I want to begin with a brief word of gratitude. I want to acknowledge all the unseen labor that goes into even something like a talk -- family, friends, people who take care of children, who pick up your life when you have to exit it for just a few days. Mentors and colleagues who will read things for you and give you feedback. And so I'm just thankful to every person who couldn't be articulated in a footnote, including students who proofread this and gave me some feedback. I also want to thank the amazing pre-modern critical race scholars who paved the way for the work that we're doing here today. I'm here today because my scholarship focuses on two areas I was told I could not do. What Margot Hendricks aptly named pre-modern critical race studies and Shakespearean appropriation. The former, they warned me, was too passe’, a conversation long over. People cautioned that the latter would not be a strong area for a job market that unbeknownst to them would soon crash anyway. Naively, I did not realize I was proposing to work at the cross-section of two areas considered to be niche, compared to historical archival work such as the history of science, the history of the book, the usual suspects of scholarly inquiry in the field Since the mid-2000s when I started graduate studies and especially since the 2010s when I graduated, both of these subfields have become more prominent with pre-modern critical race studies especially galvanized and authorized in recent years by institutions such as the Folger, SAA and Shakespeare's Globe to name but a few. Yet, despite these advances, pre-modern critical race studies and Shakespearean appropriation studies still feel the effects of their former sidelining. Scholars may focus on one or the other, but not often on both, at least not until after tenure (the second bookbook, right?). To continue acting as if either of these areas merits limited attention affirms even tacitly that only particular subfields count as proper scholarship and that only certain subfields are related to race. By ceding this ideological ground, we risk sidelining productive intersections that emphasize, rather than obscure, the relationship between the pre-modern, modern, and race. As Toni Morrison reminds us, “A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only ‘universal,’ but also ‘race-free’ risks lobotomizing that literature…” How do we lobotomize not only literature but our field when we do not place pre-modern critical race studies and appropriation studies in dialogue with one another, thereby limiting how we understand racial representation in both? Today I provide very brief answers that I hope lead to fruitful discussion by proposing two simple premises: appropriation studies need premodern critical race studies, and pre-modern critical race studies need appropriation studies. I turn to two Shakespearean appropriations, which I discuss in my in-process book (if you're interested) to explore these premises with you. Premise one, appropriation studies need pre-modern critical race studies. By this statement, I mean that scholarship on literary appropriation must engage with pre-modern critical race studies, as do appropriations themselves. Without the theoretical interrogative disruptive engagement with race modeled by pre-modern critical race studies, appropriations, the field and the objects, will fail to consider thoughtfully how the pre-modern and race speak to each other. Indeed, they will ignore the topic entirely or provide facile engagements with race that to mass audiences, usually white audiences, may look something like race work that may reify stereotypical racist thinking instead. The Q Brothers’ adaptation, Othello: The Remix, exemplifies precisely this approach to race, demonstrating how crucially appropriations need pre-modern critical race studies. The 90-minute production debuted as a US entry in the Globe to GlobeGlobe-to-Globe Festival, and subsequently ran twice at the Chicago Shakespeare theater and again, off Broadway. The production's second song exposes the Q Brothers' anxiety over audience reception regarding their hip-hop Shakespearean retelling when they rap: "Now I know what you're thinking / ‘Hold on just a minute. That's a tragedy. Yep / But there's comedy in it." Clearly the Q Brothers conceived of themselves responding to traditional theatergoers disinclined to their project, because they use low-status Black-associated hip-hop to explore high-status, white-associated Shakespeare. As a result, brothers Jeffrey and Gregory Qalyum deploy a toothsome version of hip-hop that reflects its appropriation by the white-run music industry. This decision creates a colorblind approach to both hip-hop and race by stripping away the exploration of race inherent in Othello and hip-hop. By referencing colorblindness herehere, I expand upon scholarly considerations of Shakespeare colorblind casting. I use colorblind instead to mean the creation of a racial narrative that manifests a blindness toward color, specifically in this case Blackness as anything more than a mere symbol of identity instead of a crucial factor motivating and reinforcing systemic injustices. