The topic of race has long enriched Shakespeare scholarship. Race scholarship remains marginalized in the broader world of Shakespeare studies. The simultaneous “truth” of these statements reveals a deeply rooted professional ambivalence. And while recent attention has been paid to its manifestation at conferences and in journals, this essay explores its challenge to black teacher–scholars in the majority-white classroom. Rethinking The Merchant of Venice as an educational play, with Portia and Shylock performing as nontraditional teachers, I develop the concept of “teacher trouble” from Judith Butler's “gender trouble” to reflect personally on the perils and liberatory potential of antiracist performative strategies.
Rooting his pedagogy in an Orwellian commitment to exploring the relation between writing and the cultural forces that shape it, Eric L. De Barros takes up linguistic complexity itself as a pedagogical model in this chapter. De Barros sees Shakespeare’s texts as a “weapon” to use against a range of lazy habits of mind, from bardolatry to consumerist approaches to higher education. He describes how he invites students to examine their own subject positions and ethical priorities in conversation with Shakespeare’s plays; how this engagement spurs conversations about issues from racialized beauty and consent to social mobility and criminality; and finally, how students parlay these insights into practical strategies for addressing related issues in their own lives. Fusing thoughtful intertextual engagements with close reading and autobiographical student writing, De Barros seeks to develop a “personally inflected, politically responsive” Shakespeare capable of combating cultural forces that discourage potentially subversive thought and action.
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