¡°What is the role of institutions like ours when white supremacy is resurgent?¡±

That was the question posed by Mike Witmore, director of?the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC,?at a conference on ¡°Shakespeare and Race¡± held at?Shakespeare¡¯s Globe in London?earlier this month. He was addressing an audience of critical race theorists, early modern historians, Shakespeare scholars and theatre practitioners.

A paper by Margo Hendricks, professor emerita of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, recalled a visit to South Africa in 1996 when a student asked a question?that stimulated much of her subsequent scholarly writing: ¡°Given the uses to which Shakespearean texts have functioned as an imperialist/colonialist weapon, why would (or should) black people engage with Shakespeare?¡±

Professor Hendricks greatly welcomed the work of a small group of black scholars whose ¡°insistence on the study of ¡®blackness¡¯, race and the non-European body (especially those of African origins) [had] redefined the reading practices of undergraduates, graduate students and even some faculty colleagues¡±.

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Other academics explored the implications for the classroom.

Tripthi Pillai, associate professor of English at Coastal Carolina University, described a student ¨C ¡°a queer black woman, a native of rural South Carolina and a first-generation college-goer¡± ¨C who had said to her: ¡°Maybe it¡¯s because I¡¯m black, but I?feel Shakespeare¡¯s just not for me.¡± To address such concerns, she had adopted a number of strategies. One was to ¡°insist that student-scholars engage at length with the work of at least two female and two non-white scholars¡± in their research essays. Another was to ask them to address not only the question ¡°How am I?to feel about X or Y play?¡± but also ¡°What and how does the play feel about me?¡±

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Patricia Akhimie, associate professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, recalled a project where her students created a glossary of terms relating to early modern writing and race, ¡°tracing [the use of a word] in two or more primary sources and its explications in two or more secondary sources¡±. This enabled them to ¡°feel the power¡± of expertise and also to learn a crucial lesson about race: ¡°There is confusion at the start of the semester when they believe that race is a real thing, and not a social construct we are creating all the time.¡±?

It was left to Ruben Espinosa, associate professor of English at the University of?Texas at El Paso, to consider ¡°how Latinx students and, more specifically, Chicanx [Mexican-American] students¡­engage Shakespeare¡±. He described ¡°non-traditional performances of Shakespeare through mediums such as YouTube, but also appropriations that derive from the peripheral space of the US-Mexico borderlands¡±. These included ¡°an appropriation of?Macbeth¡± produced by his own students ¡°at the tail end of the worst period of [drug] cartel violence in Ju¨¢rez, Mexico¡±,?in which they referenced ¡°an actual incident where 16 people ¨C mostly teenagers ¨C were gunned down at a house party in Ju¨¢rez as the framing device¡±.

Such initiatives, suggested Dr Espinosa, could ¡°open up an array of possibilities in bridging the Shakespeare-Latinx divide¡±. It was time to ¡°discover another Shakespeare¡± ¨C who anyway, if the celebrated Chandos portrait is a true likeness, ¡°kinda looks like a Chicano¡±.

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com