Race may dominate everyday speech, media headlines and public policy, yet still questions of racialized blackness and whiteness in Shakespeare are resisted. In his compelling new book Ian Smith addresses the influence of systemic whiteness on the interpretation of Shakespeare's plays. This far-reaching study shows that significant parts of Shakespeare's texts have been elided, misconstrued or otherwise rendered invisible by readers who have ignored the presence of race in early modern England. Bringing the Black American intellectual tradition into fruitful dialogue with European thought, this urgent interdisciplinary work offers a deep, revealing and incisive analysis of individual plays, including Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet. Demonstrating how racial illiteracy inhibits critical practice, Ian Smith provides a necessary anti-racist alternative that will transform the way you read Shakespeare.
ISBN-13: 9781009224086
Media Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 09-29-2022
Pages: 226
Product Dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.59(d)
Ian Smith is the Richard H., Jr. '60 and Joan K. Sell Professor in the Humanities at Lafayette College. He is the author of Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (2009) and collaborator on Othello Re-imagined in Sepia (2012). He has held several fellowships including the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellowship in the History and Culture of the Americas. He is currently the vice president of the Shakespeare Association of America.
Table of Contents
Introduction. Toward racial literacy; 1. The racialized reader; 2. Racial blind spots: Misreading bodies, misreading texts; 3. Antonio's 'Fair Flesh' and the property of whiteness; 4. Hamlet: Playing in the dark; 5. We are Othello; Epilogue. Forms of whiteness.
