“Is Black so Base a Hue?”: Black Life Matters in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

Brown, David Sterling

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-76786-4_7

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“…58 58 I discuss racial asymmetry in “‘Is Black so Base a Hue?’: Black Life Matters in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus ,” Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology , ed. Cassander L. Smith, Nicholas R. Jones and Miles P. Grier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 137–155.…”

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

Brown

2020

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Shakespeare, Race, and Science

Park

2024

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race

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This chapter examines the interconnections between early modern ideas about race and early modern science to interrogate what it meant to pursue, consume, and master ‘knowledge’ in Shakespeare. By exploring science and race together as they weave through Shakespeare’s plays, I argue that the pursuit of knowledge as scientific inquiry was foundational to the formation of English ideas about race and/as hierarchy and mastery, as evidenced in how negotiations with race play out in the scientific epistemologies and practices that Shakespeare engages in his works. This chapter explores these various relationships between science and race in a range of Shakespeare’s plays, from Lavinia’s accusation of Aaron’s and Tamora’s ‘experiments’ in Titus Andronicus to Othello’s famous demand for ‘ocular proof’, from the presumptions that underlie early modern European ‘philosophies’ and knowledge systems in Hamlet to the exploration of alternative authorities of natural knowledge in Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest.

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Resisting Analogies

Kumar

2024

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race

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In this chapter the author recounts her experience teaching Shakespearean film at a historically Black college (HBCU). She reminds instructors that despite the supposed fluidity of race and racism in the early modern period, in our contemporary world cinema has been used as a technology of antiBlackness—often in the name of Shakespeare. By charting adaptations of Othello from early cinema onwards, the author outlines how the film industry has used bardolatry to legitimate antiBlack violence on and offscreen. Though there are adaptations in which Othello is not meant to be Black—such as those from India which analogize race in the play with caste in the films—the author demonstrates how, without adequate racial context, they risk flattening disparate historical oppressions under the banners of universality or multiculturalism. A decontextualized film pedagogy thus obfuscates, rather than addresses, the specifically antiBlack violence with which cinema has long been complicit.

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“Is Black so Base a Hue?”: Black Life Matters in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

Cited by 3 publications

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“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

Shakespeare, Race, and Science

Resisting Analogies

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