I am talking to you, as I've put up here on the screen: (Mis)Appropriations, Shakespeare, Race, and the Police. And I should say, before I get started, that there are going to be some images that some may find a little disturbing or off-putting. This paper begins with Adam P. Kennedy and Adrian Kennedy's Obie award-winning best play, Sleep Deprivation Chamber, from 1996. An autobiographical work having a run-in with Shakespeare, with Shakespeare's Hamlet in particular. A run-in that is as incommensurable as the twenty-something, "highly educated middle class Black male protagonist” who has a run-in with the law, which leads to his being brutally beaten by the police in suburban Virginia. In Kennedy's play, written by mother and son, Teddy, the fictional son, is a senior in college and is directing the play Hamlet. And in one of many memorable scenes, Teddy is being interrogated by an unseen questioner as he, Teddy that is, stands in Yorick's grave, a recurring sight in the play. What is he doing there? What role, what alignment, or misalignment is playing out here? Is he Yorick, rendered now as always as Black clown painted inch-thick in the white cosmeticizing of higher learning, or is he a hollowed-out Hamlet as when he says to the cop during his beating, “I am an American citizen, could you please let me up and breathe?" A feint or perhaps faint with the A I N T in the faint, a feint or faint pathos-filled recall of Hamlet's "This is I, Hamlet, the Dane." Hamlet’s, however, is the moment of a heroic exhale: the articulation of the western subject’s individual freedom, his ownership of his humanness. Teddy's is something of a humanist bargain, a faint ghostly remnant of the human. The oxymoronic Black human contorting his Black body interpolating it as much as possible in American self-fashioning, so that he may take refuge in the trappings of an America that has systematically enslaved, lynched, torn apart, Jim Crowed, and incarcerated Black bodies. It's a strange place to occupy: America. A grave. Yorick's persona. Hamlet's. Not surprisingly, one of the repeated critiques of the play, that critics have talked about, is the play lacks cohesion. The play and its personas move like Teddy's uncle March, who is a retired Stanford professor, who like an unmoored King Hamlet ghost wanders through the play in every peripatetic fashion, often getting lost, going missing, searching for language to express a real history of living symbolically. “We live near the epicenter,” a line he repeats twice and almost the totality of his speaking in the Kennedy's play. Sleep Deprivation Chamber wants to work from within old Hamlet's purgatorial story of trauma narrative. The illusion of some kind of logic not only makes the storytelling itself a fiction, it renders the details anodyne, pretends to euthanize the Black bodies that are actually being torn apart, beaten, raped, lynched, murdered. Lots and lots of them. Lots and lots of us. Adam Kennedy says in a dedicatory statement at the beginning of an earlier printed edition of the play, "It is a sobering reality that my experience is such a common one." That is, the beating of Black men by the police. True in 1994. True in 1996. As true today as it was then, and of course, before. The Kennedy’s play itself is no less a traumatizing misappropriation (a critical term, in this instance, not a judgmental one) of the not-always-lawful impoverished Black Rodney King, whose March 3rd, 1991, videotaped brutal beating by three white and one non-white police officers was broadcast around the world. The iconography of that moment has a palpable stranglehold on Kennedy’s play, which features a Black college-aged man in a middle-class Black family that had done everything right. Says Suzanne, the mother in the play, "We are an outstanding Black American family, we are now a grieved family." This is the height of persecution of a Black male with tactics of the deep south, of the time 1930s in overtones of Emmett Till. We are grieved and shocked. We want these false charges dismissed. We Blacks have of course been trapped in, interpolated through a history of false charges. Now the Alexanders, the play’s family, finds itself, like Hamlet, stuck in a morass of grief and grievance. It is, of course, an unending grief and unending grievance. At the end of the Kennedy's play, the last words the audience hears are from the judge: "Case dismissed." Then Yorick's grave vanishes, but the play isn't over. The last image we see is bright light on Teddy sitting alone in the courtroom, remembering his family watching the film of his beating, his Mousetrap, as it is projected on stage, and the last thing we hear as the stage goes dark are the sounds of his screams. Still, I would argue, more traumatizing for Kennedy’s theatrical event, is the reality that Rodney King could emblematize, could be misappropriated to perform the Black man, as ontologically abject—as much as Hamlet, the white man, as universal subject. It's a strange thing that the first words spoken in the Kennedy’s play are: Ophelia, betrayal, disillusionment. And Rodney King would, in 2012, be found floating in his swimming pool the victim of an accidental drowning. Closure. Hamlet serves as a lynchpin for Sleep Deprivation Chamber, but Shakespeare refracts and cracks up at other moments in the play, as when a homeless woman stops Suzanne on her way to teach a class on the construction of a play with Aristotelian elements at New York University. Says the homeless woman: "I want to warn you that there is a vault underneath the street where brimstone lies and over it gunpowder. There is a plan for muggers on the Upper West Side to come up through a trapdoor, dressed like workmen, cast holes into the vaults so that it catches fire