African-American Shakespeares: Loving Blackness as Political Resistance

Abstract

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.