“Intelligently organized resistance”: Shakespeare in the Diasporic Politics of John E. Bruce

In 1916 the black journalist and organizer John Edward Bruce outlined an approach for the study of Shakespeare aimed at racial uplift. This chapter situates Bruce’s inaugural address to “The Friends of Shakespeare,” a black organization for the study and performance of Shakespeare, in the wider U.S. context of migration, the rise of white nationalism, and pan-Africanist thought. An autodidact, Bruce advocated for a collaborative approach to studying Shakespeare’s works in their historical context and alongside works by black authors. Comparing Bruce’s collectivist and historicist strategies for using Shakespeare as a vehicle for racial uplift, with radical pedagogies described more recently by Joyce E. King and others, Hall argues that the study of Shakespeare, then as now, can equip students for “intelligently organized resistance.”

African-American Shakespeares: Loving Blackness as Political Resistance

Can a Shakespeare course effectively historicize and challenge Shakespeare’s deployment in U.S. educational contexts “as an instrument of white racial consolidation and non-white marginalization”? Demeter offers a concise summary of Shakespeare’s positioning as the pinnacle of “universal” white, Western cultural values before detailing a course that combines Richard III, Henry IV Part I, and Othello with responses to Shakespeare’s works by black artists such as James Baldwin, August Wilson, Toni Morrison, and Djanet Sears. Though he hoped that placing African-American literature and Shakespeare “on equal footing” would provoke critical interrogations of Shakespeare’s privileged place in the literary canon, Demeter finds Shakespeare’s whiteness and universality difficult myths to dismantle, and offers his ambivalent experience as a way to frame key questions about the relation between Shakespeare pedagogy and social justice.

An Afterword About Self/Communal Care

It is interesting to note that the terms “Shakespeare” and “social justice” are neither assumed to be synonymous nor necessarily “relevant” to each other. I find this particularly ironic because as a black, female Shakespeare scholar, I have come to think of Shakespeare as my great secret weapon. I frequently wield him in the service of dialogues about equality, justice, and progress as a hidden dagger that slices to the heart of the matter. As a graduate student, I specifically chose not to specialize in African-American literature and culture because I thought (naively and mistakenly) that I would not get a large enough set of interlocutors; many who are resistant to pedagogies/scholarship of justice simply opt not to engage with (i.e. ignore all together) African-American literature, culture, and scholarship. Shakespeare, on the other hand, has been so thoroughly adopted as both the epitome of high culture and as quintessentially American (regardless of the pesky fact of his birth in Stratford-upon-Avon) that many come to his works on the page, the stage, and in the classroom with their defenses down. They are more open and available to complex social issues when they encounter them in Shakespeare’s works. My students regularly comment that they come to my classes to study Shakespeare but leave having learned so much more about our contemporary world. I know that many of you will have heard similar comments....

Cultivating Critical Content Knowledge: Early Modern Literature, Pre-service Teachers, and New Methodologies for Social Justice

In this chapter, Todd Butler and Ashley Boyd give new reasons for attending to pedagogical training in literary studies classrooms. With so many English majors planning to enter secondary classrooms of their own, Butler and Boyd highlight the potential impact that combining social justice and content knowledge pedagogies can have on generations of classroom learners. At the same time, they claim that including teaching methodologies in undergraduate literature courses builds pedagogy as a habit of mind for all undergraduates, encouraging them to consider issues of social justice in their readings, and how those issues might be effectively conveyed to others.

Literary Justice: The Participatory Ethics of Early Modern Possible Worlds

Where early modern writers traffic in imaginative inventions, they often do so with the aim of effecting positive change. In this chapter, Debapriya Sarkar puts pressure on the ethical relation between literature’s celebration of possible worlds and the pedagogical value of such imagined realms for the reader—and, by extension, for the student of early modern literature and culture. She shows how we might tap into the ubiquitous presence of imaginary worlds in early modern literature; these “golden” worlds of the imagination simultaneously practice and theorize ways of knowing and being in the actual world. What Sarkar calls “participatory readerly ethics” reveals “the radical potential of poiesis” to help us transform what is into what might be.

Confronting Bias and Identifying Facts: Teaching Resistance Through Shakespeare

This chapter foregrounds the essential role of critical analysis in an era when facts, feelings, opinions, news, and propaganda have become increasingly hard to disambiguate. Carla Della Gatta explains that Shakespeareans are in an excellent position to help students navigate this terrain, thanks to our field’s “lengthy, cross-cultural, and international history of determining, disputing, and reinterpreting facts,” a habit that can be put to especial use in identifying various modes of misinformation and bias. This chapter relates exercises in introductory scholarly editing and comparative theatrical/film analyses that enable students to be makers, not just consumers, of knowledge. Putting primary sources directly in students’ hands empowers them to apply rigorous analysis, solve interpretive problems, and hone their confidence in questioning established authority and venerated “facts.” The payoffs span from the understanding of Renaissance literature to informed encounters with “fake news,” biased sources, or unresearched content.

Shakespearean Tragedy, Ethics, and Social Justice

How can the study of literary form shape students’ understanding of ethics, justice, and community? This chapter describes a course that yokes Shakespearean tragedies to ethical philosophy from Aristotle to Patricia J. Williams. Through these pairings, students compare the benefits of cognitive and affective learning, consider questions of epistemic injustice, reasoning, and belief in historical moments of epistemological crisis, and question the roles of individuals and collectivities in precipitating tragic outcomes. Detailing her approach to teaching Othello alongside Williams’ “The Obliging Shell,” the author illustrates the importance of historicizing the construction of whiteness in order to illuminate the effects of systematized injustice.

Global Performance and Local Reception: Teaching Hamlet and More in Singapore

When Emily Griffiths Jones taught a Shakespeare seminar in Singapore through MIT’s Global Shakespeares project, she found. In this context, normative Western patterns of interpretation are challenged, along with their assumptions of a “supposedly universalizing psychological realm.” The comparative deployment of digitally archived multicultural performances led students to engage with Shakespeare’s works in a way that “transcend[s] the myth of monolithic textual authority.” Through interpreting, comparing, and responding creatively to global Shakespeares (including making their own short films), students used Shakespearean performance to address social issues relevant to them, from immigration to LGBTQ rights.

Teaching Shakespeare Inside Out: Creating a Dialogue Between Traditional and Incarcerated Students

This chapter explores the possibilities for teaching Shakespeare within and outside of the criminal justice system by putting these communities of learners into substantive dialogue. In contrast to many “prison Shakespeare” programs, a social-justice oriented approach prioritizes learning over “therapy” and promotes dialogue and collaboration among inside and outside populations. While this approach can yield positive results like “increased activism and decreased stereotyping,” its difficulties can be profitable too, as students learn to make the most of “the uncomfortable dissonances that occur when diverse populations interact.” This, argues Jayme M. Yeo, is where Shakespeare faculty can best transmit their skills to students, “for multivalence and conflict accurately describe the work of literary interpretation itself.”

Adjunct Pleasure: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Writing on the Walls

In this chapter, Matthew Harrison explores how the radical contingencies of Elizabethan sonnets and academic employment can mutually inform pedagogical practice. Tracing links between contingent labor in higher education and early modern poets’ “phenomenology of contingency,” the chapter considers what happens when the metrics of selfhood and social perception produce competing notions of individual “value.” Harrison diagnoses how readily structural shortcomings are masked by fictions of personal exceptionalism or failure, and it proposes several practical strategies that invite students to “replace postures designed for obedience with active and bodily engagement with each other’s ideas.”