bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Dispossessed and Unaccommodated
Authors: Dugan Holly 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
In this chapter, we analyse the torture scene in King Lear, arguing that metaphors of animality and enslavement attach to Cornwall’s unnamed servant in order to mitigate his attempts to intervene and stop the violence. Though a minor character, the servant’s fate reveals a wider map of power than the play is invested in representing. Furthermore, the insults hurled at him by Regan and Cornwall symbolically link animals with enslaved people and both with precarity and superfluity. Called both a dog and a slave by Regan and Cornwall, killed and tossed on a dunghill outside of Gloucester’s home, Cornwall’s servant’s death provides a useful opportunity to connect recent scholarship in premodern critical race studies with critical animal studies and critical disability studies.
‘Give me conquer’d Egypt’
Authors: Dadabhoy Ambereen 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter examines the Eastern Mediterranean geography of Antony and Cleopatra, arguing that the Islamicate cultures of this region provide an alternate context for the play’s empire-building project. The chapter offers a history of Islamicate Egypt and of Ottoman dominance in the region. Furthermore, it advances Islamic cognates for the play’s action and characters, suggesting alternative contexts for Shakespeare’s drama.
Shakespeare, Race, and Appropriation
Authors: Corredera Vanessa I. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
As three concepts all deeply intertwined with power, appropriation, Shakespeare, and race potently speak to and inform one another. This chapter considers appropriation as both a power move and a form of reimagined work to spotlight the complexity of this interrelationship. I begin by examining how race and appropriation shape one another across numerous citations from Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre. Moving across genres, I trace a dynamic in which racialized identities are appropriated for the purpose of denigration and marginalization, thereby upholding various forms of white superiority. I then turn to two contemporary appropriations—the comedy sketch ‘Rome and Julissa’ from The Black Lady Sketch Show and appropriative moments in the Public Theater’s Much Ado About Nothing—to demonstrate how modern works appropriate yet sideline Shakespeare by using his cultural capital to explore and expose contemporary racial issues. These appropriative moves thereby highlight the very identities frequently disregarded and repressed in Shakespeare’s plays.
Coordinating Racisms in The Merchant of Venice
Authors: Kaplan M. Lindsay 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
A consideration of the construction of a Jewish racial identity in early and medieval Christian theology, and its coordination with ideas about Africans and Muslims, offers an explanatory lens on Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Premodern Christian texts construct powerful antiBlack, anti-Jewish, and anti-Muslim foundational myths that contribute to racial formation by positioning white Christians as superior to damned infidels. These discourses correlate negative associations of Blackness with sin and the demonic, creating an inferior status, not only for ‘Ethiopians’, but also for Jews and Muslims. A consideration of the play’s representations of the Prince of Morocco, the ‘negro … Moor’ woman, Shylock, and Jessica, viewed in the context of contemporary cultural discourses, reveals the persistence of earlier Christian racial forms. An awareness of the shared histories of these identities helps us understand the ideologies shaping contemporary intolerance and offers opportunities for better coalition-building in twenty-first-century challenges to systemic racism.
Monstrous Indigeneity and the Discourse of Race in Shakespeare’s England
Authors: Stevens Scott Manning 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter examines the intersections and distinctions between the fields of critical race studies and critical Indigenous studies regarding the study of Shakespeare’s works. In recent decades critics have become increasingly aware of the issue of race within Shakespeare studies and have also explored the place of colonialism within the same context, but what has come to be known as critical Indigenous studies has only recently become part of the broader discourse in early modern literary studies. ‘Race’ in the early modern era depended largely on descent and culture (i.e. language and religion), whereas ‘Indigeneity’, as we use the term now, did not exist. Its closest intellectual cognate would have been ‘native inhabitant’. With the rise of early modern imperialism came the establishment of settler colonialism, and I argue that a racialized notion of monstrosity was deployed to abrogate Indigenous sovereignty and dispossess them of their territories. Caliban, like other Indigenous figures, must first be rendered monstrous in order to legitimize European conquest and rule.
Shakespeare, Race, and Feminist Critique
Authors: Howard Jean E. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter discusses the relationship of feminism and critical race studies in early modern scholarship by taking Shakespeare’s Othello and Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen as case studies. Arguing that race and gender are interconnected systems of social difference, the chapter makes the case for an intersectional criticism alert to the many ways early modern race was conceptualized and to how early modern gender distinctions were affected by class and sexuality as well as by race. If, in Othello, race is primarily conceived within a Black/white binary, in The Two Noble Kinsmen it is best defined by distinctions between those of one’s kind and kin and those who are not. The chapter identifies the aggregation of traits and capacities that allows some characters to be recognized as of one kind, while excluding and negating others. For both plays, a feminist lens reveals the relational connections between categories of difference and the contradictions and multiplier effects stemming from their imbrication.
