White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture and the Elite

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

What part did Shakespeare play in the construction of a white people and how has his work been enlisted to define and bolster a white cultural and racial identity Since the court of Queen Elizabeth I, through the early modern English theatre to the storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, white people have used Shakespeare to define their cultural and racial identity and authority. White People in Shakespeare unravels this complex cultural history to examine just how crucial Shakespeares work was to the early modern development of whiteness as an embodied identity, as well as the institutional dissemination of a white Shakespeare in contemporary theatres, politics, classrooms and other key sites of culture. Featuring contributors from a wide range of disciplines, the collection moves across Shakespeares plays and poetry and between the early modern and our own time to interrogate these relationships. Split into two parts, Shakespeares White People and White Peoples Shakespeare, it explores a variety of topics, ranging from the education of the white self in Hamlet, or affective piety and racial violence in Measure for Measure, to Shakespearean education and the civil rights era, and interpretations of whiteness in more contemporary work such as American Moor and Desdemona.

Reviews

Expressing ideas that have developed over several decades of brave and tenacious scholarship, this collection opens a new chapter in the study of Shakespeare and the study of race. It sets out a clear demand for future scholarship, artistic practice, and activism: to produce a Shakespeare that is about more than whiteness. With searching intellectual power and heart, White People In Shakespeare demonstrates why the critique of "whiteness" is a precondition for understanding Shakespeare in the 21st Century. * Dr. Michael Witmore, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, USA *
This big and provocative gathering of established and new voices gives us much of what Shakespeare had to say, in character and verse, about whiteness, as there were just beginning to be "white people." Its contributors likewise show the troubling reach of Shakespeare's genius in reproducing hegemonic whiteness across generations. * David Roediger, Foundation Professor of American Studies, University of Kansas, USA *

Author Bio

Arthur L. Little, Jr. is an associate professor of English at UCLA, USA. He is the author of Shakespeare Jungle Fever: Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice (2000) and Shakespeare and Race Theory (forthcoming, The Arden Shakespeare).