and consumes all. I know everyone." Giving us, of course, bits of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet. In short, Kennedy's play is about Black men and the police, refracted through postmodernists’ theatrical terror. That is, the theater itself as a primal scene, or a primal scream, and Shakespeare being called to do what? We may very well ask, why is Shakespeare in a police story? I would argue that this is the wrong question. Why the police in a Shakespeare story? It's the police disrupting the illusion of a coherent Western subjectivity, an illusion that is presumed to be accessible only by and for white consciousness, for white people. Is that a subject I see before me? In Sleep Deprivation Chamber, Suzanne repeatedly complains of not being able to sleep. Blacks have not murdered sleep, but have had their sleep murdered by posses and lynch mobs, by enthusiastic police officers, and seemingly fastidious new historicists, and far too many so-called academic humanists by false charges, by charges of misappropriation, by inappropriately, according to Western history's phenomenologies and epistemologies, by inappropriately trying to appropriate "man" with a capital M. A crucial point underscored by the late, brilliant paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould aptly and deftly titled study, The Mismeasure of Man from 1981 originally. And also, by the brilliant philosopher, essayist, dramatist, etc., Sylvia Wynter, who has argued, "For what Renaissance humanism was to effect was an extraordinary rupture at the level of the human species as a whole...the West was able to reinvent its true Christian self as that of man only because at the same time Western discourses were also inventing the untrue other of the Christian self as that of the man's human other. The invention of man is what the artists and the writers of the sixteenth century were doing." Shakespeare is key here, of course, but the “Shakespeare” I'm putting in quotation marks I evoke here isn't a metonym for the writer’s plays and poems but Shakespeare as humanist law. Shakespeare as the measure of man, Shakespeare as canonical man, especially from the age of the Enlightenment and the age of scientific racism. And what some of us have argued, early modern humanists were less busy explaining homo sapiens than they were obsessively trying to delimit him, even as they concomitantly and perhaps paradoxically, sought to universalize him. To find him as natural nobility, that is always already educated, always fully humanely endowed. Shakespeare is the apex of this aporia, where it at once is made to signal white people's racial superiority. (Where are all the Black Shakespeares, huh?) and to celebrate a universal non-raised human race. However, it's worth pointing out, if only as a way of short handing all this and moving my story along, that Shakespeare and race are inextricable terms as are race in the police i.e. policing. And by the. way, even in Shakespeare, and now I am referring to his works, Shakespeare's dozen or so uses of the word race, as Jonathan Goldberg has shown, frequently worried the question of mixture even within a noble strain. It is interesting that in most of Shakespeare's use of the word race, the concern is about the ending of that particular race, the adulteration of it. As real, violent, and consequential as the racialization in the west of the Black body is, from at least the 13th century onward, the Black body also serves as subterfuge, a seemingly salient illusionary and contained epistemic magic show for the more widespread and surreptitious policing of white people, both in relationship to non-whites and most especially, in relationship to each other. The policing of the Black body masks how the Black body gets deliberately misappropriated, theatricalized for the policing of the white body. Shakespeare gets misappropriated as racial cover. It should not surprise us then, that policing Black's relationship to Shakespeare is a thing, one in which white people, onstage and off, in and outside the Academy, are deeply and troublingly invested. Melancholically so, I’ve elsewhere insisted. Sleep Deprivation Chamber is an obviously complicated example of Shakespeare, race, and the police. A meta-example of sorts, but there are easier ones, such as the example of Alexander Brown, a free Black from the West Indies, who opened the African Grove theater in the 1820s so Black actors could perform Shakespeare for Black audiences. The performances drew large crowds, including white ones, but throughout his two-year history of changing names and locations, it had to grapple also with a white establishment taking offense at Black people performing Shakespeare. As one white critic put it at the time, who argued that The Grove audiences were generally of a riotous character. He recounts the infamous raid on The Grove on January 7th, 1822, "Police magistrates stormed the stage, stopped the production, and apprehended the entire company. The magistrates released the company from jail only after it promised to never act Shakespeare again." This moment, I would suggest, was not only about Blacks misappropriating Shakespeare or whiteness but also, if not more so, about ever-growing tensions about whiteness itself that were already being strained by a burgeoning non-Anglo immigrant population in the early part of the 19th century. This immigrant population, whose whiteness was on the cusp as a variable property, whose whiteness was being further attenuated by the likelihood of New York's abolishment of slavery some five years later, that is in the year 1827. I say even more so, because it wasn't just that powerful institutional, political, and cultural forces had no appetite for Black Shakespearean thespians, but