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva identifies colorblind racism as a new racism that replaced the kind seen in the Jim Crow era. Instead of arguing for Black people's biological inferiority, whites now "rationalize minorities' contemporary status as a product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and Blacks’ imputed cultural limitations." Especially salient for a discussion of Othello: The Remix is the way that hip-hop becomes affected by colorblind borrowing that mirrors America's broader racial dynamics. Jason Rodriguez notes how the type of colorblind ideology outlined above affects white youth's interactions with hip-hop. Because they disconnect racial identity from their cultural consumption, they take "the racially coded meanings out of hip-hop and replace them with colorblind ones for their own purposes." This white consumption of hip-hop, stripped of its racial elements reflects the genre's history. Scholars agree that the history of hip-hop has been influenced and altered by the desire for a colorblind form of the genre. MK Asante, Jr. recounts hip-hop's political beginnings, explaining, “although West African in its derivation, hip-hop emerged in the Bronx in the mid-seventies as a form of aesthetic and sociopolitical rebellion against the flames of systemic oppression.” As hip-hop artists sought commercially viable careers with the major record companies in the late 1980s and early nineties, however, they experienced “censorship through intimidation, budget cutting, refusing to advertise or allow airtime and via other legal channels, which resulted in a restriction of the sociopolitical voices of commercially viable artists.” Consequently, as Tricia Rose explains, "party political Afrocentric and avant-garde forms of rap were driven out of the corporate promoted mainstream." Hip-hop's history thus reveals the erasure of the "link between Black music and the politics of Black life," leaving in its stead a version of the genre often critiqued for its emphasis on materialism, sexism, homophobia, and racial characters, but enthusiastically consumed by white youth culture because of these very qualities. The Q Brothers craft an appropriation of Othello that reflects this colorblind engagement with hip-hop. According to Othello, The Remix’s character description, Othello has escaped the pitfalls of the ghetto he was raised in (with ghetto here functioning as coded language for the Black inner city). This socially mobile rap persona fits within the personal narratives articulated by real life MCs, including the Notorious BIG, 50 Cents, and the rappers directly inspiring the remix’s Othello, Jay-Z and The Game. In the song, “Never Coming Down,” Othello explores the familiar hard-knock life. He explains, “I never knew my pops; Mom's as a junkie,” then asserts that he was raised in the streets as a child of the ghetto, filled with people smoking rocks. On these streets, either you “slang crack” or “you got a wicked jump shot.” This depiction inhabits the tense space of many hip-hop personas. On the one hand, inviting a gritty exploration of socioeconomically marginalized African American voices, on the other, invoking American stereotypes about Black communities and the families within them. Yet most rappers, especially male rappers, create an entire ouevre in which to craft a counter-narrative that contextualizes their seemingly stereotypical backgrounds. Indeed, Imani Perry contends that rappers often adopt “thug mimicry,” embodying American stereotypes of Black masculinity. But they do so to indict white supremacy by critiquing “the sociological conditions, poverty, police brutality, and joblessness that contributed to his or her becoming this person.” Unfortunately in Othello, The Remix, Othello does not provide the sociologically informed alternative interrogation of his drug-addled upbringing. For example, when Othello asks, “who can I trust now?” his crew and he respond, “more money, more problems,” quoting the title of the Notorious BIG's 1997 posthumous hit single, “More Money, More Problems,” which celebrates the materialism of hip-hop success while noting its pitfalls. Deploying this highly recognizable song as an intertext for Othello: The Remix exposes how the Q Brothers overlook racial inequity. For instance, instead, they could have referenced Biggie Smalls' "Things Done Changed" from 1994, which narrates how back in the day, neighborhoods were characterized by "lounging at the barbecues, drinking brews with the neighborhood crews..." But "turn your pages to 1993" ends as "getting smoked, G believe me, talks slick you get your neck slit quick." Indeed, here Biggie makes an assertion similar to Othello when he relates, "if I wasn't in the rap game, I probably have a key knee deep in the crack game." The distinction is that Biggie provides an alternative picture of Black neighborhoods involving community, celebrated by cookouts and sitting on the porch during a summer day. This positive view of Black society never appears in Othello: The Remix. Thus, quoting, "More Money, More Problems," becomes one of many decisions the Q Brothers make that sideline race by ignoring the racial legacy informing the ghetto, constructing their shaping of Othello. Perhaps nowhere is the Q Brothers' colorblind engagement with race clearer, however, than in Brabantio's confrontation of Othello after the elopement. Brabantio's tirade against Othello climaxes with his assertion, "You are so small, he's so much bigger. I just don't see you with that, that..." In addressing the Black Othello's overpowering size in comparison to the white Desdemona, Brabantio invokes the trope of the Black male rapist while stopping one step shy of using virulent racist language. Clearly the unspoken N word hangs over the theater. In the pause, the racist discourse otherwise omitted in the production exists as an absent presence. This powerful artistic decision makes the audience complicit in Brabantio's racist musings by filling in the discursive gaps. Yet the Q brothers diffuse the tension by having Brabantio whine and reply, "I was gonna say rapper, you didn't let me finish," and he says it almost just like that. A line that, in all performances I viewed, elicited audience