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

Download the transcript
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.

Further learning

Video

The smells of The Tempest

How does the attribution of malodorousness in The Tempest reflect the kind of judgements underpinning prejudice—the judgement that decides who does, and who does not, belong?

Carol Mejia LaPerle

Recommended

Video

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.

Ian Smith
Activity

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.

Kim F. Hall
Syllabus

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.

Ruben Espinosa