Black Shakespeare

Reading and Misreading Race

AvIan Smith

Häftad, Engelska, 2025

293 kr

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Beskrivning

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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2025-03-27
Mått:151 x 229 x 15 mm
Vikt:334 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:226
Förlag:Cambridge University Press
ISBN:9781009224093

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Litteraturvetenskap inom Skönlitteratur

Mer om författaren

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.

Recensioner i media

'Ian Smith's Black Shakespeare begins by asserting that lingering contemporary resistance to the evidence that people in the early modern world believed that race was real and that it mattered participates in a larger denial of the kinds of work that race performs in our own time. In a series of subtle and revelatory readings-I am thinking particularly of the dazzling chapter on Hamlet-Smith implicitly argues that learning to recognize race's subtle and extensive operations in Shakespeare can be an important first step toward our own achievement of what he calls 'racial literacy'. To see and to know, Smith believes, is to begin to be able to recognize and resist white supremacy's purchase in our field and in the culture that shapes it. Persuasively argued and deeply ethically engaged throughout, Black Shakespeare is the work of a mature scholar who believes that Shakespeare matters and who calls on us both to embrace and to question the conditions under which he has achieved his place in our world.' Joyce MacDonald, University of Kentucky

Innehållsförteckning

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.