Mejia LaPerle, Carol. "Shakespeare's tragedies and the construction of difference." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/shakespeares-tragedies-and-the-construction-of-difference. [Date accessed].

Shakespeare's tragedies and the construction of difference

Three framing questions to analyze early modern racialization

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Carol Mejia LaPerle
Wright State University

Carol Mejia LaPerle offers three interpretive questions to introduce the ways early modern frameworks scaffold modes of racialization:

  • Who is friend and foe?
  • Whose power is legitimate?
  • Whose suffering matters?

By looking at Shakespeare's tragedies through these questions, students learn how early modern texts embed and develop structures of race and racial difference. These questions do more than reveal how early modern representations of evil, of legitimacy, and of suffering evoke racial difference. They invite us to dismantle the racializing logics that have perpetuated over long periods of time.

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