‘Edgar I Nothing Am’: Blackface in King Lear

Minor, Benjamin Blake; Thompson, Ayanna

doi:10.1057/9781137349354_11

Cited by 6 publications

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“…This may very well be one reason why our field at large has yet to see a full‐length study on domesticity that internalizes unconditionally the mid‐1990s arguments made by Hall in Things of Darkness regarding white womanhood, racism, white supremacy, intersectionality, race, and power. For instance, award‐winning 2019 domestic criticism that devotes attention to Othello , 64 a traditional Shakespearean “race play” 65 featuring a Black title character who is racially oppressed and “bruised with adversity,” 66 does not cite Ian Smith's groundbreaking scholarship on the “black handkerchief” 67 or Hall, who gave us the meticulously structured “blueprint of a methodology” 68 before offering in Othello: Texts and Contexts specific historical and cultural insights, drawn from some of the period's prescriptive texts, on “marriage and the household” (Hall, 1995, 2007; Minor & Thompson, 2013; Smith, 2013). 69 Nearly 25 years after Things of Darkness established itself as a touchstone text for discourse on early modern English race and gender, two matters directly relevant to the household, 70 the citational color line remains intact.…”

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“Hood feminism”: Whiteness and segregated (premodern) scholarly discourse in the post‐postracial era

Brown

2020

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Homing in on the segregated culture of early modern English domestic criticism as its primary example, this article explores how white voices and “white logic” have dominated reading practices in early modern English studies, and academia in general, for some time—often without critique. In different ways, those voices and viewpoints have left little to no room at the metaphorical scholarly table for influencers of a different hue, thus rendering visible in the field and profession the existence of the “color line,” as W. E. B. Du Bois called it. With an antiracist agenda that embraces the goals of Black feminism, Brown thinks through the continued disconnect between domestic criticism and premodern critical race studies, a disconnect that denotes a representative pattern. Specifically, Brown highlights how whiteness goes unexamined critically, a fact that is surprising since the domestic sphere is, and was, a formative space where processes of racialization occur, processes informing the centuries‐old racism that persists in the post‐Obama era, or the post‐postracial era: a time where anti‐blackness and related violence (physical, verbal/rhetorical, psychological, emotional) is hypervisible. Encouraging readers to be(come) “accomplice feminists,” Brown calls for the decentering of whiteness and the desegregation of scholarly discourse and citational practices.

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“…65 65 Benjamin Minor and Ayanna Thompson, “‘Edgar I am Nothing’: Blackface in King Lear ,” Staged Transgression in Shakespeare's England , ed. Rory Loughnane and Edel Semple (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 153.…”

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“Hood feminism”: Whiteness and segregated (premodern) scholarly discourse in the post‐postracial era

Brown

2020

Literature Compass

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Race in Shakespeare’s Tragedies

LaPerle¹

2021

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race

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Playing the Victim: Mockery, compassion, and racialization in premodern English Buffeting plays

Brazil

2024

Postmedieval

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Passion episodes such as the Buffeting are known for the powerful acts of compassion they occasioned within audiences through their performance of violence on the person of Jesus. Few critics, however, have considered that these episodes depend on antisemitic, Islamophobic, and anti-Black depictions of antagonists when engendering such emotional dispositions. By investigating the dynamics of mockery through a deeper look into the composite identities of Jesus’s antagonists, this study reveals that these plays and the communities that produced them rely on a disingenuous stance of victimhood for their effectiveness. This ‘victim play’—the collaborative community effort to claim the status of victim while simultaneously participating in the victimization of others—obscures that those who are attributed cruel acts of mockery are actually its targets. The powerful rhetorical strategies of the premodern English episodes are thus unearthed in this study.

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‘Edgar I Nothing Am’: Blackface in King Lear

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

“Hood feminism”: Whiteness and segregated (premodern) scholarly discourse in the post‐postracial era

“Hood feminism”: Whiteness and segregated (premodern) scholarly discourse in the post‐postracial era

Race in Shakespeare’s Tragedies

Playing the Victim: Mockery, compassion, and racialization in premodern English Buffeting plays

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