laughter. Indeed the Q collective's response to Brabantio makes the desire to evacuate the moment of racist characterization clear when they rap, "He turned his back on her, / but not out of hatred./ He was stuck in the ways of a different generation." The Q Brothers' discomfort with and reluctance to engage with racism comes through in this explicit disavowal of it, one strategically covered up by comedy. The Q Brothers' racial colorblindness then comes at a cost, both by limiting the thematic resonances in their reinterpretation of Othello, and by circumscribing the power of the generic form they choose to deliver their retelling. Othello, The Remix illustrates the need for appropriations of pre-modern work to engage with pre-modern critical race studies. For the Q Brothers, it would have shed light on Othello's status as an alienated Moor in Renaissance Venice, a status of shifting inclusion and swift exclusion that would map well onto the use of hip-hop MCs by white corporate America. They would also have been provided with the ideological tools to craft a production not anti-Black in its stereotypical depictions. And appropriation scholars likewise need pre-modern critical race studies for it is all too easy to get swept up in the fun of the Q Brothers 4/4 beat, their irreverence toward the Bard, their attempt to try something energetic and new that to a casual observer may seem to engage with systemic racial inequalities in ways that echo the hip-hop we listen to day to day. If appropriators want to do race work better in their reimaginings, if they truly want to remix and not re-inscribe; and if appropriation scholars truly want to see race in appropriations, it is clear the creators and scholars of appropriations alike need pre-modern critical race studies. Premise two, pre-modern critical race studies needs appropriation studies. Recently on NPR's Code Switch, Ayanna Thompson identified the Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Taming of the Shrew as “three toxic plays that resist rehabilitation and appropriation.” She contends that when Shakespeare and his plays are not seen as “always necessarily good for us,” then we will be in a position where we can maybe rewrite the endings and change the plays. Thompson's call to rewrite endings and change narratives is what appropriation studies offer pre-modern race. Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar deftly note the complex history shaping the term appropriation. They identify two recent voices who build upon appropriation's history as a political interpersonal re-imagining to articulate its current signification. Thomas Cartelli's assertion that appropriations generally work for the interest of the appropriator and against the interest of the work or author being appropriated. And, Julie Sanders who defines appropriation as having a greater distance from the so-called source than do adaptations. This emphasis on the interest of the appropriator and distance from the source allows for a destabilization of pre-modern narratives by providing radical re-imaginings instead. Jordan Peele's film Get Out is precisely this type of reimagining. As numerous reviewers note, as Carol Mejia-LaPerle will discuss this April at SAA, and as Arthur Little observed in a seminar a few years ago, Get Out is Othello. I would add importantly an appropriation of it. When put in conversation with Othello, Get Out's concept of the coagula exemplifies the narrative revisions appropriations make possible for pre-modern stories. Get Out literalizes the horror of Othello's racial experience by stressing white supremacy's physical and psychological appropriation of, and violence against, Black bodies. Get Out follows African American Chris, who joins his white girlfriend Rose for a weekend to visit her family for the first time. A family, he learns, who is unaware that he's Black. Rose assures Chris of her family's liberal anti-racist, bonafides. Yet Chris feels unease as he meets Walter and Georgina, the friendly if odd Black help. The film reveals that the Armitages have chosen Chris as their next victim for a process and product they invented, called the coagula: a white brain surgically implanted into a Black body so that an aging or physically impaired white person can live on. However, a piece of the former brain and thus Black self remains, which necessitates the sunken place, the psychological corner reserved for the hypnotized, appropriated Black identity, where the victim sees what occurs but cannot respond. Chris miraculously escapes, killing the family in the process, and nearly strangling Rose to death minutes before his friend Rod rescues him. Through the concept of the coagula, Get Out viscerally confronts modern society's violent appropriation of Black bodies. Recognizing this appropriation can help one reconsider Othello's service to the Venetian state and his tragic end. Ta Nehisi Coates addresses precisely this appropriative violence, arguing that the elevation of whiteness comes through "...the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies." This violence functions as the Armitage's modus operandi as they seek to create more coagula, which I will address by focusing on Georgina. Georgina, actually Rose's grandmother, reminds viewers of the physical devastation enacted on Black bodies by white supremacy. One truly sees the appropriation of the Black body when Chris finds a picture of Georgina's unnamed host. Her scar, her formal hair, and her elderly attire all contrast with the selfie, which shows her with a millennial pout, luscious natural curls and contemporary clothes. Also particularly notable is her ultimate destruction. As Chris flees the Armitage's