Corredera, Vanessa I. "Resisting Lobotomized Shakespeare: Race in/and Appropriation." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/pcrs-and-appropriation-studies. [Date accessed].

PCRS and appropriation studies

Appropriation studies and PCRS give students more complete interpretive tools for analyzing racial representation.

Download the transcript
Vanessa I. Corredera
Andrews University

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.

Further learning

Recommended

Video

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.

Madeline Sayet
Activity

Editing early modern texts

Students learn the importance of editorial influence through the process of editing a premodern text.

Patricia Akhimie
Video

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.

Kim F. Hall