Shakespeare and Mixed Race
Authors: Grady Kyle 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter considers how early modern English routines of exceptionalizing racial mixing distort more accurate understandings of how mixedness often factored in the period. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus offers key examples of such routines, representing procreative racial mixing as a novel and foreboding matter. But mixedness did not reliably factor in the period as anywhere near as ostensibly consequential as it does in Titus. Shakespeare’s early tragedy demonstrates instead the extent to which the topic could be instrumentalized. While mixedness was rendered urgent in some instances, it was frequently downplayed or rendered immaterial in others, depending, in part, on the exigencies of developing racist practice and ideology. As this chapter contends, such deemphasis is key to representations of racial Blackness on the early modern English stage.
‘Let fair humanity abhor the deed’
Authors: Mendoza Kirsten N. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
The root word ‘human’ appears approximately forty-seven times in twenty-two works from Shakespeare’s dramatic corpus and poetry. Generally, Shakespeare incorporates the term ‘human’ to denote two issues: (1) inclusion or exclusion from a particular group and (2) the treatment and behaviours that members of a specific community or kind are expected to share and reciprocate towards one another. Writing more than 300 years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was codified in 1948, Shakespeare presented being human as inextricably bound to questions of belonging and to processes of exclusion as well as to the principles and ideologies that are expected to guide interactions among people. Through analysing Shakespeare’s narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece and his plays The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, and The Comedy of Errors, this chapter analyses how Shakespeare’s works advocated for an expansion of the rights and protections of specific disenfranchised individuals. His corpus reveals that a call to recognize a shared humanity is a call for reciprocity that acknowledges the self-possession and self-determination of others—two concepts that have been integral to the understanding of basic human rights. However, Shakespeare’s works also evince the threat to privilege that such calls for recognition entails, since attending to human rights requires the circumscription of power and the limitation of privilege. Shakespeare, then, participates simultaneously in the expansion for rights, protections, and privileges as well as in the discursive production of justifications for racial prejudice and the differential treatment among people.
Shakespeare, Race, and Disability
Authors: Dhar Amrita 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
The critical and imaginative points of departure for this chapter reside in the questions: How did Othello come to be in Venice? What did he leave behind, and what did he learn on his way? Did he ever arrive? Did he belong? And where is he now? This chapter discusses Othello through critical and creative voices in postcolonial studies, migration studies, premodern critical race studies, and disability studies to examine the mutually informing forces of colonialism, empire-making, disability-making, and race-making that operate in the play. It reads selected moments in Shakespeare’s play, and engages with Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré’s Desdemona, to ultimately suggest possible pasts, presents, and futures for Othello and his transgeographical families.
Shakespeare and Race
Authors: Della Gatta Carla 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
The Oral Histories Project is a series of interviews with fourteen actors, directors, producers, and playwrights. Portions from each interview are grouped together by topic, placing the interviewees in a conversation-style format. The artists are from different countries whose experiences vary greatly in the making of Shakespeare. Interviews focused on the nuanced ways that Shakespeare and race intersect, from various definitions of race to actor training and language/accent work to changes in characterization due to concept settings or casting choices, changes in theme, pacing, and style due to a racially focused setting for a Shakespeare play, or anything else pertaining to the experience of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) artists working on Shakespeare. The Oral Histories models how theatre-making is a form of criticism and it serves as a model for scholarship that centres artists.
Editing Shakespeare and Race
Authors: Adams Brandi K. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Through an examination of a very early instance of the word ‘editor’ that occurs in William Prynne’s anti-theatrical tract Histrio-mastix (1633), this chapter considers carefully the history and implications of editing Shakespeare plays in which early modern conceptions of race—a subject matter that has been a significant area of study for the last forty years—have largely been marginalized or ignored. This tendency may be the result of an editorial aversion to considering race as a significant factor in the performance, printing, and publication of Shakespeare’s plays, or an investment in the seemingly neutral, scientific language and rhetoric of influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century editors W.W. Greg, R.B. McKerrow, A.W. Pollard, and other practitioners of New Bibliography. These particular white, male, early editors of Shakespeare (and his contemporaries) seemed to operate under the premise that they were able to edit in a neutral, objective way that could produce the clearest uncontroversial text possible for literary scholars and other readers. Their work also obfuscated a reality: that the editing of early modern plays is not a neutral endeavour and that the choices editors make both affect and shape social, political, and even racial histories. By employing the work of premodern critical race scholars, this chapter attempts to trace a history that connects the antiblackness connected to the first use of the term ‘editor’, to consider the importance of race in contemporary editorial practices.
