early modern literature, race, religion, politics, and pop culture
This bibliography offers a genealogy of the scholarly work in premodern (critical) race studies. It exhibits the long history of this scholarship and shows the new directions for critical inquiry that have emerged in recent years.
Some years ago, during a seminar at a Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) meeting in Atlanta, Ayanna Thompson proclaimed that Othello was “white property.” Commenting on the function of Othello’s Blackness in early modern culture as well as our own, Thompson signaled the importance of remembering that considerations of Othello and his racial identity must, … Continue reading Review: Blackface by Ayanna Thompson
This week, Jan 20-23, 2021 saw the first online iteration of the biannual #RaceB4Race symposium. Having shifted to the online format due to the global Covid-19 pandemic, this meeting was also the first in the wake of the global uprising for the movement for Black Lives that erupted in the Summer of 2020 after the … Continue reading After Race Before Race: Education
#RaceB4Race #ShakeRace #medievaltwitter This past weekend (Jan 17-18), the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, held the third iteration of its RaceB4Race conference at Arizona State University. The theme of the conference was “Appropriations,” and as the program explained, "this RaceB4Race event focuses on how the term appropriation has recently signified in different ways … Continue reading After Race Before Race: Appropriations
On Friday, December 13, 2019, my #MeToo Shakespeare course at Harvey Mudd College culminated in a conference where my undergraduate students presented their research. The conference was a perfect encapsulation of the critical investigation we had undertaken over the course of the semester. This work entailed examining what Shakespeare’s plays might tell us about #MeToo … Continue reading #MeToo Shakespeare at Harvey Mudd College
I'm going to be speaking at UCR's "Race and the Premodern" speaker series on Thursday, November 7, 2019. In my talk, I will be referencing a course I taught in 2016 "Race, Gender, and Class in Renaissance Drama," and I'd like to share that syllabus here. I don't have in-class assignments on this syllabus. However, … Continue reading Early Modern Drama Syllabus: A #ShakeRace resource
In the fall semester of 2018, my students at Harvey Mudd College participated in “The Quality of Mercy Project,” whose remit was to offer a collaborative but locally inflected vision of what The Merchant of Venice communicates to us and how we can, in turn, perform and transform this play given our particular, regional interests … Continue reading Looking for Mercy in The Merchant of Venice
On Friday and Saturday, January 18-19 2019, Arizona State University’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies directed by Professor Ayanna Thompson hosted a paradigm shifting conference on race and race studies in the medieval and early modern periods. Following upon The Globe’s Shakespeare and Race Symposium of August 2018, this program expanded the field … Continue reading After Race Before Race
image credit: Shakespeare's Globe Over the past 10 days I have been thinking about how privileged I am to be able to do the work I do: to read and teach Shakespeare, to critically think and write about how the artistic and cultural legacies of the past ripple through time to affect our present. While … Continue reading Shakespeare and Race at the Globe
Why we need a Trump Shakespeare I will begin with a straightforward contention: “Literature is good to think with. It makes us better analysts, better interpreters, better readers. It doesn’t supply answers.”[1] This will seem like a contradiction: that we acquire various critical thinking skills, yet we don’t utilize them in the service of … Continue reading Why we need a Trump Shakespeare
Ambereen Dadabhoy 