Re-Historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespearean Property

As premodern studies continues to develop tools for anti‐racist scholarship and pedagogy, this essay establishes the stakes of adaptation/appropriation studies especially committing to these efforts. Turning to the novel The Serpent of Venice, I demonstrate how appropriations that engage with race too often employ what I frame as racial euphemism: palliative engagements with race that sidestep questions of power and inequity. This is especially true for those attempting to maintain distance between Shakespeare and questions of race, and especially racism, often under the guise of historical accuracy. This racially euphemistic approach, therefore, disseminates to especially wide audiences white supremacist approaches to race. Premodern Critical Race Studies provides a vital activist framework, and with it, important conceptual and methodological tools, that help adaptation/appropriation scholars identify racial euphemism in premodern retellings, while at the same time offering appropriators scholarship that can help them craft anti‐racist appropriations that resist the idea of a race‐neutral past.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When the master’s tools fail: Racial euphemism in Shakespeare appropriation, or, the activist value of Premodern Critical Race Studies

Corredera

2022

“…44 44 See: “Re‐Historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespearean Property.” Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 1 (Little, Jr., 2016, pp. 84–103).…”

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confidence: 99%

Whitewashing white permanence: The (dis)/(re)membering of white corporeality in early modern England

Chapman

2022

In early modern English drama, black flesh is remarkable.In the Shakespeare canon, the visibly black flesh of the eponymous Moor of Venice in Othello and the villainous Aaron in Titus Andronicus has been the subject of scholarly analysis for centuries. Yet, in a field that has placed so much emphasis on flesh marked by color, unmarked flesh is imbued with assumptions of whiteness that make unremarkable, a privilege that renders it unthought and uncritiqued,

“…33 33 “Re‐Historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespeare Property” Shakespeare Quarterly 67.1 (Spring 2016): pp. 84–103.…”

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confidence: 99%

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

Brown

2020

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.