Corredera, Vanessa I. "Resisting Lobotomized Shakespeare: Race in/and Appropriation." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/pcrs-and-appropriation-studies. [Date accessed].
PCRS and appropriation studies
Appropriation studies and PCRS give students more complete interpretive tools for analyzing racial representation.
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.
Further learning
Recommended
Henry V and belonging
Shakespeare's language and status in the Western canon can feel inhospitable to many students, especially students of color. Teaching Henry V with a focus on linguistic identity, legitimacy, and belonging can open conversations that allow students to carve out a Shakespeare for themselves.
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Blackness and Shakespeare's sonnets
Shakespeare’s works at large, and early modern literature more broadly, all deal with constructions of race. Shakespeare’s sonnets are especially fruitful for considering how the languages of fairness and darkness are used in nuanced ways to develop particular understandings of race.
