’s Harmony, the two questions of my primary title are the governing, largely unspoken ones driving the narrative. Trapped within and traumatized by the drug- and gang-related gun violence plaguing Richmond, CA and by extension urban black and brown America, Donté Clark, a co-founder of and reluctant teacher-mentor an after-school creative arts program named RAW Talent, comes to see in Romeo and Juliet the possibility of a re-creative, expressive way out. As both the play-adaptation and film capture, Clark and his student-collaborators urgently engage in a disciplined and hopeful process of “re-wri(gh)ting” Romeo and Juliet into a lifesaving vehicle for the verbal and performative dexterity of spoken word poetry, a dexterity the film highlights with an impressive combination of soulful music, dramatic sound effects, bold lighting, and extreme close-ups. In short, the film’s representation of this spoken-word adaptation of Shakespeare, particularly it’s representation of Clark’s performances, is nothing short of dazzling. In and of itself, that dexterity should come as no surprise, for performative lyricism in black America is as old as the various manifestations of white oppression it was and continues to be variously forged to combat. In fact, as if oblivious to that long history, the film urgently attempts to create for itself the impression that spoken word poetry—as opposed to negro spirituals, blues, jazz, rock and roll, doo wop, hip hop, etc.—represents something sufficiently new, cool, and potentially transformative to merit filming. Specifically enhancing the sense of a Miranda-like “brave new world” of urban pedagogical possibilities, the Shakespearean vehicle is, of course, central to that impression. However, just as with black lyricism, there is nothing new about a film devoted to the liberal pedagogical fantasy that Shakespeare, however employed or adapted, possesses the reformative power to save urban black and brown lives. Romeo is Bleeding is just one of the latest examples. As far back as 1994, in the wake of the social and economic devastation of the mid-80s crack epidemic, Penny Marshall released a Hollywood comedy entitled Renaissance Man, and about a decade later, perhaps reflecting a new millennial desire to prove Shakespeare’s reformative power once and for all, several identically themed documentaries followed: Michèle Ohayon’s Colors Straight Up (1998), Lawrence Bridges’s Why Shakespeare? (2004), Michael Waldman’s My Shakespeare (2004), Mel Stuart’s The Hobart Shakespeareans (2005), and Hank Rogerson’s Shakespeare Behind Bars (2006). All of these films and the reform programs they variously represent fail to answer my titular questions, because the point of their fantasy is not to offer any “real” answers. Of course, time will not permit me to illustrate how for each. Therefore, I will focus on Clark’s spoken-word adaptation of Romeo and Juliet and Zeldes’s Romeo is Bleed as a representative examples of the insidious way in which all of these films and programs advance one or another version of Shakespeare-as-poetry in the interest of, as I will explain, a neoliberal pedagogy of figurative denial. To provide just a bit more context, these programs, as Ayanna Thompson usefully explains, are so committed to Shakespeare’s universality, “authority, authenticity, and textual stability” that any critical discussions of race becomes ironically irrelevant to the complexly racialized people they are supposedly intended to reform. And while, for Thompson, one promising exception is the LA-based Will Power to Youth (WPY) program profiled in Bridges’s Why Shakespeare?, specifically for its focus on appropriation, adaptation, and revision, I am not entirely persuaded that that re-creative critical engagement necessarily makes any liberatory or transformative difference. The reason—aside from or perhaps because of the pessimism rooted in the traumatic circumstances of my own urban upbringing—is that in both types of programs Shakespeare is representing something more than Shakespeare. That is, more fundamental and potentially more insidious than just privileging the authority of Shakespeare as author and/or text, Shakespeare is also or alternatively generally representing highly aestheticized poetic language as a superior mode of expression or representation. Simply stated, as an unidentified person on the street in Bridges’s film does, when apparently randomly asked the oddly depersonalized question, “What’s Shakespeare?,” Shakespeare is “poetry.” In fact, with person after person (from famous and not-so-famous actors, directors, and writers to people on the street, at-risk young adults, and elementary school children) reciting their favorite Shakespearean lines in between trite reflections on the practical present-day value of his historical and literary greatness, Bridges’s film amounts to a twenty-minute promotional celebration of this definition. And while WPY’s focus on appropriation, adaptation, and revision may be invested with the potential to transform at-risk lives and distressed communities, its simultaneous acceptance of this definition of Shakespeare-as-poetry or poetry-as-Shakespeare arguably limits, if not works against, the realization of that potential. For instance, when Ben Donenberg, WPY’s artistic director, explains iambic pentameter as Shakespeare “asking your heart to sync up with [his characters]” or when Chris Anthony, the program’s associate director, describes Shakespeare as “the gift of Shakespeare,” we are left to wonder about the ethical implications of applying this understanding of poetry—of syncing hearts and a gift—to the lives of people oppressed by the most unpoetic of circumstances. Theodor Adorno’s “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” is perhaps the most famous expression of this ethical skepticism. However, it is but one of the many instances that forced me over the course of my education to stop—usually when it was especially costly to do so—and think seriously about the role that I was being trained to play in a beautifully barbaric culture that has almost always represented me as the ugliest kind of barbarian. There was Tadeusz Borowski’s realization, as expressed in his collection of concentration camp stories, that oppression and exploitation is the price of civilization, and that the fate of the oppressed and exploited, who are forced to live “filthy [lives] and die real deaths,” is that they will “be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the poets, the jurists, the philosophers, the priests. . . . [who] will produce their own beauty, virtue, . . .truth. . . . [and] religion.” There was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and its representation of the power of Kurtzian eloquence—the gift of voice, expression, poetry—to obscure and thereby perpetuate the ugly realities of European imperialism, “which mostly means the [violent] taking [of the earth] away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses. . . .” There was Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and its identification of the insidious, colonizing poetry of Christianity. There was Ray Durem’s “I know I’m not sufficiently obscure,” and its rejection of the capacity of poetic language to represent the violent oppression of black people with the startling concluding address to white poets: “You deal with finer feelings,/very subtle—an autumn leaf/hanging from a tree—I see a body!” Similarly, there was Nikki Giovanni’s “For Saundra,” and its rejection of conventional poetry, because for oppressed black people “these are not poetic/times/at all.” Specifically, in terms Shakespeare, there was Titus Andronicus, and its gruesome illustration of the failure of poetic language, when, in particular, Marcus awkwardly attempts to aestheticize the blood flowing from the mouth of a raped and mutilated Lavinia as “a crimson river of warm blood,/Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind,/Doth rise and fall between thy roséd lips/Coming and going with thy honey breath.” While not about poetic language per se, there was also Stephen Greenblatt’s “Marvelous Possessions,” and the way the devastation of Amerindian peoples and cultures compels him to ask, “Should we not say then that words do not matter . . . ?” before concluding that “we are thus forced to abandon the dream of linguistic omnipotence.” And finally, specifically in terms of the representational dangers of film, there was Robert Leventhal’s uncompromising critique of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List for using romantic conventions of narrative to wipe away the horrific, material reality of the Holocaust. What Clark’s Té’s Harmony and Zeldes’s Romeo is Bleed fail to see or acknowledge is what these powerful reflections made it impossible for me to ignore: that the relationship between poetic language and the bodies of oppressed people is anything but obvious or obviously good. In fact, it is precisely through that failure that the play adaptation and the film employ Shakespeare-as-poetry and its equivalent cinematic techniques to mystify or romanticize and thereby avoid addressing the ugly interconnected workings of racist power as internalized within and historically inscribed upon suffering black bodies. The Play As published by Red Beard Press, a Michigan-based publishing house devoted, as its website declares, to giving youth and marginalized people a space for their voices to be heard, the play’s front matter variously celebrates the Shakespeare-as-poetry fantasy of urban, black reform at the heart of Clark’s adaptation. In the “Acknowledgments,” Molly Raynor, the other co-founder of RAW Talent and Clark’s teacher-mentor, thanks Clark “for all of the hard work, love, energy [,] and thought he put into the script,” before sharing, It was amazing to walk into work every day for three months and see Donte sitting at his desk, deeply engrossed in Romeo & Juliet. I could tell from the way he would smirk and chuckle to himself that he had overcome his initial disinterest in the play; that once he broke through the dense language and began making connections between Verona and Richmond, he came to truly appreciate the genius and humor of Shakespeare. He found a way to honor the original text without being confined by it. Although Raynor concludes that that breakthrough balance between honoring the original text and not being confined by it results in a play that “digs deeper into the roots of the conflict and challenges the reader to imagine a counter narrative to” Shakespeare’s tragedy, the actual play, as I am arguing, does nothing of the sort. In other words, as I will detail shortly, Clark’s adaptation doesn’t so much dig deeper and challenge us to imagine a counter narrative as much as it teases us with flashes of poetic brilliance before letting us off the hook with an evasive and therefore questionable deus ex machina resolution. In that way, what enables Raynor to make and presumably believe such a hyperbolic claim is that her uncritical privileging of the classical humor and genius of Shakespeare is so strong that all Clark really needed to do for his observant and ultimately amazed teacher was demonstrate a sufficient reverence for Shakespeare-as-poetry in both process and produce. For Raynor, the immediate inspiration for this Shakespeare-as-poetry thinking is actually not Shakespeare, but Luis J. Rodriguez, the poet, activist, and author of Té’s Harmony’s foreword. As Raynor acknowledges, “[Rodriguez] is the model for what we are trying to accomplish with this play—creating social change through art—and we are so grateful for the work that he is doing around violence prevention and communal healing.” While I cannot speak to Rodriquez’s work and assume he’s well-meaning and has made a positive difference, I am, however, concerned with his articulation (in the foreword) of a personal, neoliberal, even Oprah-Winfrey-style self-help understanding of creative expression. “I am going to make a bold statement,” he begins, A statement that may grate the ears of practical minded, cost-conscious and uninspired persons, usually, unfortunately, among those who run governments, schools, and corporations: The arts save lives. The arts are the best antidote for violence, disconnections, depressions and alienations. For Rodriquez, the arts have little, if anything, to do with the cultivation of a revolutionary critical consciousness that might inspire efforts to resist, dismantle, or maybe just reform the “existing profit-driven structures of production and consumption.” In other words, for him, creative expression is not about the structural-institutional social change that, I think, Raynor is suggesting. On the contrary, it is about the reformation—really the salvation— of the individual from the physical and personal-emotional consequences of those structures, which Rodriquez also conveniently individualizes into the unimaginative, asshole bureaucrats that are so easy for us to blame and hate. In that way, Rodriquez’s creative expression effectively works on and through the bourgeois individual of its own creation as the poetry of a secular religion with all of the neoliberal, colonizing potential that goes along with it. There are, at least, two troubling ways in which Clark’s play realizes that potential: the first is its uncritical objectification of the black female body, and the second, as I have already indicated, is its evasive deus ex machina resolution. As immediately indicated by the double entendre of the title Té’s Harmony, Clark assumes for Té the possessive perspectival position of the traditional Petrarchan lover over his love interest, Harmony, because, according to the Shakespeare-as-poetry ideology that shapes him shaping them, that’s what a clever poet is supposed to do. Indeed, after their initial encounter in Clark’s version of the masque scene, Té poetically gazes at Harmony with, But I can hear it The eruption of her blood From volcanic times in Richmond That mold her obsidian Dark shades of hardened rock exterior Bruised and brittle, deep within With a sharpened shine that’s fair A black stone, a jewel Fashioned for kings to wear. (1. 5: 36) While a sympathetic attempt to represent Harmony as a physical and emotional victim of Richmond’s traumatizing realities, this passage also ironically repeats that victimization with its poetic-symbolic objectification of her as a valuable piece of jewelry “[f]ashioned” to be worn by a king like Té presumably imagines himself to be. In the next scene, as if to translate that refined image of kingly jewelry into the lower register of present-day consumer consumption, Clark represents Té following—really stalking—Harmony into a Target department store. In the process of browses her browsing clothing in the women’s section, he muses, From the outside you can tell You can smell that something died inside of her I wonder what it was that was left to rot in this vacant lot But if time permits These hands of my love will renovate This deserted shack behind her breast I’ll build a mansion of all colors. (1.6: 43) Again, while well-intentioned, Clark represents Té further objectifying Harmony—specifically the empty space where he imagines her heart used to be—as a putrid, vacant lot or deserted shack in need of his renovating hands. The obvious problem to many, if not all, of us is that these instances of female objectification have little to do with Shakespeare as interpreted by more than thirty years of feminist and critical race scholarship. In other words, they lack any critical or ethical awareness of Shakespeare’s own complex representation of the violent, racialized, and imperialistic power implicated in the tradition of the Petrarchan love blazon that he inherited. In the specific case of Romeo and Juliet, as Robert N. Watson and Stephen Dickey highlight in their important pro-feminist reading of the play, Clark is unaware that, by having Té engage in this creepy voyeuristic cataloguing of Harmony’s body, he is actually poetically perpetuating the culture of violence he is attempting to use creative expression to end. That is to say, in these instances, Clark is not simply positioning Té as a romantic, would-be lover; he is also positioning him as precisely the kind of man that violent and competitive patriarchal cultures produce. In short, he is simultaneously positioning him as a would-be rapist. Clark can’t see any of this, because, as I have suggested, Shakespeare-as-poetry won’t allow him to. Indeed, as Laura Mulvey might describe, the point of Shakespeare-as-poetry, defined as it is by the pleasure and beauty of patriarchal creativity, is to avoid or deny this type of destructive, ethically oriented analysis. That’s what I think also ultimately explains Clark’s decision to turn Shakespeare’s tragedy into the romance or tragicomedy of his spoken-word adaptation. As he explains through the Nurse/Narrator, who at the end of the play interrupts the characters to ask, But could there be another ending to this story? We know what you were expecting—a tragedy, The classic tale of star-crossed lovers who take their lives, The classic tale on Channel 5 News of Richmond youth, Ugly as the scarred backs of our ancestors Can you feel it? It’s time to heal Time to reclaim the city of Pride and Purpose—our Richmond We know you were expecting us to choose death Narrator, Té & Harmony: [Together] But tonight, we choose life. This deus ex machina comes a few scenes after Clark’s version of the Mercutio-Tybalt double homicide. In that scene, after Té shoots and kills T-Y, the Tybalt character, for shooting and killing Gemini, the Mercutio character, he hides out in the nearby town of Pittsburg. Soon after, he learns that a pregnant Harmony has been beaten and hospitalized and that rumor has it that he’s responsible. He then determines that he can no longer stay away, declaring to the friend who delivered the news, “I’m not running no more. I didn’t do this—somebody lying on me/I’m tired of running. Whatever happens, happens. But I gotta go see/ my girl and my seed” (2.7: 95; my italics). Both families arm themselves after learning of his decision and converge on the hospital with every intention of continuing the tragic cycle of violence. This is where the tragedy ends, for Clark uses this point in the play to build up to the Nurse/Narrator’s interruption and the closing image of everyone laughing and dancing. The only problem is that this choice of life depends on forgetting that earlier scene of death, and specifically that Té is still presumably wanted for T-Y’s killing. Although Té’s “Whatever happens, happens” indicates a willingness to accept the consequences of his actions, nothing ultimately happens and, more disturbingly, there’s no sense that there will ever be a moral or judicial reckoning with the tragic loss of black life. Indeed, much like Ray Durem’s imitation of the white poets’ representation of a lynched black body as “an autumn leaf/hanging from a tree,” the black bodies left by T-Y and Gemini evaporate within the romanticizing, spoken-word flourish that ends the play. So, if there is any hope of answering my titular questions—“Who Shot Romeo? And, How Can We Stop the Bleeding?,” it will first require our courage as literature scholars and especially as literature teachers to be rude, unpleasant, and, yes, unpoetic enough to reject Shakespeare-as-poetry and to call out all those committed to perpetuating it. In that regard, it’s time for us to have an honest conversation about white people. Much like so much of today’s social justice rhetoric, with so many white people all-of-a-sudden and variously asserting that “Black Lives Matter,” another function of Shakespeare-as-poetry comparable to its evaporation of the black body is to hide the role of white people vis-à-vis black and brown oppression through what Teju Cole usefully describes as “The White-Savior Industrial Complex.” That complex, as Cole explains, “is not about justice.” It is about confirming white power and privilege through sentimental stories that always cast a “good” and benevolent white person as the messianic answer to black and brown suffering. Indeed, as Matthew Hughey also usefully explains, “these narratives help repair [especially in unsettled and racially charged times] what is truly the most dangerous myth of race—a tale of normal and natural white paternalism.” In that regard, the dazzling lyricism of Clark’s play works to render the “good” white people in control of it all—a white publisher, a white teacher, a white filmmaker, and a Latino poet with white friends—normal and natural to the point of invisible. Therefore, it is not just that the play’s neoliberal pedagogy of figurative denial is not about justice for black people; it is also as disturbingly for and about the power-confirming sentimental needs of white people and the white-savior industrial complex that continues to produce them. Film While those people are not racially marked in the play and its front matter and are therefore easily rendered normal and natural as such, Zeldes’s film, as a film, must engage in a more complex and repetitive process of showing and hiding them. As I began, this film is beautifully filmed and indeed centers its attention on the performative brilliance of Clark’s spoken word poetry. However, the story he co-narrates in between is a tired, unpoetic one of an unrepentant, drug dealing juvenile delinquent saved by a young white woman somehow deemed qualified enough to reach him and teacher him 11th grade English. As Clark tells the story of his relationship with Raynor, he unapologetically expresses his disdain for the charter-school college prep academy that brought them together along with anything having to do with justice for black people in urban America. Indeed, after confessing, “I don’t give a fuck about college,” he further unapologetically reveals that his primary interest in the creative writing program Raynor asked him to help her start is to use it to get rich through writing instead of his first love: drug dealing. In this regard, as a school-hating, money-loving young black man with the gift of gab, Clark is the perfect mouthpiece of or front man for the kind of neoliberal agenda focused on beautifully representing black suffering as an alternative to and distraction from the desperate need for intelligent solutions. And although Zeldes’s camera loves Clark, it also always makes sure to frame and thereby contain his image, his words, and his story with Raynor, the loving white teacher who saved him from the streets. Indeed, she’s always somewhere on the margins of a shot, silently reminding us that Clark and the program belong to her. And whenever she emerges, it is not to help Clark confront and work through something like the limiting effects of his anti-intellectual materialism; it is merely to express personal, sentimental concern for his physical safety or to console him for having lost another friend to gun violence. Therefore, at the end of the film, after their opening-night performance, it is not surprising that Clark sentimentally concludes, as he has been mis-educated to conclude, that, on one hand, you can’t stop gun violence, but on the other hand, “You just gotta have love.” Please forgive me, but in the interest of social justice for black people, I must rudely and unpoetically conclude, that’s bullshit.