Translation at the Intersections of Shakespeare and Race
Authors: Modenessi Alfredo Michel 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Shakespeare’s works make hard, ever-accruing demands on translators because the multiple energies at work in their complex design change and expand unceasingly, together with Shakespeare itself, with societies and cultures, and with translation. Chief among the translator’s tasks, then, is to tackle those demands head-on for stage artists to do right by their art and their publics. The intersections of ‘race’ with Shakespeare, and the presence thereby of racism and kindred forms of prejudiced differentiation in his works—and in critical literature—pose a major challenge. What should a thorough translator do about it? What has been done? Translational choices have been and will be made according to specific reasons and circumstances. What are they? How do they relate to text, to stage, to people? This chapter explores artefacts, objects, and events where Shakespeare and race meet and pull translation towards answers to their conflictive intersections.
An Interview with Artist Fred Wilson, 30 July 2021
Authors: Erickson Peter , Corrin Lisa Graziose 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This contribution consists of an edited conversation between the Black artist, Fred Wilson; literary scholar, Peter Erickson; and art historian/curator, Lisa Graziose Corrin. The conversation focuses on Wilson’s ongoing engagement with Shakespeare’s play, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. Wilson’s interest in Othello began in 2003, when he represented the United States in the distinguished international exhibition, the Venice Biennale. The title of his Biennale installation, Speak of Me as I Am, evokes the tragic final speech uttered by Othello, just before he kills himself. Shakespeare’s play has continued to be a rich source of inspiration for his reflections on race and representation for nearly twenty years. A brief introduction by Erickson argues for the value of cross-historical, contemporary re-visionings of Shakespeare’s work by contemporary writers and artists for expanding understanding of his work and amplifying its relevance to the present.
Shakespeare and Race on Screen
Authors: Sen Amrita 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter explores the plural and often contradictory ways in which race travels in Shakespeare adaptations in Indian cinema. The role of race, and racialized characters in Shakespeare, has come under renewed focus in recent years, as has the growing field of Global Shakespeares. The question remains: how does race figure in screen adaptations of the Bard outside of Anglo-American contexts, particularly in the Indian subcontinent? This chapter will turn to Ajoy Kar’s Bengali film Saptapadi (1961), Jayaraaj’s Malayalam film Kaliyattam (1997), and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Bollywood movie Omkara (2006) to show how race in Othello translated into caste in post-independence India. On the other hand, neither race nor caste seem to play any obvious role in Bornila Chatterjee’s The Hungry (2017). An adaptation of Titus Andronicus, Chatterjee’s film erases the multi-racial and imperial setting of the play, and the figure of Aaron the Moor becomes effectively indistinguishable from the other characters.
Teaching Shakespeare and Race in Communities of Colour
Authors: Espinosa Ruben 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
While Shakespeare’s iconic status often results in views that take his value as a given, on the US-Mexico border it is imperative that this understood currency is scrutinized without reservation. Because the issue of linguistic identity is so often fraught for Chicanxs in the United States, Shakespeare’s language is often seen as both a marker of that which one ought to aspire to, engage, and apprehend and that which is altogether inaccessible. Through experience teaching at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), the author does not seek to make students appreciate Shakespeare’s language for the legacy it has already left, but rather invite them to consider how their view of Shakespeare—how their apprehension of what his works and his words have to offer—stands to redefine the legacy he leaves in their border community.
‘Reading’ Shakespeare as Political Activism
Authors: Hall Kim F. 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
The popular Black Shakespeare performers of the nineteenth century were known as Shakespeare ‘readers’. Barred from the dominant stage, these actors performed a fragmented Shakespeare often interspersed with popular Black poetry, their own writings, and music. This chapter uses ‘reader’ as a point of departure for identifying ‘Shakespearean’ performers, writers, and intellectuals in three case studies from nodal points of Black freedom struggle. These moments—in Brazil, South Africa, and the USA—bring to the fore questions of race and Black freedom while creating spaces for unlearning and developing various literacies. They also provide ways of addressing the role of pleasure in institution building and social transformation. It is suggested that Shakespeare has played an important (if fragmentary and variable) role in forging political subjects and communities of action.
