This book is about Shakespeare’s role in sustaining the antiblack paradigm of modernity. This work re-reads both Shakespearean texts and performances from the 16th century to the present to argue that American and English societies have deployed Shakespeare for four hundred years as a mechanism to construct and reinforce paradigmatic antiblackness. Framed within the author’s experiences as a Black scholar, actor, and director of Shakespeare and using both contemporary Critical Race Theory (CRT), as well as Pre-Modern Critical Race Studies (PCRS), this book uses civil society’s engagement with and performance of Shakespeare in various times and places to reveal the continuum of antiblackness that predates chattel slavery in America and contributes to antiblack world-making across oceans and centuries.