Who Shot Romeo? And How Can We Stop the Bleeding | Watch the full talk

Presented by Eric L. De Barros at Education: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Eric L. De Barros critiques educative adaptations of Shakespeare plays that seek to create social change through art but instead are too reverential of Shakespeare, especially its poetic language. Such works are insufficiently focused on developing critical consciousness. De Barros provides as an example Romeo is Bleeding, a 2015 documentary about an after-school program that produces Te’s Harmony, a spoken word adaptation of Romeo and Juliet responding to gun violence in Richmond Virginia. While De Barros admires the dazzle and dexterity of the spoken word performances captured in the film, he is critical of how the documentary ignores the legacy of Black lyricism (jazz, hip hop, and more) in presenting spoken word as the newest and most powerful version of Black self-expression. De Barros cautions that Shakespeare’s words are treated as emblematic of poetry, because Shakespeare = poetry is an equation that obscures Black bodies and the violence white verse often does to them. De Barros further points to the white producers and teachers who surround the Black young people creating Te’s Harmony and considers this evidence of white savior mentality at work, focused on art as rescuing individuals rather than addressing systemic causes of suffering.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Syllabus
Ruben Espinosa

Critical theories and methods

This class investigates and gauges the value of critical theories and methods focused on race, racism, and racial justice. The aim of this course is to engage meaningfully with scholars, cultural productions, and criticism that draw on critical race studies within their artistic and scholarly work.

Course description

The application of various forms of cultural and critical theory to the study of literature has a long, varied, and robust history. In recent years, we have seen a revolution in literary criticism as critical race theory has become a dominant approach to understanding not only the works that we read, but also the world around us. This revolution puts questions of race and racial justice at the center of the subject. This class will investigate and gauge the value of critical theories and methods focused on race, racism, and racial justice. The aim of this course is to engage meaningfully with scholars, cultural productions, and criticism that draw on critical race studies within their artistic and scholarly work.

Learning outcomes

After you complete this course, you will: 1) have a better understanding of the main texts, authors, and critical field of study; 2) be able to apply techniques of critical analysis; 3) understand critical race studies approaches to literary and cultural studies.

Course readings

William Shakespeare, Othello

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Additional scholarly articles, essays, and chapters will be made available via PDF.  

Course requirements

Daily class participation

This is an upper division course, and you are expected to attend every class meeting. If an emergency forces you to miss class, discuss it with me upon your return. The success of the class depends on your presence and participation. Students are expected to read, and should be prepared to discuss, all assigned material. Please note that this is a reading intensive class.

Group led discussion

Early in the semester, students will work in groups to lead class discussion centered on a specific school of theory (Feminism, Marxism, New Historicism, Psychoanalysis, etc.). The group will present a short overview of the school of theory, explain its significance, and offer brief examples (2-3) of the way this theory can be applied to a literary text. The presentation/discussion should be roughly 20 minutes. I will circulate a sign-up sheet the first week of class.

Public facing essay

For this assignment, you will be asked to write a public facing essay that uses Othello or The Merchant of Venice as a vehicle to explore a contemporary social issue. Please take time to look at the short essays published in ACMRS’s online journal, The Sundial. The public facing works in that journal will give you a sense of what is possible and possibly inspire the approach you take for this assignment. Your essays should be 500-750 words in length and should be submitted via Canvas by the assigned date (see schedule below).

Final project

For your final project, you will present on a product from popular culture of your choice (YouTube video, music, visual art, poem, film, etc.) that adapts and/or appropriates Shakespeare’s work and that engages with the issue of race/racism (implicitly or explicitly). You should interpret your chosen product through the lens of one of the pieces of critical race theory/studies that you read over the semester and explain the value behind considering such a perspective. Presentations should be 10 minutes in length. In addition to the presentation, you will submit a 250-word reflection on why this product and interpretation is meaningful to you.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Essay
Kyle Grady

Navigating mixed-race identities in Shakespeare

Titus Andronicus is a play that demonstrates early modern English dexterity with racial constructs. This nuance is demonstrated in part through its representations of racial mixing and mixed-race identity.

Titus Andronicus is a play that demonstrates early modern English dexterity with racial constructs. This nuance is demonstrated in part through its representations of racial mixing and mixed-race identity. Engaging these representations in the classroom can introduce students to an early modern England that was more familiar with racial difference than is sometimes commonly understood. Doing so can also help students track how Shakespeare leveraged that familiarity to stage complex and competing ideas about racial difference.

The experiment of racial difference

A great moment to start with seems to confirm that racial mixing was unfamiliar to the Elizabethan English, at least initially. During the forest scene, Lavinia finds Aaron the Moor and Tamora the Goth alone. She already suspects their relationship and upon finding them tells Tamora, “’Tis thought you have a goodly gift in horning / And to be doubted that your Moor and you, / Are singled forth to try experiments.”

The word “experiments” is an unusual way to describe a relationship, interracial or otherwise. It suggests that Aaron and Tamora are engaged in something new and untested. The phrase “singled forth” redoubles this characterization, immediately describing the pair’s deviation from the rest of the group in the scene, but also characterizing their relationship as singular.

I encourage students to think of this characterization as derived from a more multifarious position—not one fully representative of early modern English beliefs. In other words, I ask students to think of this framing in terms of the complexity generally attributed to Shakespeare’s work. Aaron and Tamora’s relationship is, of course, not even singular in the world of the play. When the pair’s child is born with darker skin, indicating that Aaron, rather than Saturninus, is the father, Aaron suggests swapping the child for another mixed-race infant. This child, born to his countryman Muliteus, is, he says, “fair” as Tamora’s sons, Chiron and Demetrius. Considering Lavinia’s ascriptions alongside this revelation can help students trace the play’s various discourses concerning mixed race identity.

Racial mixing is ostensibly being mobilized through Aaron’s revelation (the stealing of another child to protect himself) to propose a frightening possibility for an early modern England that frequently trafficked in and furthered racist ideas. But the moment is also undergirded by a matter-of-fact sense of the somatic possibilities of both inter- and intraracial procreation. Aaron demonstrates as much when overheard telling his child “where the bull and cow are both milk-white / They never do beget a coal-black calf,” a statement offered almost axiomatically as he imagines the possibilities had his child been born with Tamora’s “look.” Such casual observations appear drawn from contexts in which mixed-race identity was treated as neither experimental nor as profoundly consequential.

Perceptions of mixed-race identities from Shakespeare to now

Given that Titus is one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, examining its engagement with mixedness helps contextualize the topic’s appearance throughout the playwright’s dramatic work. Characters staged as late in Shakespeare’s career as Caliban might be placed into productive conversation with Titus’s approach to the topic. Drawing these types of connections invites students to see mixedness as having a more sustained role in the conceptual lexicon of early modern drama. Considering this lineage also includes interrogating lacunae in overt representations of mixed-race identity. Such gaps are especially notable given Titus’s proclivity for shunting mixedness into the foreground, including during the tragedy’s final scene, during which Marcus Andronicus asks those gathered to “behold” Aaron and Tamora’s child.  

When I teach Titus, I ask students to reflect through journaling exercises on how and where they see mixed race identity represented in the world around them. Students generally have a range of responses to this prompt, which not only brings into focus the various and inconsistent ways that race signals and operates today, but also offers a more immediate parallel to Titus’s own multifarious approach.

Drawing such connections can encourage students to look to the past as a way to better understand their present. It can also help students consider mixed-race identity—often treated as a late 20th- and early 21st-century formation—as having a much longer history than its inconsistent recognition and representation might otherwise suggest.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Syllabus
Leslie Alexander

From slavery to mass incarceration

This course examines the legacies and afterlives of slavery in mass incarceration and modern-day policing.

Course Description  

This course examines the legacies and afterlives of slavery in mass incarceration and modern-day policing. In recent years, there has been growing public awareness that mass incarceration has its roots in slavery and that racial bias infects all aspects of our criminal injustice system. However, our nation has yet to reckon with the reality that America’s systems of policing and mass criminalization have histories rooted in white fear—not merely of Black people, or even Black resistance, but of the very notion of Black freedom. Therefore, this course examines how, from the founding of the nation, Black people’s desire for freedom led fearful whites to establish a network of laws, policies and social practices that laid a durable foundation for systems of racial and social control that continue to exist in modified forms today. Creating a precedent for state policing and social control that would haunt future generations of Black people in America, state and federal authorities implemented a complex web of legal codes, patrols, and state militias that monitored and governed Black people’s lives in sickening detail, ensuring that whites were empowered to use all means—legal and extralegal—to control Black lives. This course helps us to understand how and why these systems emerged, and why policing has become such a problem in American society that it infiltrates and undermines nearly every Black family and community across the nation, even in the 21st century.  

Course Synopsis

This course begins by examining policing and incarceration in the contemporary moment. We will discuss the recent murders of Black people by police, including the tragic deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. And we will explore the rise and structure of the modern police state in the United States, particularly the role of mass incarceration in Black communities.  