as a sign of their own will to proper whiteness. The legitimate theater, as they called it, was namely the big theatre across the street from Alexander Brown's theatre. That Alexander Brown thought he could compete with the legitimate theater of course is the point of some ridicule. And one of the ways that we understand, too, of the way that Shakespeare was done (the “legitimate” Shakespeare) in the 1820s in New York, is that it was important to bring in the actors for lead roles from London itself. And show that America was indeed part of Anglo culture. Americans, American whites, we could say, were still in rehearsal. Their misappropriation of white Anglo culture was still on its way to becoming suitably appropriated as the better sort of Americans continued to police and perform and at times Shakespeare (I'm using it as a verb here) and to Shakespeare their way into white cultural authenticity. It's worth considering one more example. This one even earlier, from Thomas Rymer, who in 1678 coined the phrase poetic justice, the spirit of which he presumably put to use in his 1693, A Short View of Tragedy, where he lambastes not only Shakespeare's Othello but also Shakespeare himself for what he sees as Shakespeare's misappropriation of Cinthio’s tale, Shakespeare's mismeasurement. Shakespeare's first mistake, according to Rymer, was his bestowing a name on his moor, a gesture that in itself gives Othello, argued Rymer, “a dignity that is an affront to all chroniclers and Antiquaries. A Negro be their general and to marry him to the daughter of an heir of some great Lord, none of this comports with the condition of a general or indeed of a man.” I would ask you to think again about Sylvia Wynter, and I would insist there is no humanistic innocence here in Rymer’s man who stands firmly in contradistinction to what Ian Smith has cogently shown to be the racialized critical barbarity of the non-white other. In other words, man is racially white, not a generic species marker of the human race. And while it's beyond the scope of this particular essay, but something I hope to pursue in our discussion immediately following this essay, and something I'll argue in the introduction to the soon-to-be forthcoming White People in Shakespeare, whiteness was not an attribute or attainable by all what we may consider to be, white men or white people. In his misappropriation of Cinthio, Shakespeare fails, according to Rymer to properly police "his Negro.” Rymer argues that while Shakespeare's last speech may remind one, this is quoting him, "of the style of the last speeches and confessions of the persons executed at Tyburn." There, Rymer contends, "justice would be served." Here in Othello, I'm quoting Rymer again, "Shakespeare against all justice and reason, against all law, against all humanity and nature, in a barbarous way, executes and makes havoc of his subject as they come to hand.” Not surprisingly, many Shakespeare and early modern critical race scholars, myself included, would argue that there are a few fields within Shakespeare and early modern studies more important and consequential than critical race studies. At its humanist, sharpest, and its most insistent, it argues that indeed Black lives matter. Yes, in the United States, but also globally, and at the field’s broadest disciplinary reach, its fighting for the soul of the humanities itself, and yes for the progressive or troubled soul of Shakespeare. These are grand words to be sure, but they are also apropos, given the real beginnings of Shakespeare and critical race studies in the mid 20th century, and in the broader world of those fighting for social and racial justice, particularly as responses to the terrorism being systematically heaped upon Black persons and Black bodies. Not surprisingly, many of these same Shakespeare and early modern critical race scholars, myself included again, would argue that especially, but not only since the advent of New Historicism in the 1980s, no field has been more policed than Shakespeare and early modern studies. Before saying just a few words more, and as we begin to close out this fabulous conference, I would like to remind us of some of the important tenets of critical race studies and its distinction from what Margo Hendricks, at the last RaceB4Race, called racial study tourism. Tourism belabors and performs phenomenological and epistemological tricks that temporally and spatially locate race elsewhere and nowhere. And if it could even be imagined to be present (with the tourists), the word race (often flanked by scare quotes threatening to forklift it from the page) that the word race is too inchoate and too obfuscated a term in the period to have much purchase. It's a term that must be heavily policed, and often but not always, more sotto voce. Like Shakespeare himself needs to be protected from Shakespeare and early modern scholars of color, particularly Black ones. Shakespeare and early modern critical race studies works with three important affirmative arguments. One: race as an assemblage of racialized processes is very much founded on endlessly mutable acts of social and political violence, on acts of essentially social and political terrorism. Two: Western modernity is intimately bound to early modern race formations that come long before post-enlightenment and scientific iterations of race, which transformed these earlier iterations by fitting them into discourses that suited the phenomenological and epistemological needs of other eras, giving them purchase and authenticity in different locations and at different moments. And three: it is important to study all this, not only to deepen our understanding of race as a subject in and of itself, but in order for us to better grasp the role race