house, he crashes his car into her. Chris's subsequent attempt to save her suggests that to him, Georgina is not the white brain inside, but rather the Black woman signaled by her physical appearance. Chris thus sees hope for Black subjectivity despite its appropriation by whiteness. His recognition of her Black selfhood juxtaposes with Rose, who exits the house declaring, "Grandma!" indicating that for her, the white interior supersedes the woman's Black exterior. The camera returns to the car where Georgina's wig slides off, thereby emphasizing the surgical scar marring her forehead. She revives, grabbing Chris and screaming, "You ruined my house!" Despite Chris's attempt, the eradication of the Black self who once inhabited the woman next to him is complete. Through Georgina, the film comments on the ramifications of white domination over Black bodies. Once part of the coagula, Black selfhood becomes unrecoverable. This is the logical extreme of the violence Coates argues permeates the treatment of Black bodies in America. As a broader framework, then, the coagula makes all viewers -- those already cognizant and those woefully not so -- hyperaware of the constant physical and metaphysical threat whiteness poses to Blackness. In addition to stressing the corporeal and mental ramifications of the white appropriation of Black bodies, the coagula also demonstrates the white brain's overpowering nature, a literalization of the way that a white view of the world strives to govern Black experience. Sociologist Joe R. Feagin calls this the white racial frame, the white world view "dominant through the country and indeed in much of the western world that crafts a strong positive orientation to whites and whiteness and a strong negative orientation to racial others who are exploited and oppressed." A confrontation between Chris and Georgina powerfully communicates this white domination. In the midst of the Armitage's party, Chris tells Georgina, "All I know is sometimes if there's too many white people, I get nervous, you know?" In this moment, Georgina's true self struggles to appear as indicated by the fact that her smile falls as she trembles and cries, never taking her eyes off Chris. But the white Georgina's brain overcomes this temporary lapse, as signaled by the return of the oversized grin, and she responds, "No, no, no, no, no" 10 times. "That's not my experience. Not at all." Upon first viewing, the repeated "no" seem meant for Chris, but considered in light of the film's big reveal, these no!s may also serve as a command of repression for the young woman whose body hosts Regina's white mind. White control over the Black self may lapse for a moment in the coagula, but the dynamic here makes it clear that in the coagula, the white brain demands totalizing authority, thus embodying white supremacy's sociological dynamics. As an indicator of the physical, mental and sociological effects of white supremacy upon Black selfhood, Peele's depiction of the coagula provides a version of Othello's narrative that bolsters pre-modern critical race readings focusing on Othello's role as a Black man navigating the white-dominated Venetian society. Indeed, placing Othello and Get Out in conversation with each other, especially if one sees the latter as an appropriation of the former, invites what Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall identify as cross-historical tracing that might foster reflection upon strategies for othering in the early modern period that resonate with those deployed in modernity. Like Georgina, Othello too is deployed in the service of whiteness. Ambereen Dadabhoy stresses the dominating nature of his service, arguing that Othello's commitment to Venice's imperial war signals an obligation to the state that exceeds volunteer or even paid mercenary service. Venice, it seems, can and does deploy him with impunity. Indeed, Brabantio's onstage hospitality demonstrates the self-serving nature of Venetian's engagement with Othello. But Brabantio's welcome of him and his exotic tales finds its limits when the threat of miscegenation looms. Not only does Othello work for a coterie of all-white Venetians who order him at will, but as a Christianized Moor opposing the Turks, he also champions Christianity and its function as a force at once civilizing for the converted, yet exclusionary against the unconverted and above all, a white force. As Dennis Britton explains, Ethiopians, Moors, Turks, and Jews were “dually recognized in the early modern period as figures of alterity, foreign to normative white Christianity.” In his role as a soldier, Othello therefore defends not just Venice nor Christianity, but whiteness as well. Thus, in civil and interpersonal context, Othello, like Get Out's Georgina, serves whiteness in a literal and ideological sense. Indeed, one could interpret Othello as a Black man whose brain, like Georgina, has figuratively undergone the coagula process of whitening his identity, only to grapple with the ramifications in his final moments. Dadabhoy reads Othello in this way, arguing that the “duality of Othello's visage points to a psychological fairness belied by his somatic one.” Britton, too, stresses how “Venetian imperial interests necessitate an Othello who is ‘far more fair than Black’.” Othello thus mirrors those who have undergone the coagula process as a white mind within a Black body. As the film makes clear, the coagula ultimately entails a marginalization of Black selfhood. This is precisely Othello's journey in the play, so much so that he disavows his own name, "that’s he that was Othello. Here I am," becoming like Georgina's host, an unnamed entity traumatized by whiteness. By highlighting the