Then, in an effort to locate the origins of policing in Black communities, we will analyze the historical evolution of surveillance and policing. As this course reveals, government policing of Black people in mainland North America began almost concurrently with the introduction of slavery itself. Within two decades after Africans landed in Virginia in 1619, colonial lawmakers began drafting legal codes defining slavery and limiting enslaved Africans’ rights. By the late 17th century, slave laws became increasingly draconian, particularly as panic about Black rebellion intensified. White colonists lived in deep fear of their enslaved human property—a fear that proliferated throughout all thirteen colonies, and resulted in laws granting white people “absolute power and authority” over Black people. In the years that followed, the Haitian Revolution and the subsequent rebellions it inspired prompted widespread anxiety among whites in the United States and caused white governmental authorities to enact increasingly despotic laws, targeting men, women, and children.  

Even after slavery’s legal demise, local, state, and federal authorities continued to monitor and police Black communities. Most southern states passed Black Codes, which scrutinized and governed Black people’s movements and empowered the police and the militia to monitor and punish them for any and all violations. As during enslavement, Black women were especially subject to physical and sexual violence at the hands of police. In subsequent decades, state and federal authorities persisted in their mission to monitor and sabotage Black liberatory leaders and organizations. Most famously, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s notorious counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) targeted Dr. Martin Luther Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and others, seeking to “prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify” the Black community. And by the late 20th century, the devastating loophole in the 13Amendment, which banned slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” gave rise to the afterlives of slavery: racial profiling, mass incarceration, and modern-day surveillance and policing. Therefore, this course concludes with a detailed examination of contemporary policing, surveillance, and mass incarceration.  

Course content / trigger warning

Given this course’s focus on violence—physical, psychological, and sexual—there may be times that the course content could be disturbing, even traumatizing for some students. If you suspect that specific material is likely to be emotionally challenging for you, I am available to discuss any concerns you may have before the subject comes up in class. Even so, I am aware that it’s not always possible to predict one’s emotional reactions, so if you ever wish to discuss your personal responses to course material with the class, or with me individually afterwards, I welcome such discussions as an appropriate part of our classwork.

In addition, if you ever feel the need to step away during a class discussion, you may always do so without academic penalty. You will, however, be responsible for any material you miss. If you need to leave the room for a significant time, please obtain notes from another student or see me individually to discuss the situation.

Classroom philosophy  

Your instructor holds the perspective that all classes are essentially intercultural encounters—among individuals in the class, between the readers and any given author, and among the authors, the students, and the professor. We are all learning how to effectively learn from one another. Such a classroom requires particular capacities and commitments on our part. It also requires mutual effort in helping each other understand the course material and the differing interpretative positions we may bring to a more complex understanding of the material. While each of us seeks to advance our own knowledge, we are also a community in which we are each responsible to help the other members of the community learn effectively.

In an effort to enhance our learning experience, we expect that students and instructors will commit to do the following:  

  • Acquire and utilize intellectual skills and capacities that will enable us to work effectively with the complexities of the course material.
  • Develop increased self-knowledge and knowledge of others.
  • Understand how the material we are studying relates to our own previous learning, backgrounds, and experiences, and how we can use and apply our new knowledge effectively.
  • Develop the ability to critique material in a mature manner using our own previous learning and experiences as part of the critique when appropriate.
  • Develop the communication skills that facilitate our learning and our ability to listen, read, reflect, and study to understand.
  • Remain engaged and in communication even when the course material or discussion is confusing or upsetting, by recognizing that understanding does not imply agreement.
  • Respect everyone’s ideas and values even when we disagree.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this course, students will be able to: 

  1. Analyze and interpret primary source materials.
  1. Speak and write critically about secondary historical sources by examining diverse interpretations of past events and ideas in their historical contexts.
  1. Understand and analyze the origins and development of policing and mass incarceration in Black communities.

Example Early Paper Assignment (referred back to at the end)

The first two weeks of this term will be dedicated to exploring contemporary policing in Black communities. Students will submit a short, “think piece” reflecting on the following questions: Based on what we have discussed in class so far, what are your thoughts about contemporary policing? In what ways is policing a “problem” in Black communities and what factors, policies, and laws have created this problem? Why might it be important to consider history and America’s racial past as key factors in understanding how Black people are monitored and policed in the US?  

Example Primary Source Analysis

Throughout the term, we will read several primary sources, which are documents or images that were created during the historical time period we are studying. This assignment allows students to practice analyzing primary source materials and using them to interpret the nature of policing in Black communities. Students should select a primary source and submit a short, written analysis based on the course material.  

Papers should be approximately 3-5 pages and should consider the following:

  1. When was the source created and why? Was it created in response to a particular event or series of events?
  1. What does the source reveal about the nature of policing and surveillance in Black communities during the era in which it was created?  
  1. What particular fears does it reveal among whites?  
  1. What repercussions would it have created for the Black community?  

Example Final Reflection Paper  

Students will submit a paper reflecting on the following questions: after reviewing your first reflection paper, how has your thinking about policing in Black communities evolved during this semester? How have our readings and discussions about the historical development of policing changed or enriched your understanding of modern-day policing, surveillance, and mass incarceration? Have any of your original ideas radically changed? If so, why? What evidence from the course would you use to support or refute your original thinking?  

Course readings

The following books are required for the course

Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017).

Excerpts from the following books are required reading

  • Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).
  • R. J. M. Blackett, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
  • Ward Churchill, The Cointelpro Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (New York: South End Press, 2001).
  • Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004).
  • Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
  • Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage, 2011).
  • Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, [2010] 2019).

Other required readings:  

18th Century
History
Black Atlantic
Video
Cord J. Whitaker

Blackness as metaphor

The history of racial construction is long and non-linear. Unpacking Blackness within medieval epics, and examining how Black characters are treated in these stories allow us to see how medieval Europe used Blackness as a rhetorical tool.

The Middle Ages are really helpful for understanding why and how we make meaning out of race, because the Middle Ages show you the meaning being made. The Middle Ages offer the possibility that when we speak in metaphors, the way we interpret that metaphor has everything to do with just what we want to do with it at the time. There's a 14th century story, a romance story, an adventure, that has everything to do with the crusades, called The King of Tars, and it's a great example of how we make meaning out of race. It's the story of a beautiful white Christian princess who has to marry a black Muslim sultan. Now, royal marriages are always about producing an heir, so she tries, and instead all they get is an undifferentiated lump of flesh. Those of us who read this story a lot call it the Lump Child. The Sultan tries to get his gods to turn this child into a baby. And medieval Christians often conflated Islam and Paganism (so they got that wrong quite a lot). But his pantheon of Gods can't do it. And then her Christian God does, and it becomes a beautiful little baby. And so then the Sultan agrees to convert to Christianity, and when he does, what the text describes is quite a miracle. In the moment before he says he believes in the Christian God, his skin turns blindingly white. This tells us a lot about blackness as meaning in Middle Ages. On that Sultan, it (blackness) seems to mean spiritual depravity. It seems to mean sin and evil. After all, he's forced, through war, this beautiful princess to marry him. But on the other hand, this 14th century story shows us something else. After the Sultan converts, the story doesn't just end. After the Sultan converts and becomes blindingly white, he continues to wage war for a different side, but using a lot of the same tactics. He does not seem to have changed, fundamentally. The King of Tars leaves us with the question: well, if his blackness meant spiritual depravity, if his blackness meant evil... Now, now that he's converted and turned white, does his Christianity, does his whiteness, mean the same thing?

Many medieval epics regale their audiences with the phenomenon of skin color change, often in the context of religious conversion. The metaphor of Blackness at play in these epics offers a way to understand how phenotypic traits were used as markers of good or evil in the literature and culture of medieval Europe. The long history of racial construction has its roots in how Blackness is leveraged as a metaphor over hundreds of years.

Medieval
Literature
Religion
Poetry
Video
Ruben Espinosa

Hospitality in The Winter’s Tale

If we allow Shakespeare to remain inaccessible or inhospitable, then we reinforce the idea that he is white property. What can our students, especially our students of color, bring to a play like The Winter’s Tale?  

Shakespeare is often seen as a stand in for whiteness. Crossing a border into the realm of Shakespeare, especially for people of color, is seen as stepping into a white space – one where not all students feel like they belong. It’s important to think about entry points to address this feeling of unbelonging when teaching Shakespeare. If we allow Shakespeare to remain inaccessible or inhospitable, then we reinforce the idea that he is white property. The Winter’s Tale is a play that is very, very white – and this is a reason why I find it to have so much potential for generative discussions in our present moment. Perhaps best known for the strangest of stage directions – “Exit, pursued by a bear” – The Winter’s Tale details how Leontes, the king of Sicilia, allows his jealousy to turn into tyranny. This obsession results in the death of his young son, Mamillius, the banishment of his daughter, Perdita, and the perceived death of his wife, Hermione (who is not actually dead but just pretends to be a statue for the better part of the play). Others get unfriended, banished, and mauled by bears in the process. It’s a rich, strange play. But what does it have to do with a Chicano like me? That, it seems, is the wrong question. The question should be, what can a Chicano like me bring to a play like The Winter’s Tale? The entry point is hospitality. That issue dominates the opening of the play, as two men – the Bohemian Archidamus and the Sicilian Camillo – discuss the great hospitality that Sicilia has shown to its Bohemian guests. But what we see unfold in that opening act is far from a hospitable society. Leontes falls deeper and deeper into jealousy and ultimately wants to poison his guest, Polixenes. There is a lot to unpack in that opening act – misogyny, the elevation of whiteness, the fear of tainted bloodlines, and the demonization of strangers. But in my teaching, I make it a point to slow down when arriving at the comedic turn of this tragicomedy – which takes place sixteen years after the opening act. When the second half opens, the sixteen-year-old Perdita thinks herself to be not of royal lineage, but instead the daughter of a shepherd. She hosts a feast that includes her love interest, Florizel, son of Polixenes, who also attends the feast in disguise, so that the commoners and his own son do not recognize him. At this feast, Perdita has a conversation with Polixenes in disguise about the human manipulation of nature. Polixenes calls Perdita “A fair one” who adorns that feast with “flowers of winter.” The conversation seems innocuous enough, because Perdita as hostess is welcoming her guest and engaging him in conversation. Polixenes compliments her on her beauty and winter flowers, she explains that she does not grow ‘streaked gillyvors,’ or gillyflowers, and identifies these cross-bred flowers as ‘Nature’s bastards.’ It’s kind of boring, but this perspective opens the door to something less innocuous. The scene draws attention to perceptions of what is deemed natural, authentic, different, and counterfeit through the object of the flower. It is worth noting that the adjective employed to describe Perdita’s beauty in this moment is ‘fair’ – as in beautiful and white. The scene, and the play even, works to elevate whiteness, and we ought to consider how this lands for students of color. This racialized design makes it inhospitable to some audiences. I like to push a bit more forcefully on this issue of fairness because it has strong bearing on Polixenes’ response to Perdita regarding crossbreeding. In the early modern imagination, Perdita’s fairness, or whiteness, is at odds with her low social standing as a shepherdess but most certainly bolsters belief in the strength of her royal bloodline. It is deemed important in the play to emphasize her whiteness, then. In fact, later in the same scene, Florizel says to Perdita, ‘I take thy hand, this hand / As soft as dove’s down and as white as it is, / Or Ethiopian’s tooth, or the fanned snow’ (4.4.367-69). As we can see, her whiteness is akin to a dove, snow, and a Black African’s tooth. This, we know, is not the first time Shakespeare employs a reference to a Black Ethiopian to juxtapose against white beauty. In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo describes Juliet’s beauty by saying, ‘It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night / As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear, / Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear. / So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows’ (1.5.44-7). Beauty is equated to whiteness and set against the perceived ugliness of the black skin of Africans. It is important that we, and our students, understand that The Winter’s Tale, like Romeo and Juliet, is trafficking in racist language that elevates whiteness. What follows in that scene is Polixenes’ surprising defense of crossbreeding and hybridity. He says to Perdita: You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race. (4.4.89-95) Polixenes finds value in the mixing of different breeds of flowers, believing the ‘gentler’ sort (evoking the social status of the gentry) can improve those of ‘baser kind.’ If read as a commentary on individuals and with racialized language in mind, the racism is unnerving. As Arthur Little points out, “In early modern England . . . ‘White’, whether phenomenologically, sartorially, politically, religiously, etc., most often carried with it a sense of distinction and superiority.” In The Winter’s Tale, we find that characters are invested in preserving and venerating the social hierarchies that define their lived experiences—even when those hierarchies work against their best interests. What unfolds in the play is a man leading a nation into authoritarian rule. It is against the backdrop of this authoritarian rule that I want to consider a key moment of radical hospitality within The Winter’s Tale. As the sea roars during a storm and a bear feasts on Antigonus on the imagined Bohemian coast, a humble Shepherd finds the newborn baby Perdita. He says to his son, ‘But look thee here, boy. Now bless thyself; thou met’st with things dying, I with things newborn’ (3.3.126-27). Without reservation, the Shepherd helps that vulnerable child. He doesn’t know who she is, and doesn’t know from where she came, but he intends to give her refuge. This is as close to true hospitality as we get in this play. The image of a baby on the seacoast evokes, for me, the image of the young Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdy in 2015. Lifeless, face down on the sandy shore of Turkey, this three-year old child was one of nearly half a million Syrian refugees seeking aid as they escaped the brutality of war. Unlike Perdita, most of these refugees have encountered strategic measures – at the hands of our own U.S. government – to prevent them from finding refuge. It is a heart-breaking image, but one that forces us to confront the awful effects of inhospitable nations like our own where kids are separated from their families and kept in camps. I think it is important for our students to see within the play how small the promise of hospitality is when juxtaposed against the entities that get to define who is worthy of refuge and life and who is not.

Shakespeare is often seen as a stand in for whiteness. Crossing a border into the realm of Shakespeare, especially for people of color, is seen as stepping into a white space—one where not all students feel like they belong. It’s important to think about entry points to address this feeling of unbelonging when teaching Shakespeare. If we allow Shakespeare to remain inaccessible or inhospitable, then we reinforce the idea that he is white property.  

The Winter’s Tale is a play that is very, very white—and this is a reason why I find it to have so much potential for generative discussions in our present moment. It’s a rich, strange play. But what does it have to do with race? That, it seems, is the wrong question. The question should be, what can our students, especially our students of color, bring to a play like The Winter’s Tale?  

