Smith, Ian. "Reading the violent Black man myth in Hamlet." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/reading-the-violent-black-man-myth-in-hamlet. [Date accessed].

Reading the violent Black man myth in Hamlet

Further reading for an interrogation of race in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

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Ian Smith
University of Southern California

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Great Fire.” Vanity Fair, August 24, 2020. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/ta-nehisi-coates-editor-letter 

Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.  

Parker, Patricia. “Black Hamlet: Battening on the Moor.” Shakespeare Studies 31 (2003): 127-164. 

Smith, Ian. “White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage.” Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 33-67.  

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Further learning

Essay

Hamlet and the color of criminality

Bringing Hamlet into a recognizable universe of modern concerns and asking students to think about the demands reading Shakespeare and race places on them as 21st-century thinkers.

Ian Smith
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

Recommended

Video

Witnessing whiteness in the early modern world

It is crucial to scrutinize whiteness when exploring early modern constructions of social difference with students. Students are not often taught to see issues of white privilege and power.

Kim F. Hall
Video

Titus Andronicus as the gateway drug

Students believe they know what Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet or Macbeth mean, but rarely do those “meanings” stem from the students’ close engagements with the texts. Using Titus Andronicus at the beginning of any Shakespeare class forces students to experience Shakespeare anew.

Ayanna Thompson
Syllabus

Revising the Shakespeare survey

Ruben Espinosa's annotated syllabus offers entry points to broaching conversations about race and racism within a course that isn’t necessarily devoted to Shakespeare and critical race studies.

Ruben Espinosa

Selected annotated bibliography