‘In her prophetic fury’
Authors: Mehdizadeh Nedda 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter advocates for a student-centred and culturally responsive approach to studying Shakespeare which can encourage students to become active participants in producing knowledge about his works. By empowering students to engage with Shakespeare’s world from their own perspectives, educators can affirm the subject positions from which students’ ideas are born while guiding them through engaged instruction on critical modes of intervention. The chapter focuses discussion on a course unit that pairs Othello with Djanet Sears’s play Harlem Duet (1997) and argues that a close study of Sears’s play alongside Othello enhances students’ interpretation of early modern racial formation and the long-lasting effects of racism. By examining Harlem Duet, an adaptation that is a critical intervention in Shakepeare’s racial politics, students deepen their critical thinking skills about race, racial formation, and racism in Shakespeare’s time as well as their own.
Trans Studies at the Crossroad
Authors: Joubin Alexa Alice 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter argues that race and gender are social practices that evolve over time, in each other’s presence, and in different social spaces. To correct the early modern studies’ tendency to privilege narrative texts, this chapter uses global and performance studies methods—as critical tools that are designed to capture transformative cultural practices—to highlight embodied significations of transness. The chapter concludes with a reflection on pedagogical implications of multidisciplinarity. Providing critical tools to understand atypical bodies, trans studies solidifies critical race studies’ support of minority life experiences. Critical race methods, with their attention to the social production of hierarchies, can also help trans studies address its often-unacknowledged whiteness.
Casting Shakespeare Today
Authors: Della Gatta Carla 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter expands widely-used casting categories such as ‘colour blind’ and ‘colour-concept’ from four categories (as quoted in Thompson) to nine categories. It also addresses the rationale for removing ‘colour’ as the primary focus of casting decisions and provides new terminology that shifts away from ableist language (such as problematic usage of ‘blind’). The chapter puts forward terms such as ‘Nondeliberate Identity Casting’ as ‘Identity Conscious Casting’ instead. Citing diverse artists and casting scholars throughout, this chapter is the culmination of more than a decade of research and practice in the theatre. The chapter closes with a critical analysis of the factors that inform questions of dramaturgy, ethics, authenticity, and positionality in casting practices. The new and expanded vocabulary about casting is necessary for a wider conversation about staging and the aesthetic considerations and ethical practices of theatre-making.
Shakespeare and Critical Race Theory
Authors: Chakravarty Urvashi 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
This chapter begins by tracing some of the key arguments and developments in critical race theory, with a particular focus on its provenance in legal studies, its systemic analysis of the operations of race and race-making, its interventions into an understanding of whiteness as property, its theory of interest convergence, and its emphasis on intersectionality. The chapter then turns to the critical directions in Shakespeare studies which have originated in and have been influenced by critical race theory. The third and final part of this chapter suggests that thinking with critical race theory as a methodology unfolds new ways of understanding the operations of systemic racial inequity in The Merchant of Venice, in particular its fiction of equal protection and its framework of interest convergence, and the chapter ends with a brief reading of the operations of whiteness in Measure for Measure.
The Oral Histories
Authors: Della Gatta Carla 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
Each of the artists were asked about how they identify, how others identify them, and about the very language we use to discuss identity—which differs across countries and generations. These conversations revealed that the complexity of identity cannot be reduced to any one factor including race—and that gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, immigration patterns, and more, are intricately tied to any conversation about race. Identity involves multiple histories—political, economic, familial, personal, etc., extending through time to one’s recent personal history. As many of the artists note, the language for identity has changed during their lifetimes, and this both informs and reflects their own self-identification. The artists reveal the insufficiency of language to capture one’s identity and the ongoing struggle this produces professionally and onstage.
The Oral Histories
Authors: Della Gatta Carla 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
For theatre artists, the space and origin of where language is located in the body has as much to do with actor training as it does with identity. The artists had much to say about the location of sound, and how varied experiences in the conservatory or classroom were in dialogue with their own corporeal knowledge and experience. The conversation about finding rhythm in the body shifted between musicality, breath, movement, and the body as tool for storytelling. Shakespeare’s poetry is a music on its own, and the path to embodying those sounds is both destination and practice for work with other playwrights.
The Oral Histories
Authors: Della Gatta Carla 
Published: January 2024

Abstract
The processes for directing and performing Shakespeare vary widely, but all of the artists continuously circled back to two primary elements: language and collaboration. The approaches to Shakespearean language referenced in this chapter run the gamut from folio technique, to dramaturgical research, to Method acting, to political-social analysis. Each approach serves the artist in their craft. With collaboration, the approaches run the gamut as well, and in each case, the work of collaboration reflects the importance of a diversity of artists and a diversity of processes in approaching art-making in order to create new meaning from Shakespeare’s plays. The artists share their approaches for linguistic translation and for artistic translation for the stage.