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Essay
Adam Miyashiro

Contextualizing The Epic of Sunjata

The Epic of Sunjata is a living, evolving text, still performed by griots and griottes. Taught alongside more traditional European epics, The Sunjata offers students a wider lens with which to look at the medieval world.

Teaching the epic of Sunjata Keita, also known as the Sunjata or the Sundiata, opens up all kinds of avenues to teaching against the white supremacist myths that are still prevalent in the American historical imagination.  

The Epic of Sunjata is a living, evolving text, still performed by griots and griottes, with traditional griot instruments such as the kora and the 22-key balafon. Typically, the griot performance of the poem is done in parts or episodes, and is almost never performed in its entirety at once. Because the poem was never concretized into an early textual form after centuries of oral composition, the Sunjata is a prime example of the complexity of interdisciplinary textual performance—one that engages perspectives within literature, history, musicology, and the performing arts.  

I like to teach this text, including video excerpts of performances, alongside the more traditionally taught European epics because it offers my students a wider lens with which to look at the medieval world. Not only does the Sunjata ask students to see a text as merely one point of a story’s history, but it allows students to begin an exploration of the global medieval, one that decenters Europe. The conversation across these texts reveals a world that was far more vast and complex than most students have ever been taught.  

Who is Sunjata Keita?

Sunjata Keita lived between ca. 1217-1255 CE, and was the founder of the Keita dynasty of the Mali Empire. He first came to be known outside of the Mande-speaking world in 1960 through the Guinean historian and playwright Djibril Tamsir Niane. He translated and published the story that was told to him by the Djeli (or griot) Mamoudou Kouyate, who performed the epic tale in music. Known by Manding names such as “djeli/jail,” or in Wolof “gewel,” the griot/griotte was a storyteller, musician, historian, poet, and royal advisor in Mali and throughout West Africa. The story of Sunjata, his ancestry, his childhood, his exile, and his war against Sumanguru, are now all parts of the official national epic in Mali, Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea.  

The Empire of Mali that Sunjata Keita founded became one of the wealthiest, most erudite, and intellectually advanced cultures in the hemisphere. The massive collection of Arabic manuscripts in Timbuktu, in northern Mali, began to be copied and compiled during and after the reign of Sunjata Keita in the 13th century. West African literacy, in Arabic, Mande languages, and other West African languages like Wolof, Keren, and Tuareg, was robust in the premodern period and the manuscripts covered a wide variety of disciplines, including the human and physical sciences, philosophy, and Islamic jurisprudence.  

Sunjata’s education

There is no single authoritative source for this story, and many variations exist, numbering close to 40 different episodes. The story of Sunjata has influences from the Quran and other Arabic stories that became part of the fabric of its various iterations over the centuries. It weaves together external influences such as Islam and the indigenous beliefs and customs of the Mande peoples. For example, in the stories of Alexander the Great there is a moment in which we can see Sunjata’s education pulling from a variety of influences:

Sogolon Djata learnt to distinguish between the animals; he knew why the buffalo was his mother’s wraith and also why the lion was the protector of his father’s family. He also listened to the kings which Balla Fasséké [Sundiata’s griot] told him; enraptured by the story of Alexander the Great, the mighty king of gold and silver, whose sun shone over quite half the world.


Here Sogolon Djata (Sunjata) learns about his parents’ spiritual ancestry, with the Mandingo belief in wraiths or doubles, combined with teaching from his griot about kings and especially Alexander the Great.  

In his version, Djibril Tamsir Niane, the Guinean historian and playwright, refers to Alexander by the Mandingo name “Djoulou Kara Naini,” a form of the Arabic “Dhu’l Qarnayn.” Niane believed that many of the songs and stories of Balla Fasséké featured in his version of the Sunjata originated from the reign of Mansa Musa (1307-1332 CE) saying, “at that time, the griots knew general history much better, at least through Arabic writings and especially the Koran.”  

Ancestors, descendants, and the preservation of knowledge

The power of ancestors and descendants is especially important in the story of Sunjata, preserving relations between the various political groups that would come under the Keita rule in Mali. During Sunjata’s rise to prominence, his griot, Balla Fasséké, recounts to him his genealogy and extols the importance of griots in preserving knowledge:

I have told you what future generations will learn about your ancestors, but what will we be able to relate to our sons so that your memory will stay alive, what will we have to teach our sons about you? What unprecedented exploits, what unheard-of feats? By what distinguished actions will our sons be brought to regret not having lived in the time of Sundiata?

Griots are men of the spoken word, and by the spoken word we give life to the gestures of kings (63).

The Mande Charter: hundreds of years ahead of Europe

After the defeat of Soumaoro, the King of Sosso, which is his crowning military achievement and one that begins the dynasty of Keita in Mali, Sunjata gifts to his descendants and the rest of humanity his most important legacy: that of equal rights between all people, declared at Kouroukan Fougan.

Composed of smaller Mandinka kingdoms, Sunjata’s coalition would form the basis of the Mali Empire, codified in the so-called “Mande Charter,” the official constitution created by an assembly of nobles to establish the new empire in Mali.  

Nick Nesbitt characterizes the Mande Charter of 1222 CE as “the invention of an uncompromising, principled, universal concept of social equality, of justice as universal human dignity [. . .] that the logics of entitlement, of class, of property, of authority, of any logic that counts any single human being as less or more than one single being, is not right and is not inevitable.” The Mande Charter predates by hundreds of years all declarations of human rights in European or western modernity.

It is important to bring my students to this moment to show them what it looks like to be confronted with the white supremacist myths we are often taught in western educational settings. The Epic of Sunjata opens a conversation about the tunnel-visioned nature Eurocentrism and allows students to begin seeing a wider world in which Africa’s cultures, histories, and art are not sidelined.

Medieval
Literature
Poetry
Transnational studies
RaceB4Race Highlight
Debapriya Sarkar

Figurative speech and racecraft

Debapriya Sarkar explores the connections between English-language figurative speech and racecraft through an examination of George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (c. 1589) and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.

My talk is titled, "The Arts of English Poesie: Making Worlds and Making Race." At the core of The Art of English Poesie, published in 1589, lies a constellation of English figures of speech that traffic in logics of mobility and fixity, proximity and distance. Describing the work and figures here, George Putnam notes that dissimulation of language occurs when speech is wrested from its own natural signification. Such wresting of signification refers to the movement that constitutes one of figuration's key engines of meaning making. Metaphor, for instance, is the wresting of a single word from its own right signification to another of some affinity or convenience. While metalepsis is used, Putnam tells us, when “we had rather fetch a word a great way off than to use another, nearer hand." Indeed, Putnam's English names for classical figures, not only transport for metaphor or farfetched for metalepsis, but also trespasser, slow return, over-reacher, marching figure, advancer, straggler, all calibrate different kinds of mobility. The tensions between such forms of mobility, and between mobility and fixity, that English theories of figuration delineate and activate are the subject of my talk today. Participating in the 16th century English project of constructing a classically sanctioned vernacular eloquence, Putnam adapts theories of figuration from classical rhetoric. These theories rely on ideas of travel from the familiar to the strange. Tropes and figures of speech were called deviations of language that would transport words from their natural signification, thereby alienating them from their familiar usage. Putnam expresses this idea at one point by stating, "figurative speech is a novelty of language evidently (and yet not absurdly) estranged from the ordinary habit and manner of our daily talk and writing." So given that rhetoric's theory of discourse relies upon distinctions between the familiar and the strange, it isn't unsurprising that in both classical and early modern rhetoric, the form of a figure and the ability of that form to make meaning are theorized through geographical distance and cultural difference. Scholars including Ian Smith, Jenny C. Mann, and Catherine Nicholson have variously explored how ideas about the domestic and the foreign secure rhetoric’s theory of discourse. Today I want to examine how such ideas of cultural and geographic distance, constituting figures of speech, calibrate the formal features of poetics. Early modern English poetics, I propose, is predicated on figuration's "wresting of signification" to create racialized structures of difference. And I attend today in particular to the ways in which Putnam's farfetched figure, metalepsis, mobilizes a constructed system of cultural and formal difference. And then I'm going to track how this figure naturalizes such differences via the body of Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra. So, makers of poesie, not only Shakespeare, but Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Margaret Cavendish, and John Milton built fictional worlds that were modeled, as we know, on discourses embedded in classical text, travel writing, cartographic material, and chronicles of history. But such worlds are also constructed according to the geographical and cultural logics of mobility and fixity, proximity and distance that were staged in the pages of the rhetorical, grammatical, and poetic manuals of the period. And I argue that, in order to uncover the embarkations of race and poetics, we must center the figures of speech that populated the rhetorical manuals circulating in England in the 16th century. The figures of speech that, in Colleen Rosenfeld's words, were the constitutive engines of poetry's imaginative worlds. Rhetoric, as we know, is central to the grammar school education, as Ian Smith, Urvashi Chakravarty, Brandi Adams, (I'm looking for the people in the room) have shown, ideologies of humanist education and its grammar school curriculum, with its promise of social mobility, were vital to early modern race-making. Given rhetoric's centrality to this curriculum, it would follow that it is this art of the trivium that provided the technical apparatus for racecraft to makers of poesie. In using the word racecraft, I draw on Karen A. Fields and Barbara J. Fields' work, but especially on their emphasis that racecraft originates in human action and imagination and involves a busy repertoire of strange maneuvering to create systems of classification. Drawing on this work, I propose that rhetoric offered the technical apparatus of racecraft to makers of poesie. From Kim F. Hall's study of the originary language of racial difference in English culture, attention to language has been central to pre-modern critical race studies. And Ian Smith's work in particular establishes that race is properly situated within rhetoric. I want to triangulate such study of race and rhetoric via poetics by turning to these figures of speech. And today I want to attempt to practice the kind of close reading that Patricia Parker advocates, one that eschews a formalism that would separate the language of early modern texts from the social, racial, religious, and political. My touchstone for exploring figuration, as is probably obvious, is Putnam's Art. The title of my own talk plays with the title of Putnam's treatise on poetics and rhetoric, because The Art has as much to do with our own disciplinary formations as early modern ones. Unsurprisingly, Putnam’s treatise is vital to scholarship on poetics and rhetoric, but The Art was also the exemplary text for new historicism, which read its discussions of form, decorum, ornament, and proportion as the source of social and political purchase and read its figures of speech as strategies of social mobility in Elizabethan courtly culture. Given the looming shadow of new historicism on early modern literary studies, subsequent approaches that read aesthetic and literary form to history, culture, and politics (and here I'm thinking of movements such as historical formalism, historical poetics, neoformalism, all of these subfields) are haunted by the specter of insights gleaned from Putnam's Art. Yet in new historicism's focus on mobility, perhaps most evident in its signature language of self-fashioning, mobility occludes attendant categories of immobility and immutability, which as Patricia Akhimie's work on the ideology of cultivation reveals, became tools of racialization. So, I return today to The Art to examine race as a missing dimension rather than a supplement to be belatedly added in studies of poetics and form, given that The Art set the terms of critical conversations on poetics, culture, and politics—conversations that actively elided discussions of race. By returning to this text, I'm also urging us to reflect upon the political constitution of our own formalisms, and upon the ethics of our methodological commitments. Such reflections might engender other reckonings, too. If race was always there in figuration, rather than a supplement to be provided by new critical narratives, how must we revise critical commonplaces about rhetoric and poetics in the period? To recover the racecraft of rhetoric as a first step, then, I address what the focus on formal and social mobility in The Art has rendered invisible: how figuration's activation of mobility and fixity, proximity and distance, ontologically fix certain people through appeals to notions of geographical and cultural difference. As I've also already mentioned, I turn to Putnam's figure of the farfetched, or metalepsis, because, as scholars note, it takes us to the heart of the humanist concern with the nature of language. Metalepsis, Putnam tells us, is used when "we had rather fetch a word a great way off than use one nearer hand to express the matter as well as plainer. In this manner of speech we use it: leaping over the heads of a great many words, we take one that is furthest off to utter our matter." Described as the figure of figurality, the essence of rhetoric, metalepsis is a trope of a trope—unlike something like metaphor, which is a trope of a word. Take this commonly used example to explain metalepsis: the driver has a lead foot, which means that she drives fast. But here we have a hidden series of associations that we are using. Lead is heavy. A heavy foot presses the accelerator to the floor. The car drives first, and metalepsis is kind of hiding all of these associations in this phrase. Unlike tropes like metaphor and metonymy, which refer to a word by means of another close to it, or “nearer hand” in Putnam's words, metalepsis refers to an entity by means of something remotely related or a great way off. Its ideological power lies in its tropological absence. It yokes together two disparate worlds, invisibly working its rhetorical effects. In making connections invisible, metalepsis hides itself, and makes the extremely hard labor of troping tropes seem natural. If, as scholars note, the interest in metalepsis lies indeed in what it leaves out, it seems fitting to turn to this figure to grapple with the other missing entity haunting early modern poetics and rhetoric: race. In Antony and Cleopatra, I argue that metalepsis disguises the historic and symbolic constructions of race, to use Stuart Hall's words, as part of what nature is. And I want to turn in particular to one rhetorical construction today, the numerous instances where Cleopatra is addressed as Egypt, not by her name or her title. I'll return to some of these quotes later. I propose that the figure of Putnam's "farfetched leaps over the head of a great many words" works to naturalize the link between two words, Cleopatra and Egypt, that are actually a great way off rather than nearer to each other. The Egypt of Shakespeare's imaginary traffics in an inherited constellation of orientalist ideas about Africa and Asia, and Ambereen Dadabhoy’s recent study of Antony and Cleopatra makes newly apparent how the formal, the theatrical, and the geographical are inextricable in this work. Egypt is a political geography, distinct from Rome, and a natural geography with overflowing rivers and venomous snakes. Renaming Cleopatra Egypt binds her multifaceted presence to the place, such that she becomes Egypt. In an early episode in the play, Alexas states, for instance, "the firm Roman to great Egypt sends / This treasure of an oyster." Alexas's words here use ontological distinction to accentuate political contrast. Anthony is Roman, Cleopatra is Egypt; he is human, she is placed. This designation is especially charged when Cleopatra bows before the victorious Caesar at the play's final act. He states, " Arise, you shall not kneel. I pray you rise; rise, Egypt." The play, as we know, uses many descriptions of queenship to capture what Imtiaz Habib identifies as Cleopatra's unpredictable self. She is wrangling queen, enchanting queen, precious queen, dear queen, sweet queen, to offer just a few examples. Caesar's words arrest this multiplicity. Here he mobilizes metalepsis, or the farfetched, the figure that connects tropes to one another. When Cleopatra is called Egypt, at least two figures are at work. First, we have metonymy, where a thing is referred to by something close to it, as in, when I say I study Margaret Cavendish, rather than saying, I study the poems of Margaret Cavendish. Next, we have antonomasia, which is a substitution of a governing or essential characteristic for a proper name, as in, when we call Elizabeth the first the Virgin Queen. In Antony and Cleopatra, such metonymic and antonomastic substitutions make Egypt the “farfetched” that figures both Cleopatra's royalty and her personhood. Egypt is first a substitution for her royalty. She is queen of Egypt, called Egypt. And Egypt also figures the essential or governing characteristics of her unpredictable personhood, such as wrangling or enchanting or some of the other words I showed you. The repression of such associations is a powerful act, and metalepsis's invisibility naturalizes Cleopatra's body as racialized, as alien. It is a commonplace that colonialist and imperialist discourse ascribes feminine characteristics to conquered land. What I'm proposing today is that this commonplace identification of women and alien territory is produced by racial rhetorical transport, such that Cleopatra is made into alien territory through rhetorical strategies that relocate ontological otherness to the corporeal form of the Egyptian queen. Metalepsis is the instrument of imprinting difference, and one particularly harmful in racializing women, because it makes the dehumanizing of raced and gendered bodies seem natural. By making Egypt the geographical farfetched that makes legible Cleopatra's absolute difference, the figure of the farfetched formalizes linguistic distance as geographical and racial difference. This formalization depends on the Roman characters' understanding of Egypt itself as unpredictable, as enchanting, as decadent: words that we just saw used with Cleopatra. Joyce Green MacDonald reminds us that our understanding of the raced bodies in the play is impacted by the Roman perception of characters. I build on this to propose that the rhetorical transport of Cleopatra into Egypt activates the Roman perceptions of Egypt's non-human world as uncontrollable and threatening in its otherness. Egypt's natural world is farfetched. The Nile most clearly exemplifies this alien-ness, as travelers' tales conflated, in Kim F. Hall's words, the geographical fact of inundation with the sense of darker-skinned Africans as people who resist boundaries and rule. Both the promise and the threat of the river's boundlessness are apparent when Antony notes, "the higher Nilus swells / The more it promises; as it ebbs, the seedsmen / Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain, and shortly comes to harvest." The Nile's swelling and ebbing prophesy harvest, signaling its role as a source of sustenance for human life in the region. Within Antony's description, however, lurks a warning: the Nile controls human survival, curbing their ability to determine the conditions of their own lives. It is so powerful it can maintain or destroy the lives of those who depend on its resources. It might seem especially threatening when Cleopatra's wrathful directive to "Melt Egypt into Nile, and kindly creatures / Turn all to serpents!" conjures the image of a destructive being more powerful than a Nile, a being that can alter even this water scape. Cleopatra's audacious declaration mirrors the capacity to remake the world, and she seems to activate the destructive forces of nature. You might consider here a series of hidden metaleptic relations where Cleopatra mimics the Nile and then the Nile represents Egypt's natural forces, so there are various connections happening here too. For the Romans, constraining the mercurial queen of Egypt is inseparable from their desires to control its overflowing waterscapes. Curbing her might just signal that they can control the place itself. The Nile is also a shorthand for the strange and dangerous animal life it harbors: flies, gnats, butterflies, crocodiles, and asps, creatures that participate in creating an Egypt that teems with beings that are destructive, wild, or simply irrelevant to the project of empire building. Lepidus marks such alterity when he tells Antony, "Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun; so is your crocodile.” The repetition of ‘your’ locates both serpent and crocodile in Egypt, or perhaps more accurately not in and of Rome. Ontological difference is a function of physical distance. Thus, by calling Cleopatra his serpent of old Nile, Antony transports onto her the destructive qualities of the asp, which is "a mortal wretch and venomous fool" that activates the destruction at the end of the play. Here Antony's words dehumanize Cleopatra into a life form that is tethered to the geographies of Egypt, and that is essentially a tool of annihilation in his mind. And here you might think of another series of metaleptic relations, where the animals stand in for the Nile and Egypt and so forth and so on. In a play where Cleopatra is so polyvalent that she beggars all description, the most pernicious elements to constrain her are quite mundane: Egypt's waterscapes and animal life. This we might say is how metalepsis makes race, as it makes fictional worlds, by making the farfetched seem commonplace. In his discussion of race as a discursive concept, Stuart Hall terms it a floating signifier, where signifiers "refer to the systems and concepts of the classification of a culture to its practices of meaning making. It is only when differences have been organized within language, within discourse, within systems of meaning, that the differences can be said to acquire meaning and become a factor in human culture.” Arguably rhetoric, whereby one learned to read, write, act, and think, is the system of classification that defines the culture of early modern England. Figuration is its technical apparatus to construct the discursive concept of race. Figures of speech provided poets and dramatists the systems and concepts to practice meaning making, and metalepsis, the essence of rhetoric, was especially powerful in imposing pernicious meaning. As it tropes other tropes like metaphor, synecdoche, and metonymy, metalepsis activates an entire system of mobility. Its true power lies in its characteristic capacity to hide the system, to render invisible the connections among the figures of speech it has activated in order to mark certain bodies as fixed. The mobilities of metalepsis then, wrest signification to arrest Cleopatra's polyvalent ontology, ensuring that rhetoric's mobile forces remain the province of certain kinds of subjects: Male, European, Christian. Putnam, forever helpful, himself hints at metalepsis's ability to calibrate categories of identity and difference when he genders the figure's work. "It seemeth," he tells us "the diviser of this figure had a desire to please women rather than men." Through such claims, Putnam seems to invite readers to notice the figure in relationship to women and gender. Early modern scholarship has happily accepted this invitation as research on rhetoric, gender, and sexuality attest. Feminist work on figures, for instance, has persuasively shown how tropes passed through female material where women became the matter that enabled masculine meaning making. Yet this research failed to grapple with the attendant issue of how figures like metalepsis hide race in plain sight, and how materializations of race were being invisibly structured by the same rhetorical system. The elision of race in studies of gender and early modern women's writing is the topic for another day. I note this critical absence to underscore both my simplest point, that our scholarship is shaped by what we notice in text and what we fail to notice. And also, my most critical point: that our political and ethical commitments are evident in our methodologies. Method is where ideological commitments gain traction in scholarship. It determines whether we consider race as constitutive to poetics or supplementary. It impacts whether we classify poetics under the aesthetic while relegating race to the political. It shapes whether we treat the political and the cultural as equal partners of, or merely supporting characters to, the formal, and studies of aesthetics and politics. My talk then responds to the provocation of our symposium, encapsulated by Fred Moten's question: "now, how can we read this poem?" by suggesting that we read any early modern poem with attention to its invisible systems of meaning making. This would require perhaps that we reconsider the entire critical architecture that undergirds our constructions of English poesie.