played in plays in shaping the sense of discovery and enthusiasm in text -- locally and globally -- that gave birth to the Renaissance and made possible the kinetic energies that gave us the early modern stage. As Iago promises his eager audience—his hungry posse of an audience— “I have ‘t! It is engendered! Hell and night must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light.” Some of the grounding questions asked by Shakespeare critical race scholars have focused on the relationship between Shakespeare's humanity and the humanity of Black folks. Critical Shakespeare and early modern race work is by no means univocal: it involves a diversity of approaches and informed perspectives, it operates often implicitly but sometimes more explicitly with something akin to Alexander G. Weheliye’s exacting argument that quote, “the volatile rapport between race and the human is defined,” he says, “by two constellations. First there exists no portion of the modern human,” he says, “that is not subject to racialization which determines the hierarchical order of the homo sapien species into humans, not-quite humans, and nonhumans.” Second, continuing the quote, “as a result, humanity has held a very different status for the traditions of the racially oppressed. The human as a secular entity, a scientific and humanistic inquiry has functioned,” he says, “as a central topos of modernity since the Renaissance.” From this perspective, Shakespeare in early and modern race studies seeks to understand the how and why Shakespeare and his early modern English contemporaries thought to reinvent, not to invent, to delimit and theorize about the humanity of themselves especially in relationship to the humanity of others. Why did they appropriate, why did they misappropriate, other human beings? At the risk of stating the obvious, this area of inquiry is of course open to non-Black and non-people-of-color interlocutors. Many prominent studies have been written by white scholars. It would be misleading, however, to pass over the fact that self-identified scholars of color, particularly Black ones, have been crucial to the development of this field. And I was thinking here to something that Justin said earlier in that mesmerizing talk he gave earlier: how we see appropriating Black culture but leaving behind Black people. I would say to him that yes this is exactly also our experience in critical race studies in Shakespeare and the early modern period. It is somewhat surreal to sit, not in this room, but to sit in many other institutional conference spaces, and to hear Black thought and Black critique (that some of us have been doing for a decades now, and paying the price for as well), to watch that material in those studies get appropriated by white scholars who often find themselves discovering something new and at the same time they elide the very voices and the very people who have done that work. That is what came to my mind when Ayanna Thompson wrote me and asked me if I wanted to come and speak about appropriation. I thought yes: I want to come and talk about intellectual theft. It has been scholars of color who have most insistently and persistently argued for the importance of studying Shakespeare in a racialized context, especially given the prominence afforded to Shakespeare in Western literature in thought and also of course given the reading of Shakespeare from Ben Jonson to Harold Bloom to Jacob Burckhardt to Stephen Greenblatt among many, many others, the reading of Shakespeare as to quote Stephen Greenblatt, “the embodiment of human freedom.” A freedom which seems to go hand in hand with the earning of human status itself. Race is capacious and any viable critical intervention requires a capacious response. Part of this capaciousness includes thinking about race and racializing processes not just with respect to Shakespeare on the early modern stage or the early modern period more broadly but taking seriously a critique of our and your scholarly habits and practices. The way we police our bodies and scholarship (and I'm talking to the scholars of color) as a way of belonging, and the ways our bodies and our scholarship are policed, as an art of exclusion, sit at the evidentiary core of Shakespeare and early modern studies. Critical race studies builds from here. Working through the archives, and critical race theorizing, to take on to take on these issues: of embodiment, the human. Whiteness, Blackness, anti-Blackness, brownness, swarthiness, intersectionalities with gender, sex, able-bodiedness, religion, class, sexuality, queerness, nationality, etc, etc, etc. Taking all these on in order to better understand it as phenomenon and as epistemology, not only in the workings of Shakespeare's 16th and 17th centuries, but also in Shakespeare's afterlives, including in Shakespeare studies and for us here especially in Shakespeare studies. And that is, studies that are in the past. Studies that are in the present. And as I rage on, I am of course thinking about those studies in the future.
(Mis)Appropriations, Shakespeare, Race, and the Police | Watch the full video
Presented by Arthur L. Little, Jr. at Appropriations: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2020
Arthur L. Little, Jr. addresses the ways Shakespeare and early modern studies are policed in and out of the academy. He reflects on “policing” in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Adam P. Kennedy and Adrienne Kennedy’s Sleep Deprivation Chamber play, drawing parallels to the police brutality experienced by Rodney King on March 3, 1991, which was broadcast to the world. Little compares the policing of the Black body to the intellectual theft that often surrounds Shakespeare and early modern studies.
Early Modern
Literature
