Grady, Kyle. "Racial mixing in Titus Andronicus." www.throughlines.org/suite-content/racial-mixing-in-titus-andronicus. [Date accessed].

Racial mixing in Titus Andronicus

Early modern English familiarity with race and racial difference.

Download the transcript
Kyle Grady
University of California, Irvine

Teaching Titus Andronicus can open up conversations about early modern English familiarity with race and racial difference, as well as to help students consider the inconsistent ways that race operates in the world around them. In particular, Titus’s tendency to play up the significance of mixed identity helps students think through how mixedness often registers differently today depending on the context, sometimes being framed as meaningful and other times not registering at all. Especially in a moment like our present, when mixed-race identity is sometimes framed as a late 20th- and early 21st-century phenomenon, seeing it represented in an Elizabethan play can encourage students to investigate the past as a way to better understand the present.

Further learning

Essay

Navigating mixed-race identities in Shakespeare

Titus Andronicus is a play that demonstrates early modern English dexterity with racial constructs. This nuance is demonstrated in part through its representations of racial mixing and mixed-race identity.

Kyle Grady
Activity

Journaling through questions of race

The journal is a place where students can engage in dialogue with themselves. This kind of reflection helps students track how their understandings of race develop over time.

Kyle Grady

Recommended

Video

Race in Hamlet: The violent Black man myth

Rather than try to tell a sociological story about the "violent Black man" myth, we can examine one instance of this racial mythmaking in a widely studied, influential literary forebear: Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Ian Smith
Video

A brief history of Indian policy

A bit of the history leading up to the start of the contemporary Native theater movement. While not a comprehensive history, this is a small ideological dip into some of the major cultural shifts and moments in policy.

Madeline Sayet
Video

The cliché of race

Probing the cliché of race is a necessary moral objective and pedagogic requirement that begins by making race visible in Shakespeare’s texts to disrupt the prevalence of a destructive, convenient untruth.

Ian Smith