The Arts of English Poesie: Making Worlds and Making Race | Watch the full talk

Presented by Debapriya Sarkar at Poetics: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2023

In this talk, Debapriya Sarkar explores the connections between English-language figurative speech and racecraft through an examination of George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (c. 1589). Situating Puttenham’s text within broader early modern conversations regarding rhetorical value in the English language, Sarkar brings out how English theories of figuration theorize language on a spectrum of mobility and fixity which in turn generate possibilities of “familiar” and “alien” meaning for specific words. This basic configuration, Sarkar argues, leads directly into racializing processes in which language is key. To demonstrate such processes, Sarkar turns to a close reading of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1607), focusing on the work being done in Shakespeare’s language to naturalize a link between the person of Cleopatra and the place of Egypt, showing us how the identification of a woman with an “alien” territory naturalizes the dehumanization of the racialized subject.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Video
Kyle Grady

Racial mixing in Titus Andronicus

Teaching Titus Andronicus can open up conversations about early modern English familiarity with race, racial difference, and mixed-race identity.

Titus Andronicus is a play that demonstrates early modern English dexterity in constructions of race and racial difference. And because it’s one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, it helps to give a sense of how that dexterity informs his subsequent work. When I teach Titus, I focus on its interest in racial mixing. Students are sometimes surprised to see mixed race identity represented in a text that’s over 400 years old— students often imagine Shakespeare’s London as a homogenous place. But Titus shows that not only was early modern England more diverse that is often understood — a reality increasingly supported by archival work — but also that familiarity with difference was already being leveraged in Shakespeare’s time to represent and animate understandings of race. One of the first moments I bring students’ attention initially seems to confirm that something like racial mixing was unfamiliar to the Elizabethan English. Early in the play, Lavinia finds Aaron the Moor and Tamora the Goth alone in the forest. She already suspects their relationship and, when she finds them alone she tells Tamara “Tis thought you have a goodly gift in horning; / And to be doubted that your Moor and you, / Are singled forth to try experiments.” The word “experiments” is an odd way to describe a relationship, interracial or otherwise. It suggests that Aaron and Tamora are engaged in something new and untested. Working through this moment with students, I also highlight the phrase “singled forth,” which immediately describes the pair’s deviation from the rest of the group in the scene, but also characterizes their relationship as singular. Rather than confirm a view of the period as new to or naïve about race, this moment, I explain to students, shows us one mode out of a range of ways mixed race identity is represented in the period. Aaron and Tamora’s relationship isn’t even singular in the world of the play. When the pair’s child is born with darker skin, indicating that Aaron, rather than Saturninus, is the father, Aaron suggests swapping the child for another mixed race infant. This child, born to his countryman Muliteus, is, he says, “fair” as Tamora’s sons, Chiron and Demetrius. Racial mixing is ostensibly being used here to propose a frightening possibility for an early modern England that frequently trafficked in and furthered racist ideas. But there is also a matter-of-fact sense of the somatic possibilities of both inter- and intraracial procreation. Aaron demonstrates as much when he is overheard wishing his child was born with his mother’s “look,” and telling the child, “where the bull and cow are both milk-white, / They never do beget a coal-black calf.” These kinds of casual observations appear drawn from contexts in which mixed race identity isn’t treated as either experimental or profoundly consequential. I bring students’ attention to these moments in the text to give them a better sense of early modern English familiarity with race and racial difference, as well as to help them consider the inconsistent ways that race operates in the world around them. In particular, Titus’s tendency to play up the significance of mixed identity helps students think through how mixedness often registers differently today depending on the context, sometimes being framed as meaningful and other times not registering at all. Especially in a moment like our present when mixed race identity is sometimes framed as a late 20th and early 21st century phenomenon, seeing it represented in an Elizabethan play can encourage students to investigate the past as a way to better understand the present.

Teaching Titus Andronicus can open up conversations about early modern English familiarity with race and racial difference, as well as to help students consider the inconsistent ways that race operates in the world around them. In particular, Titus’s tendency to play up the significance of mixed identity helps students think through how mixedness often registers differently today depending on the context, sometimes being framed as meaningful and other times not registering at all. Especially in a moment like our present, when mixed-race identity is sometimes framed as a late 20th- and early 21st-century phenomenon, seeing it represented in an Elizabethan play can encourage students to investigate the past as a way to better understand the present.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Video
Ayanna Thompson

Titus Andronicus as the gateway drug

Students believe they know what Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet or Macbeth mean, but rarely do those “meanings” stem from the students’ close engagements with the texts. Using Titus Andronicus at the beginning of any Shakespeare class forces students to experience Shakespeare anew.

I have come to think of Titus Andronicus as the perfect gateway drug for a lifelong addiction to Shakespeare. In fact, I start all of my Shakespeare courses with a unit on Titus because the play destabilizes my students’ preconceived ideas about Shakespeare. Some students come with a hatred of Shakespeare because of the ways they encountered his works in high school; and some students come worshipping “The Bard” because of the ways they encountered his works in high school. Either stance (disdain or worship), though, precludes close readings and original analysis. The students believe they know what Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet or Macbeth mean, but rarely do those “meanings” stem from the students’ close engagements with the texts. So I approach the beginning of any Shakespeare class with the goal of making the students experience Shakespeare anew. I always begin by asking if any of my students have read or seen Titus Andronicus before. Typically, none (or at most one) has, which means that I get to quote Bette Davis in All about Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” I bring up how weird and strange Titus Andronicus is, mentioning the extreme violence, the extreme sexual violence, and the fact that there is a biracial baby in a play written in 1592. I mention that the play feels like a toboggan ride through the end of empire. And I also mention that the play might seem boring and/or hard to read in the first scene, but that they need to stick with it because the weird stuff starts sneaking in soon after. I tell the students to pay attention to Aaron the Moor, and I ask them to think about why he is in the play. And then I send my students off to read it on their own, telling them that they need to have it fully completed by the next class. I know this approach has worked because my students tend to come back the next class fired up, expressing confusion, horror, shock, and disbelief that a Shakespeare play feels so familiar, contemporary, and yet also unknowable. Frequently, I have several students who explicitly ask, “Why haven’t I heard of this play before? Why wasn’t I taught this before?” The crazypants content grips the students immediately, but they don’t know what to do with it or even how to make sense of it as Shakespeare’s or Shakespearean. And that’s when I am able to turn to close reading and analysis. It is difficult to get students to do effective close readings and analyses of the Shakespeare plays they think they “know.” It is very easy to get students to do close readings and analyses of a text that they cannot make sense of on their own. Some students express a frustration with not being able to puzzle out Titus Andronicus on their own, and that is the moment I long for because I can explain that it is unreasonable to think that we could make sense of 400-year old texts on our own. There are many lores about Shakespeare, and one of them is that his works are universal, which sometimes can be interpreted to mean that his plays are universally understandable. What Titus Andronicus helps to demonstrate to the students is that his plays are fascinating, complicated, and sometimes painfully timely, but they require a type of reading and attention that is often neglected by the familiarity of the more popular plays. The fact that race, sexual violence, and disability, topics the students assume are only contemporary, are the vital components of the narrative structure invites them to ponder, reimagine, and re-read Shakespeare communally, as a class.

