Smith, Ian. "The cliché of race." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/the-cliche-of-race. [Date accessed].

The cliché of race

A necessary moral objective and pedagogic requirement that begins by making race visible in Shakespeare’s texts.

Download the transcript
Ian Smith
University of Southern California

How is the cliché of race developed in the early modern literary canon? The emphasis on skin and its emergence to prominence represents an important shift in the history of racial ideology that, in the premodern era, had relied on religion, geography, and language. Complaints about the injustice and unoriginality of this topsy-turvy, upside-down racial cliché have been set aside since its maintenance and durability are, in fact, the cultural goal. By asking students to interrogate the role of the cliché, they are given the opportunity to understand how race is understood as a form of cliché itself.

Further learning

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
Reading list

Reading race in Shakespeare

Suggested readings from Ian Smith for an in-depth understanding of the "cliché of race."

Ian Smith

Recommended

Essay

Shakespeare and the history of Indian policy in the United States

It is important when teaching Shakespeare in America to acknowledge the colonial legacy that brought his texts to this land.

Madeline Sayet
RaceB4Race Highlight

Shakespeare and the War on Terror

Ambereen Dadabhoy investigates the long history of the logics of the War on Terror and how these structure narratives about Muslims across the centuries.

Ambereen Dadabhoy
Reading list

Staging Islam and Shakespeare

Ambereen Dadabhoy’s course asks students to investigate how individual, cultural, and political Muslim identity is manufactured in Shakespeare’s canon.

Ambereen Dadabhoy