Hall, Kim F. "Blackness and Shakespeare's sonnets." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/blackness-and-shakespeares-sonnets. [Date accessed].

Blackness and Shakespeare's sonnets

Using Shakespeare's sonnets to discuss race-making through the language of 'fairness' and 'darkness.'

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Kim F. Hall
Barnard College

Shakespeare’s sonnets allow for generative conversations about the way perceptions of fairness and darkness inform understandings of race in the early modern world. Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets, in particular, tether whiteness not only to physical beauty but to national identity for the English. By attending to the way the sonnets deploy whiteness to consider social and gendered hierarchies, we are able to see how uses of fairness reveal emergent ideologies of white supremacy. As a result, Kim F. Hall explains, we find that the dark lady sonnets threaten the entitlement of whiteness, rendering a real danger for those with dark bodies.

Further learning

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One word essay

This assignment in Kim F. Hall's Shakespeare courses asks students to analyze a single word in early modern texts using a variety of primary sources.

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Kim F. Hall assigns the unessay to have students tackle an intellectual knot outside the constraints of the usual college essay.

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This assignment asks students to investigate online databases in search of BIPOC who lived in England between 1500-1700.

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