Titus Andronicus is the perfect gateway drug for a lifelong addiction to Shakespeare. Starting Shakespeare courses with a unit on Titus destabilizes students’ preconceived ideas about Shakespeare. Some students come with a hatred of Shakespeare because of the ways they encountered his works in high school. Some students come worshipping “The Bard” because of the ways they encountered his works in high school. Either stance (disdain or worship), though, precludes close readings and original analysis. The students believe they know what Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet or Macbeth mean, but rarely do those “meanings” stem from the students’ close engagements with the texts. By beginning any Shakespeare class with Titus Andronicus, students are forced to see Shakespeare anew.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Intro to premodern critical race studies
RaceB4Race Highlight
Margo Hendricks

What is premodern critical race studies?

Margo Hendricks offers her insights into what exactly premodern critical race studies is (especially in comparison to premodern race studies), and what it means to be a practitioner within this field.

MARGO HENDRICKS: Okay, I have permission to do this. [LAUGHTER] Y’all thought I was joking? [PLAYS SHORT CLIP OF “CALIFORNIA LOVE” BY 2PAC FT. DR. DRE] All right. Michael’s never going to invite me back to the Folger! [LAUGHTER] First of all, I want to thank all of you for being here. I’m a little nervous, because it’s been a while since I gave a talk, and the last one I did—and I have no pockets, and please, somebody, let’s start really seriously giving women pockets—the last time I gave a talk, it was supposed to be my farewell to Shakespeare studies. It was a rough time. I did not care for the direction that I saw the field going, and I’m one of those individuals, if I don’t like something, I say it, and then I disappear. Unfortunately, there were certain people who didn’t allow the disappearance. This talk is called “Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race.” For anyone who doesn’t know me, you will quickly discover I have no filters. Well, maybe one or two left. My academic career on paper has been successful, though I haven’t written or published an academic article in years, which makes me either uninvested or an ancestor. Because I write romance novels, I’m going with the latter. Consider me your ancestor. However, before I claim ancestral privilege, I want to share. Who I am in the academy falls squarely on the shoulders of the following people, and this is in no particular order, so: Kim Hall, Arthur Little, Ayanna Thompson, Joyce Green MacDonald, Francesca Royster, Elder Jones, Anthony Barthelemy, Imtiaz Habib, Patricia Parker, Geraldine Heng, Peter Fryer, Peter Stallybrass, Hayden White, Harry Berger, Michael Warren, Don Wayne, Karl Marx, Raymond Williams, Christopher Hill, Perry Anderson, Stuart Hall, Terence Hawkes, and, most of all, Zeola Culpepper Jones, my great-grandmother whose father was born enslaved. She was not. So, you can either blame them or sing their accolades for the fact that I’m standing here. I much prefer you do the latter. In other words, cite, cite, cite. In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word was Race In the only essay I will unapologetically go, “Damn, that was good,” I wrote: Somehow, giving our silent mestizo the voice [and the “silent mestizo,” if you don’t recall the essay, which is Midsummer Night’s Dream “Obscured by Dream,“ was the Indian boy]—Somehow, giving our silent mestizo the voice of another mestizo, rather than that of an academic like myself, seems fitting. The words of this half-Scottish/half-Irish changeling stand as a vivid reminder that it is in the “antique fables,” the “fairy toys” produced in the colonizing dreams of Europeans, that the “shaping fantasies” of modern imperialism began. These words are a reminder that it will be the mestizos—the racialized descendants of those who framed the lexicon and practices of modern imperialism—who, in dealing with it, will write the final epilogue to the shaping fantasy of race. This essay followed upon the heels of Women, Race, and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Of this book, I’m inordinately proud. It is a reflection of what I wanted to achieve as an early modern Shakespeare studies colonizer. The book was never intended solely for literary dialogue. Its purpose was to initiate conversations among and between academics working on race and gender in the early modern period. The absence of male contributors was deliberate. I believe Pat Parker and I succeeded with that book. In 1997, I organized a University of California Humanities Research Institute residential research group, entitled “Theorizing Race in Pre- and Early Modern Contexts.” This group was made up of classics, medieval, and early modern academics. Now, 20 years later, I’ve been invited to speak about historical periods, race, and bridging a divide. What I learned from the members of the residency group: There is no divide. There is, however, a problematic rupture worth exploration. For the purpose of this conversation, I’m going to refer to it as the “White settler colonizing” of “premodern critical race studies.” I’m also going to insist that we make a distinction between “premodern race studies” (PRS)—or “priss,” I can’t do this with the next acronym, so I’m sorry, I don’t have one—and “premodern critical race studies” (PCRS). PRS is the practice of approaching race studies as if “you’ve just discovered the land.” Practitioners ignore the preexisting inhabitants of the land or, if PRS scholars deign to acknowledge the land is inhabited, it’s viewed as uncultivated and must be done so properly. In this body of work, all evidence (or nearly all of the evidence) of the work done to nurture and make productive the land is ignored or briefly alluded to. In other words, the ancestry is erased. No articulation of the complex genealogy that produced premodern critical race studies exists, which in turn, drew these academic “settlers,” and I am calling them “settlers,” to premodern race. And just like capitalist “White settler colonialism,” PRS fails to acknowledge the scholarly ancestry (the genealogy) that continues to inhabit and nurture the critical process for the study of premodern race. As Patrick Wolfe cogently reminds us, White “settler colonialism destroys to replace.” It is not an invasion, so much as it is a structural event, driven by “the logic of elimination.” Much of the theoretical and analytical critiques that form anti-settler colonialism are framed around indigeneity, which admittedly complicates the centrality of the notion of anti-Blackness being the center of “race” in the premodern period and what it means for premodern critical race studies. For the moment, I want to highlight—and I want to shift our gaze away from anti-Blackness—and I want to highlight why I link PRS to White settler colonialism and why it needs to go. White Settler Colonizing in Premodern Race Studies I want to suggest, I want to declare, “White settler colonialist” thinking is integral to premodern race studies. Why? Because “Whiteness” is centralized in PRS as the privileged narrative creep. PRS relegates its critical race studies’ ancestry to a citational entry, buried in a lengthy footnote, surrounded by scholarly Whiteness. This creeping Whiteness mediates the narrative by insisting on the sanctity of White-centric ideologies, genres, and, of course, the privilege of engagement: who gets cited, who doesn’t. Using this creep, anyone can wear the mantle of premodern race studies. What this individual fails to see in such practices is the ways PRS intersects with the ideologies of White supremacy, and PRS’s insistence on what Lehua Yim describes as the “arrogance of assumption” embedded in the inclusive “we.” Let me just take a minute and thank Lehua, because that woman talked me through some stuff. She’s friggin’ amazing. All right? That’s all I’m going to say. I love her. This “we” envisions itself acting inclusively, engaged in the political work of furthering premodern race studies by structuring race as an event. Okay, I’m going here, Michael. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than the blurb for Stephen Greenblatt’s led edX online course, “Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor.” I’m going dramatic on you here, okay? And this is the blurb, or part of it: In this course, we will read Shakespeare’s Othello and discuss the play from a variety of perspectives. The goal of the course is not to cover everything that has been written on Othello. Rather, it is to find a single point of entry [I’m a romance writer, and when I read that line, Lord, I was about to run with it]—Rather, it is to find a single point of entry to help us think about the play as a whole. Our entry point is storytelling. . . . From lectures filmed on-location in Venice, London, and Stratford-upon-Avon to conversations with artists, academics, and librarians at Harvard, students will have an unprecedented access to a range of resources for “unlocking” Shakespeare’s classic play. Greenblatt’s online course typifies, in my opinion, a classic, “White settler colonialist” move. Through the “logic of elimination,” this course de-centers the theoretical, historical, and analytical work done by premodern critical race theorists and scholars, none of whom, to my knowledge, are at Harvard. In effect, by focusing on the play as a matter of “storytelling” and framing it as a filmic piece—if you haven’t seen this, I can only take 45 minutes, but it was filmed—Greenblatt ensures that the spectatorial gaze is always White centered (“eyes on me”) and Othello’s sovereignty is consumed so that his race is always received as a structural event, rather than a structural process. A structural event. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat—over and over again. There is a deep connective tissue between a resurgence of White supremacy and fascist discourse at present and the “White settler” colonizing that informs PRS, a connection which reinforces the underlying belief systems inherent in White supremacy—perhaps out of ignorance for PRS, perhaps not. In both cases, anti-Blackness sits as a peculiar litmus test for who does or who doesn’t do PRS. On the one hand, PRS sees the value of race as anti-Blackness, and therefore will turn Othello, Aaron, Caliban, and Ithamore [editor: from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta] into an “I am woke to premodern race studies” badge to wear. The problem with such wokeness is that generally, though not always, it fails to turn inward. Rarely do these individuals ask of themselves: How does my discursively arguing for Othello’s emasculation, Ithamore and Aaron’s vengeful turns, Caliban’s de-humanization sustain a White supremist ideology? In what ways can I think about these characters independent of a gendered Whiteness, of White supremacy, of White settler colonialism? What if, instead of anti-Blackness, I consider these characters from a critical lens of anti-Whiteness? In other words, what if I disengage from my White privilege? Not asking these questions shows how deeply White settler colonialism and its logic of elimination are implicated in the direction premodern race studies has taken over the past decade or so. Those of you who heard me kind of do this riff at SAA [Shakespeare Association of America] 2011, this is a little bit more sophisticated. Don’t get me wrong, race equaling anti-Blackness is still a jumping-off point for, I think, premodern critical race studies. We need to not let go of that. However, within PRS, race has come to be used as a structuring event for gender, lineage (or blood), nation, and class without any attention to skin color or indigeneity. As an ancestor, I own my responsibility in these acts of diffusion. Some of my publications do lend themselves to this type of “race signifies ______” and you fill in the blank. However, what always stood behind my writings was the belief that colonialism/imperialism, capitalism, and White sovereignty were handfast. They were wedded. When we fall into the trap of trying to pinpoint the “actual first use of race” as a definitional or critical device, we inevitably fall into White supremacist discourse. When we make anti-Blackness the pivotal narrative, we elide the anti-Indigenous strategies woven into White supremacy’s insistence on anti-Blackness. It’s actually a very good strategy on the part of capitalism and its colonial arm. White settler colonialism happens through the mind. The enslaved Indigenous peoples removed from the continent of Africa were the first to undergo the horrors of colonization. White settler colonialism stripped the enslaved of their right to sovereignty as a capitalist experiment. An experiment that involved the destruction of a relationship to land, a relationship to community, and a relationship to the idea of sovereignty itself. By elevating the idea of individuality, a fundamental tenet of premodern and modern capitalism, and by stripping Indigenous peoples of their relationship to the means of production—you hear my anti-historical materialism work in here—their labor, and most importantly, land, White settler colonialism ensured that not only descendants of the enslaved, but all Indigenous peoples, remained locked in a capitalist experiment. This experiment is what PRS fails to see, when the storytelling narrative is about “anti-Blackness” and not about White settler colonialism and its “anti-Indigeneity.” I told you this was going to be short. Premodern Critical Race Studies Someone asked me, “What does that mean?” [LAUGH] “I don’t know.” So I thought about it. So what does PCRS look like? I have no idea, except it’s not PRS in its current iteration. I do want to suggest, as part of the larger critical race theory practice and practices, PCRS 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. Unlike PRS, PCRS resists the study of race as a single, somatic event (skin color, in most cases) and insists that race be seen in terms of a socioeconomic process (colonialism). What truly distinguishes PCRS from PRS, of course, is the bidirectional gaze, the one that looks inward even as it looks outward. As bell hooks observed, “spaces of agency exist . . . wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see. The gaze has been and is a site of resistance for colonized . . . people globally.” I want to argue that PCRS entails, or requires, both an oppositional and an insider definitional gaze. That like the term “Indigenous,” PCRS is strategic and political. It recognizes the analytical gaze’s capacity to define the premodern as a multiethnic system of competing sovereignties. PCRS will resist PRS’s tendency to make the study of race something akin to ecotourism (a passive-aggressive form of White settler colonialism). PCRS is an intellectual, political, and public interrogation of capitalism’s capacious erasure of the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, whether in the Americas, the Pacific islands, Asia, or the African continent. PCRS is the work of humanists/activists who recognize that the kinetic importance of their work is not strolling through Venice, posturing your PRS creds, but finding ways to destabilize the academy’s role in furthering capitalism’s use of White supremacy to sustain itself. That’s what PCRS does. PCRS also recognizes and acknowledges its genealogies. It celebrates that lineage—citation—and it uses it “to dismantle the master’s house” since the master’s tools are ineffective. I’m going to end now. This is an epilogue. Since I’m both an academic and a romance writer, I will end with something I wrote years ago. Willoughby Plantation, Barbadoes 1649 The young girl sat at the feet of her Black nurse, entranced as the woman’s aged fingers moved swiftly and certainly through the cane husks, bringing to life a past nearly forgotten. “Tell me once more, Nana. Tell me about the Negress Maria.” “In the veins of the Negress Maria flowed the blood of kings. Both she and her sister (who was called Phillipa), were taken as young girls, no older than you. Maria was perhaps fifteen. The Spaniard who stole her kept her as his mistress. Her beauty then bewitched an Englishman. It was he who taught her the secrets of love and hate. Francis Drake, the Dragon,” the old woman spat. The woman stroked the girl’s dark hair. “Drake fathered Francisco, your mother’s grandsire, on the Negress Maria then left her to die on an island with no women to care for her. None to bring the babe into the world. They lived, mother and child. They lived. Francisco was always a wild seed, not African like his mother but not English like his father. The Spanish called him Mulattos, little mules. He was of that temper. When an English ship came to the island to take on food and water, Francisco persuaded the captain to take him on. Maria’s son worked hard for the merciless White man, and when Francisco came to England he left the barbaric captain and went in search of his father. Alas, it was not to be. The Dragon was dead. With no mother, no father, no lands, Francisco was lost. Desterrado.” “Exile,” the child mouthed. “Exile,” the old woman acknowledged. “His child begat a child and that child begat a child, you, and with each generation, the Negress Maria’s blood grows thinner and Drake’s stronger. Francisco knew that those of his seed would wear the Whiteness of his father and pass among the English as one of them. Before his death, he made his daughter Elizabeth swear to remember his line. His daughter’s daughter was to be called Aphra. For the dark earth that nurtured her ancestors. Aphra, A-P-H-R-A. To remind her that, despite her Whiteness, she was of the land, of Africa, was forever mestizaje, forever desterrado.“ All right, one last comment before I walk away—well, not permanently, because Ayanna won’t let me. Y’all are the next generation. I’m handing it over to you. Don’t come looking for me to be brilliant. Don’t come looking for me to save y’all. Don’t look for me to be theoretical. I’m just going to be me. Thank you so much.

