An Early Modern Audience in the Classroom: Metatheater, Religion, Race

Abstract:

Emphasizing the role of audiences in shaping the meaning and social function of performance, this essay presents some suggestions for deepening the discussion of race in our undergraduate classes on "Golden Age" theater. These suggestions include enticing students with recognizable names and accessible texts—Cervantes's El retablo de las maravillas is one of my choices—and then nudging them to consider canonical works in dialogue both with representations of Black characters and with the diasporic experience of free and enslaved Black people in Spain during the early modern period. We should encourage class discussion that draws early modern primary sources into the racial politics of the present. We should likewise investigate and historicize the relationship between religion and race as conceptual categories. These sorts of pedagogical adjustments are part of the effort to rethink the methodological presuppositions and canons that have long defined—and constrained—early modern Iberian studies.