Smith, Ian. "Reading race in Shakespeare." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/reading-race-in-shakespeare. [Date accessed].

Reading race in Shakespeare

Further reading into the "cliché of race."

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Ian Smith
University of Southern California

Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard. Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

Little, Arthur, Jr. “Is it Possible to Read Shakespeare through Critical White Studies?” In Ayanna Thompson, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020: 268-80.

Marcus, Stephen and Sharon Best. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108.1 (2009): 1-21.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Schreiner, Susan E. “Appearances and Reality in Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare.” The Journal of Religion 83.3 (2003): 345-80.

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Further learning

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
Essay

Racialized skin in Shakespeare

The necessity of excavating and exposing the forms of whiteness that both drive the cliché of race and offer students opportunities for more sharply defined social critique and self-interrogation.

Ian Smith

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Sierra Lomuto examines the field of medieval studies and how it privileges whiteness in knowledge production. The Global Medieval/Early Globalities as a methodology can open up current structures and create a spacetime beyond Europe.

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RaceB4Race Highlight

Defining race, periodizing race

In her 2019 RaceB4Race talk at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Geraldine Heng argues for thinking about race in transhistorical terms.

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Selected annotated bibliography