In 2019 at Race and Periodization: A RaceB4Race Symposium, Margo Hendricks offered her insights on what exactly premodern critical race studies is (especially in comparison to premodern race studies), and what it means to be a practitioner within this field. Her working definition is a guide to the methodological and theoretical background of PCRS, as well as a rallying call to continue to expand understandings of the past.

Read the complete transcript and listen to her talk, archived by the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Early Modern
Literature
Intro to premodern critical race studies
Video
Madeline Sayet

A brief history of Indian policy

A bit of the history leading up to the start of the contemporary Native theater movement. While not a comprehensive history, this is a small ideological dip into some of the major cultural shifts and moments in policy.

When I begin talks about the Indigenizing Shakespeare Movement, I'm often confronted by the need to give listeners access to a bit of the history leading up to the start of the contemporary Native theater movement. Unfortunately, I can't go through the history of each of the more than 570 federally recognized tribal nations, not to mention the state-recognized ones right now: that would take weeks. What I'll give you is a small ideological dip into some of the major cultural shifts and movements in policy helpful for general context. Each Native nation is a sovereign nation. That means they have their own rules, languages, and cultural protocols. There's no collective Native American culture. Rather, there are hundreds, each with their own distinct arts and history. When you go to a bookstore, if your town still has a bookstore, and see Shakespeare everywhere and no Native plays, that's not an accident. It's a result of hundreds of years of policy that centers one voice while actively eliminating others. In fact, Native arts were illegal for swaths of US history. In the early 1900s it was illegal for Native people to perform their own traditional dances, while one of the few ways for them to make a living was to perform fake versions of Native dances in white-created Wild West shows. For hundreds of years, non-Natives had control over any public artistic representation of Native peoples. It wasn't until the 1970s that Native people could legally practice their art, religions, and culture without fear. Let's look at a few major moments that show the ways in which US policy was dedicated to taking land resources and the ability to practice art, ceremony, and culture from Native people. Erasure of matriarchal leadership. Did you know that many Native nations had matriarchal leadership structures? When the settlers arrived in the 1600s, they couldn't comprehend the idea that women were in charge, so they didn't write down what the women were doing. Once the US was created, Native women were stripped of many of the rights they had had in their own nations. Indian watching. The theater has a history of being weaponized against Native people. The press made much of Pocahontas's attendance at Ben Jonson's The Vision of Delight in London in 1617. Articles were written noting the reactions of Native guests at performances throughout the 1700s and 1800s, including Cherokee dignitaries at a 1752 performance of Othello in Virginia. As Miles P. Grier argues, these writings were intended to represent Native peoples as a "racial type, distinguished by an inability to grasp or wield the mediations of urban capitalist modernity." Redface performance. In 1829, the hit play Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags, popularized redface on Broadway. That same year, Andrew Jackson was elected President, and then the next, he signed the genocidal Indian Removal Act, commonly associated with the Trail of Tears, into law. At this devastating moment in history, the major commercial entertainment was white actors performing stereotypes of Native people in redface, proclaiming they were the last of their race and bolstering a belief in white supremacy. Residential schools. Assimilationist missionary schools began with colonization, but in the 1870s, the government built schools to more systematically assimilate Native youth. Stealing them from their homes, their hair was cut, they were beaten for speaking their languages, their living conditions were terrible. Many children died. Made to take English names, one student at Carlisle Indian School in 1881 took the name Will Shakespeare. Outlawing Native religious practices. In 1883, the Religious Crimes Code made practicing Native dance and ceremony illegal and would remain so for nearly a century. If this brief summary feels long, keep in mind that this is merely a fraction of the injustices and harms done to Native peoples in the United States. Termination era. Beginning in the 1950s, the U.S. sought to terminate many tribal nations, denying their sovereignty and separating Native communities from each other and their traditional land. In 1956, the Indian Relocation Act offered Natives job training to encourage them to leave reservations and move to cities, where the incentives promised did not pan out. This separation of Native peoples from their communities and lands allowed the government to break up reservation trust plans. In 1958, the Indian Adoption Project separated thousands of native children from their families, placing them in non-native homes. Red power. Resistance to these relocation, termination, and school policies led to the Red Power Movement in the 1960s, alongside other civil rights movements. Native peoples wanted self-determination. In 1968, the American Indian Movement AIM was founded. That same year, the Indian Civil Rights Act was passed. In 1969, a 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island led by Richard Oakes and urban Indian college students argued that the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie required that the now unused land be given back to the native people. This drew enormous attention to the struggles of Native peoples. Shortly after in New York City, in the early 1970s, the Native American Theater Ensemble and Spiderwoman Theater, a feminist Native theater company, were founded, launching the contemporary Native theater movement. Self-determination. In 1973, the standoff at Wounded Knee drew national attention to Native issues, and in 1975, the Indian Self-Determination Act gave Native nations authority to administer their own programs and services within their nations. Finally, in 1978, the Indian Religious Freedom Act restored the rights for Native people to practice their ceremonies. And the Indian Child Welfare Act means children can no longer be stolen from Native communities and adopted out. It's important to remember that the Constitution of the United States acknowledges the inherent sovereignty of all Native nations. Every decision made that strips Native nations of these rights is unconstitutional.

To engage students in the performance history of Shakespeare in America, they need to be familiar with the political landscapes in which his plays were taught and staged. Further, to bring the Indigenizing Shakespeare Movement into our classrooms, it is imperative that our students are informed and knowledgeable of this history—one that most of them were never taught.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Indigeneity
Video
Kyle Grady

Racial divides in The Merchant of Venice

Using The Merchant of Venice to demonstrate an early modern interest in maintaining racial divides, particularly in a context where those boundaries regularly collapse.

The Merchant of Venice is a key text to demonstrate how race factored into early modern English culture. The play pays close attention to the workings of an early modern society: it stages a Venice with complex and interconnected economic, legal, and social systems, and these systems are in many ways organized around the city-state’s position as a nexus for an expanding early modern mercantile and colonial economy. When I teach Merchant, I ask students to consider how characters deemed “strangers” factor into these systems. One moment I draw students’ attention to is the easily overlooked or sometimes intentionally avoided exchange between Jessica, Lancelot, and Lorenzo. Lancelot disparages Lorenzo’s marriage to Shylock‘s daughter and Lorenzo in turn reveals that Lancelot has been engaged in a relationship with a Moor. This is meant to be an insult to Lancelot. The moment can be an uncomfortable one, especially for a modern-day reader. It trades on racism, antisemitism, and misogyny for an attempt at humor. Lorenzo, for example, is characterized by Lancelot as being “no good member of the commonwealth, for in converting Jews to Christians, [he] raise[s] the price of pork.” And Lorenzo’s reply, that he “shall answer that better to the commonwealth than [Lancelot]” because “the Moor is with child by you,” prompts the clown to attack the woman’s character by mobilizing her difference. There are a number of reasons I highlight this moment for students. It’s an important demonstration that early modern attention to race often appears at the margins, here as part of a quick back-and-forth that the play never picks up again. It also shows that these sometimes ostensibly small moments are crucial to our understanding of the early modern past. For example, despite Merchant’s extended focus on Venice’s workings, this exchange is actually the only moment in the play that the term “commonwealth” appears. And this particular exchange is inextricable from the societal intricacies Merchant is organized around. Kim F. Hall’s foundational work on Merchant, and in particular this scene, shows that Lancelot’s complaints about Jessica’s conversion align with a recurring focus in the play on food insecurity—a focus that’s carefully attentive to the availability of resources among and between particular groups. When I teach this moment, I ask students to consider how it also demonstrates an early modern interest in maintaining racial divides, particularly in a context where those boundaries regularly collapse. I contextualize the exchange as part of Merchant’s broader interest in interracial and interreligious unions, from its focus on Morocco’s courting of Portia, to its suggestions that Shylock might not be Jessica’s father. I point out that despite all this ongoing and potential intermixture, the Venice we see represented is still organized by and around relatively static categories – organized around racial, religious, gendered, and social hierarchies – which suggests the ongoing reinforcement of those boundaries. For me, this moment reflects an Elizabethan and Jacobean English sensibility already attentive to identities that don’t fit neatly into discreetly constructed categories, as well as one that sees the reinscription of those divides as important to both its domestic organization and to its colonial ambitions. In Shakespeare’s Venice, managing those categories — and how people fit into them — appears especially important for ensuring that its legal, economic, and social systems maintain and reproduce a particular hierarchy, especially in an increasingly intercultural context. When I teach this moment in Merchant, I also want my students to think about its relevance today: what does it look like when a person's heritage or identity doesn’t fully register among the limited range of categories that our 21st century societies recognize? And where do these categories emerge from? Thinking through these questions with The Merchant of Venice can help demonstrate that these categories have a long history of being constructed, and, maybe more importantly, their constructions have historically been grounded in maintaining and reproducing particular structures of power.

The Merchant of Venice is an ideal play to begin showing students how the early modern English attention to difference plays out in the margins. It is clear in the text that the English sensibility in the early modern era is one already attentive to identities that don’t fit neatly into discreetly constructed categories and one that sees the reinscription of those divides as important to both its domestic organization and to its colonial ambitions. In Shakespeare’s Venice, managing those categories—and how people fit into them—appears especially important for ensuring that its legal, economic, and social systems maintain and reproduce a particular hierarchy, especially in an increasingly intercultural context.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Video
Adam Miyashiro

Teaching the medieval epic

Teaching The Epic of Sunjata alongside La Chanson de Roland and El Poema de Mio Cid helps students decenter Euorpe and gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of the medieval world.

Often, when the epic poem is taught, the discussion around transmission from oral to textual sources creates a hard line between the two, as though the act of writing preserves these stories in amber. However, especially in the case of the medieval epic, many of these narratives were produced and reproduced, told and written again and again. La Chanson de Roland, La Poema de Mio Cid, and The Epic of Sunjata are three narratives that were rewritten and retold in this way, morphing and adapting throughout the 12th and 13th centuries. I teach these three poems together because they can help us rethink and reimagine the literary and cultural relationship between Africa and Europe. Whereas many medievalists have studied The Song of Roland and The Poem of the Cid as somewhat complementary texts along traditional lines of Crusades and the so-called “Reconquista,” the inclusion of The Sunjata recasts these two European texts, troubling the oral/textual split, the idea of colonialism and nationalism, and the genealogies of narrative restructuring. Rather than simply adding The Sunjata alongside a French and Castilian Spanish text, reading these texts together challenges Eurocentric and Orientalist narratives by thinking about the Western Atlantic as a wider region—one that provincializes Europe. By reading these texts against the Eurocentric grain, I ask students to consider how these narratives of the African continent, and specifically the West African coast, challenge the white supremacist myths that continue to serve in the foundation of the US educational system. These epics, side-by-side, showcase the shifting and politically charged changes in representations of Africans, Muslims, and Arabs in the European consciousness, the consequences of which live with us still to this day. For example, the Mande peoples are represented in The Sunjata as a sophisticated early political organized empire, challenging modern American stereotypes of West African peoples as “tribal,” “primitive,” “illiterate,” or otherwise “uncivilized.” In this comparative reading, students are confronted with evolving and conflicting depictions of Muslims and Arabs. In The Song of Roland, Muslims are depicted as Black as well as being viewed as heretical and monstrous. Whereas in The Cid, a Muslim character becomes an ally to the Cid and is entrusted with the safety of his wife and daughters. These texts collectively interrogate unquestioned assumptions in my own students that have been internalized through popular media and educational messaging. Reading and thinking through these texts together can help explain how race-making and colonialism shape not just our literary canon, but our world today.

The medieval epic tradition contains deep wells of insight into the culture, traditions, and political values of the period. Teaching the epic contrapuntally and including texts outside of the European tradition gives students the opportunity to expand their understanding of the premodern world. Adam Miyashiro recommends teaching The Epic of Sunjata alongside European epics, like La Chanson de Roland and El Poema de Mio Cid, to offer students greater insight into a rich, multicultural, and multilinguistic medieval past.

Medieval
Literature
Transnational studies
Poetry
Activity
Leslie Alexander

"Would you rebel?" classroom activity

This classroom exercise challenges students to consider all the costs and consequences that enslaved people faced when responding to their enslavement.