violent, physical, and ideological appropriation of Black bodies and minds by whiteness, Get Out reorients how scholars, educators, students, directors, actors, and myriad future adapters alike might perceive of, and therefore re-present racists' role in Othello's tragic downfall. For, reimagined through the racial dynamics highlighted by Get Out, Othello's racial tragedy is the annihilation of Black selfhood at the hands of a white society that destroys Black subjectivity. This interpretation follows the shift Hendricks called for at the last RaceB4Race, recognizing the anti-Blackness in Othello while transforming the narrative into an anti-white one that indicts white supremacy. Get Out thus demonstrates how appropriating pre-modern narratives allows us to move beyond reifying whiteness through signifiers such as Shakespeare, or terms like Anglo-Saxon, to crafting radical narratives that decenter whiteness instead. To return to the two premises guiding this talk. Premise one: appropriations need pre-modern critical race studies. How else to explain limited appropriation scholarship addressing race and what David Sterling Brown calls Shakespeare's other race plays such as the overwhelmingly white-cast history plays? Indeed, all pre-modern and frankly even modern appropriations would benefit from pre-modern critical race studies. We live in a world where many are comfortable with a fantasy show depicting dragons, but in which representing a powerful non-stereotypical, non-exoticized person of color is a step too far, supposedly a-historical. Indeed, let us call for race theory to be applied to all narratives imagined on the page, podcast, stage, and across various screens. Premise two: pre-modern critical race studies need appropriation studies. The phenomenal scholarship undertaken by so many scholars in this room leaves no doubt that revisiting the archives is a vital endeavor. But for many of our students, and let's admit even some of our colleagues, but also especially undergraduates, the archives are inaccessible, even exclusionary. For students, archives are what we provide in our classrooms: Thug notes, Shakespeare memes, film adaptations, a graphic novel Kill Shakespeare, clips from Dr. Who, as well as the media all around them that relentlessly references Shakespeare and the pre-modern more broadly. This begs questions such as, do they understand the terms adaptation and appropriation just as much as they might archival ones such as Verso and Recto? More specifically, have we encouraged them to talk about the pre-modern and race in ways that they can transfer to other contexts? Have we taught them to observe what is present but also absent in regards to race as old narratives continue to be retold. Even as we encourage our students to revisit and rethink historical archives, we must train them to assess and create what will become the future’s archives. In the powerful play, American Moor, Keith Hamilton Cobb, the protagonist, the actor who's unnamed, discusses how his Blackness forces teachers, directors, and audiences alike to question their assumptions about who may perform Shakespeare and how. He notes that when embodying as a Black man, “the listener all too often has no place for it, no tools with which to hear it.” Are we providing our students and each other the best possible interpretive tools? Geraldine Heng observed at the last RaceB4Race that tools allow you to acknowledge, quote, "racial phenomena, racial institutions and racial practices," while Hendricks cautioned that the master's tools are ineffective. Are we using all possible tools for identifying and analyzing racial representation, or the master's ineffective ones? I contend that it is only when we offer the tools for both pre-modern critical race studies and appropriation studies that we can truly assert that we are using everything at our disposal. There is a reason these subfields have been marginalized in the past, for each has the potential to center often-silenced voices, to radically challenge the status quo, to call for ethics and equity in spaces where people have long ignored imbalances of power. How much more influential and effective could they be if they dialogued more with each other? As Carol Mejia-LaPerle asked at the end of her talk last time, “As we commit to anti-racist efforts in our research and teaching, what materials, archives, histories and experiences can be put beside each other?” At least one answer is pre-modern critical race studies and appropriation studies. SoSo, I leave you today with questions about how to bring these two fields together so that we have the tools to resist lobotomized literary studies, resist lobotomized pedagogy, resist lobotomized narratives that so many still try to maintain race free. Thank you.
Resisting Lobotomized Shakespeare: Race in/and Appropriation | Watch the full talk
Presented by Vanessa I. Corredera at Appropriations: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2020
Vanessa I. Corredera puts forward two premises for productively understanding racial representations in premodern critical race studies and in adaptations: first, that appropriations need PCRS; second, PCRS needs appropriation studies. She analyzes the Q Brothers’ adaptation Othello: The Remix as an example of an appropriation that does not critically engage with race and illustrates how crucially they need PCRS. Corredera reads Jordan Peele’s Get Out as an appropriation of Othello that offers a productive lens for engaging Shakespeare’s play. She concludes that taken together, appropriation studies and PCRS give students and scholars more complete interpretive tools for analyzing racial representation.
Early Modern
Literature