In this brief segment, I'm going to review the goal and format of a classroom exercise that challenges students to consider all the costs and consequences that enslaved people faced when responding to their enslavement. I first developed this activity several years ago, and I've regularly used it in my classes ever since. Over the years, I’ve found that it forces students to really think about the harsh realities of slavery and the practical issues that enslaved people grappled with. I came up with this idea because whenever I taught introduction to African American history, I encountered students who seemed sure that they knew exactly how they would have responded to enslavement. Almost all of them were absolutely sure that they would have rebelled or fought back, and that's understandable. Slavery was a cruel, brutal, horrific system, and it's hard for most students to imagine being reduced to slavery and not fighting back. But I wanted students to understand and have compassion for the millions of people who suffered enslavement and did not rebel. I wanted my students to reflect on the true conditions of slavery and to consider all the obstacles, challenges and unspeakable consequences that would have faced anyone who tried to resist against enslavement. So I created a debate-style activity that encourages students to consider all the different ways that enslaved people might have resisted against, or coped with, their enslavement, and also to reflect on which response they might have actually chosen if they were in that situation. Usually this exercise occurs at a point in the semester when the students have learned about the rise, development, and basic structure of slavery as an economic, social, and political system. They've also learned at least a bit about the cultural resistance, fugitive slaves, and rebellions, so they have some familiarity with the different ways that enslaved people responded to enslavement. Depending on the size of the class, I randomly divide the students into four or five groups. Each group is assigned a form of resistance, and they're asked to make a short presentation in which they deliver a compelling argument in favor of the resistance strategy they've been assigned. The exercise is usually a debate in which each group presents their argument to the entire class. They should consider commenting on both the strengths of their strategy and the weaknesses of the competing strategies. At the end, one group wins the debate by convincing the judges to endorse their strategy. So let's talk briefly about each of the groups. Group one, daily resistance. Their job is to argue in favor of using everyday strategies to express discontent with slavery. They can propose the use of any combination of daily methods that enslaved people used to undermine slavery, including talking back to their master or overseer, breaking tools, faking illness, intentionally working slowly, faking stupidity to avoid work, or negotiating or bargaining for better conditions. This group should be prepared to respond to criticism that daily resistance does not do enough to really challenge or change their conditions. Group two, the runaways. These students will insist that the only reasonable response to slavery is to escape it entirely, and they will try to convince the rest of the class to become fugitives. Members of this group should consider all the logistics of running away, including what resources they have, what their destination should be, and what if any assistance they might receive along the way. They should also consider the consequences for themselves and their families if they are caught. They should also consider potential consequences for their loved ones who are left behind. Group three, the rebels. These students will try to persuade their classmates to take up arms and rebel against slavery in a physical violent uprising. This group will also need to consider various logistical factors, including how they'll actually rebel. Will they use arson, poisoning, or do they have a plan to access weapons that will allow them to engage in actual combat? They should also consider whether they have a long-term goal. In other words, if they successfully kill their master, then what? Did they try to spark a full-scale revolution, and what consequences will they face if their rebellion fails? Group four, the judges: they have the toughest job. These students are responsible for listening to each argument, composing questions to ask each group, and then voting on which form of resistance to employ. One option is to have a fifth group. I call these students the accommodationists. They have to argue for nothing more than survival. They must make the argument that the best response to slavery is to simply survive, and therefore there should be no resistance at all. Instead, they should cope, and keep living, in order to ensure that future generations can live and perhaps even become free. Another option is to change how the groups are judged. Rather than have a formal group of judges, you can allow everyone in the class to have an opportunity to question the other groups, and then at the end, the entire class votes. To be honest, I initially hesitated to let the entire class vote, because I assumed that everyone would vote only for their own group. But I've tried it a few times and have been impressed with the logical, sound choices that students have made when casting their vote. I've had amazing success with this exercise, and I find that it really changes how students think about resistance against slavery when they have to consider tough questions about resources, strategies, and the punishments they might face, or even worse, the punishments their family members and loved ones might face. So make sure that you really push each group to ask themselves hard questions about the strengths and weaknesses of their strategy and what hindrances or consequences they might face: not only if they fail, but also if they succeed. When this exercise is working well, you'll start to hear groups even arguing among themselves a bit. This is a good sign because it lets you know they're really grappling with the hard questions.

Goal

It’s often difficult for students to understand the realities of enslaved Africans. Students may make assumptions about how they would have responded to enslavement. This classroom exercise challenges students to consider all the costs and consequences that enslaved people faced when responding to their enslavement. It forces students to think about the harsh realities of slavery and the practical issues that enslaved people grappled with when responding to their circumstances. Students consider all the challenges and issues that enslaved people faced when responding to their enslavement. Should they resist? Runaway? Rebel? Or simply survive?  

Prep

Students should be knowledgeable of the material realities of enslavement. This exercise should occur at a point in the class when the students have learned about the rise, development and basic structure of slavery as an economic, social, and political system. They also should also be familiar with cultural resistance, fugitive slaves, and rebellions. They should have some familiarity with the different ways that enslaved people responded to enslavement.

Format

Randomly break the class up into 4 or 5 groups. Each group is assigned a form of resistance, and they're asked to make a short presentation in which they deliver a compelling argument in favor of the resistance strategy they've been assigned. One group will argue that the enslaved community should use daily resistance (described), another supports the notion of running away, the third group advocates for armed rebellion. The final group are judges—they are the ones who listen to each argument, ask supplementary questions, and then vote on which form of resistance to employ. 

The exercise is usually a debate in which each group presents their argument to the entire class. They should consider commenting on both the strengths of their strategy and the weaknesses of the competing strategies. At the end, one group wins the debate by convincing the judges to endorse their strategy. 

Depending on the size of the class, you can also add a fifth group, which would argue simply to accommodate to slavery and survive, in order to ensure that future generations live and perhaps live free. 

Or, conversely, you could have all four groups (daily resisters, runaways, armed rebels, and accommodationists) and then have the entire class vote rather than have a separate group of judges. 

Outcomes

This exercise changes how students think about resistance against slavery when they have to consider tough questions about resources, strategies, and the punishments they might face, or even worse, the punishments their family members and loved ones might face. Make sure that each group is pushed to ask themselves hard questions about the strengths and weaknesses of their strategy and what hindrances or consequences they might face, not only if they fail, but also if they succeed.  

Instructions for student groups

Daily Resistance

Includes all of the following

Social resistance—building family and community

Cultural Resistance—developing “liberation theology”

Work Avoidance—working slowly, breaking tools, faking illness, etc…

Arson and Poisoning

Questions to consider
  • Do you plan to use one of these strategies, or a combination of all of them?  
  • What exactly is your plan going to be, and how will you implement it? What is your goal, and will you be successful?  How would you define “success” with daily resistance?
  • If you choose something risky, such as arson or poisoning, how many people would you involve in the execution of your plan?  Would the conspirators include domestic slaves, field slaves, or both?
  • What are the benefits of using the particular strategy you have chosen?  Why do you think that it is the most effective attack against slavery?
  • What are the drawbacks or consequences of your strategy?  

Flight/Running Away

Questions to consider
  • What exactly will your plan be? Are you planning to escape permanently or just temporarily run to the woods? How and when do you run? Do you know where you’re going and how to get there? Are you planning to run to the North, or to a maroon society?
  • Do you have money, tools, or supplies to help you?  
  • If you are successful, what are the benefits of running away?
  • What risks are involved with this strategy? What are the potential consequences of your actions?

Armed Rebellion

Questions to consider
  • What exactly is your plan going to be? What method or strategy are you going to use? 
  • Do you have weapons? How many people are you going to include in the plan?  Are you going to include domestic slaves, field slaves, or both? 
  • What is your long-term strategy? Do you plan to just attack your own plantation, or is this a larger movement?
  • What is your plan for after the rebellion begins? Are you going to try to escape? Seek refuge in a maroon society, sail for Haiti, or return to Africa?
  • What do you believe are the benefits to your strategy?
  • What are the potential risks? What are the consequences of your actions?

Accommodation/Survival

Questions to consider
  • What does it mean to “accommodate” to the system of slavery? What would your daily life look like? 
  • What does “survival” mean during slavery and why is it important? 
  • Do you feel like you are “selling out,” or is there something inherently valuable about surviving under these circumstances? 
  • What are the potential benefits for you and your community if you choose to accommodate? What potentially negative consequences does your choice have? 

Judges

Questions to consider
  • What do you think would be the most effective response to slavery?  
  • What is the goal?  Do you want to help people cope with slavery?  Escape it?  Destroy it?
  • What are the potential problems with each of these strategies?  What are the potential drawbacks or consequences for each strategy?
  • What specific flaws do you see for each strategy, that you would want to ask questions about?
18th Century
History
Black Atlantic
Activity
Ruben Espinosa

Student approaches to adaptations of Shakespeare

In this assignment, Ruben Espinosa asks students to write and record short videos using Shakespeare to highlight and interrogate contemporary social justice issues.

In my classes, I emphasize the value of not seeing Shakespeare as the object of study, but rather seeing him as a vehicle to understand important issues in our present moment. One assignment that I include in my classes empowers students to incorporate a contemporary issue into a video production of Shakespeare. Students collaborate in groups of four or five to perform, in film, an adaptation of a scene from any of the Shakespeare plays we've covered during the semester. The parameters are pretty straightforward. Film should not be more than five minutes in length, should employ at least some of Shakespeare's original dialogue, and should find a way to speak to contemporary social issues. Beyond these guidelines, students have absolute creative license for the productions of these films. They also submit a written reflection about the cultural significance of their production. The groups present their films to the class near the end of the semester. That's it. In general, I have found that students are incredibly savvy in producing polished videos on their own. I recommend pointing students to university technology resource centers, although many of them will inevitably turn to YouTube, and experienced students will have enough of the tools to make these videos. Because I encourage students throughout the semester to think about the way Shakespeare speaks to race, religion, immigration, and misogyny, among other topics, students feel empowered to focus on issues that matter to them. This assignment has yielded some remarkable productions. For example, in one production of Hamlet, students use Ophelia’s suicide to explore the pressures of linguistic assimilation and feelings of alienation, directly implicating the elevation of Shakespeare's language within that design. In a different production focused on 12th Night, students presented the characters in a reality show setting, where confessionals were interspersed throughout the action, allowing actors to speak directly to the camera. The students used this framing for the Viola character to acknowledge her desire for Olivia. The short film ends with her on a phone call with her mother speaking in Spanish, where her coming-out is a sort of cliffhanger for the next episode. It captures the weight of heteronormative expectations and cultural attitudes within Latinx communities. In this example, you'll see students addressed the violence on the border via an adaptation of Macbeth. It was produced at a time of rampant cartel violence in Juarez, in a period where the average was eight murders per day, often in incredibly gruesome ways. Many of the students at UTEP are transfronterizos, which means they live in Juarez, but cross the border daily to attend school. As such, they had to navigate the violence that they witnessed on a daily basis. Rather provocatively though, the students showed how linguistic violence on the US side of the border works to further estrange these students and position them in altogether unwelcome territory. As you will see, students are often able to use Shakespeare as a vehicle to explore issues that are meaningful to them. This assignment creates opportunities to have candid discussions in the classroom about a host of important, urgent topics. In this way, students have agency and redefine Shakespeare's enduring value in our present day.

In this assignment, Ruben Espinosa offers a creative entry point for students to engage with Shakespeare. Students produce a short film that must touch on a national or local social justice issue using dialogue from one of the plays they’ve studied in class. By focusing these adaptations on students’ interests and communities, students are given the opportunity to question who is allowed access to Shakespeare and consider how these plays are often weaponized against marginalized populations.

Foul and Fair - an example student production

La Muerte de Ofelia - an example student production

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare
Video
Dan-el Padilla Peralta

Premodern critical race studies and classics

Premodern critical race studies in the classics traces the historical, literary, and cultural effects of race inherited from imperial projects in the ancient world.

I see PCRS as facilitating radical reconstruction of the field of ancient Mediterranean studies known as classics on at least two levels. First, it will open up a space for thinking more capaciously about the ancestors who did much of the trailblazing work in identifying and mapping forms of racial assignment and racial identity, and projection, in pre-modern cultures more generally, but the ancient world in particular. PCRS, as I see it, has enormous potency as an ethical summons to intellectual history of the most rigorous kind. Part of what I see as important about that ethical summons for classicists is that normally the field has understood its own intellectual history to orbit the very specific historical identities of these individual scholars who more often than not are cleaved artificially from the context of knowledge production in which they operate. The genius of PCRS is that it has really encouraged folks to think, in the first instance about collectivities of knowledge and knowledge formation, and also to think about structures of racial formation that pervade and define the texts and non-textual materials from pre-modernities that we encounter without explicit or primary reference to any one scholar or any one unit of scholars who more often than not receive these kinds of hagiographic workups in intellectual histories of the field. So for me, this is an incredible boon. But there's another feature of PCRS that I think matters equally, if not more to the radical transformation of ancient Mediterranean studies and classics -- or whatever is in the future to classics. That is the prospect of cultivating relationships with other fields of pre-modern inquiry that are not extractivist in nature. For me, this has become a point of concern in much of my recent work, and in many of my conversations with colleagues. I am concerned about the persistent tendency, on the part not just of classicists, but of other humanists, to engage in forms of theory-rating of other disciplines, especially disciplines that are achieving spectacular breakthroughs precisely because they center the perspectives of BIPOC scholars. They are then importing those theories, rated and extracted from those disciplines, into classics, without barely so much as an acknowledgement of the labor involved in crafting those theories, let alone the identities that define the capabilities and affordances of those theories themselves. So, to the extent that PCRS has modeled, I think quite exactingly and inspirationally, capacity to build networks of care and intentionality that do not simply replicate these longstanding patterns of extractivism, then I think classicists will have much to learn from embracing PCRS.

Premodern critical race studies offers a profound lens with which to approach ancient Mediterranean history and culture. As a multi-disciplinary framework and as a rigorous research methodology, PCRS offers new approaches to the field of classics. Dan-el Padilla Peralta discusses the imperative of studying race and racialization in the ancient world and the influence this lens of inquiry has on the field.

Ancient
Literature
Intro to premodern critical race studies
Activity
Dennis Britton

The epic assignment

Dennis Britton's epic assignment asks students to collaboratively write an epic poem, considering the possibilities and limitations of the epic genre for defining who we are—or want to be—in our present moment.