This essay was published in the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at The Ohio State University’s Petites Nouvelles — Issue #1 (September 21, 2020)
Why Race before Race Now?
Themes of national belonging and racial otherness shape Shakespeare’s work. From Aaron the Moor, to Cleopatra, Egypt’s Queen, to Shylock, Venice’s Jewish moneylender, Shakespeare’s plays grapple with the ideologies that produced medieval and early modern systems of inclusion and exclusion. Before the high era of biological racism in the nineteenth century, the word “race” had not acquired its pseudoscientific valence but appears as an open-ended concept assembled and reassembled out of other modes of differentiation. The vast range of these concepts, or racial formations, were woven into the tapestry of premodern lives, including Shakespeare’s, and encapsulated ideas about religion, class, lineage, rank, gender, skin color, and so forth. Therefore, scholars of medieval and early modern culture ask two questions: what is race in this context, and how does it function as a sorting mechanism between dominant and minority groups? Using the vocabulary of critical race, indigenous, postcolonial, and feminist theories, premodern critical race scholars, to use Margo Hendricks’s apt distinction, vivify the field’s understanding of the production of hierarchies within and beyond Europe. More importantly, they bring the past in conversation with the present, and by doing so, they are committed to mobilizing anti-racist and decolonial agendas in their institutions and communities.
The social and racial injustices of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, alongside ethnic conflicts globally, have coalesced to put race at the center of premodern studies. But this concentration on race is not a new trend, catalyzed by what the feminist writer and activist Sara Ahmed calls “happy diversity,” or a performance of inclusion that does not attend to structural inequalities at the heart of institutions. More than two decades ago, the field-shifting work of Kim F. Hall, Ayanna Thompson, Peter Erickson, and Ania Loomba, in early modern studies, and medieval scholars, such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Tamar Herzog, and Geraldine Heng, among others, laid strong foundational grounds that flesh out the racialized language and imagery shaping our understanding of the premodern past. In a field historically populated by white men, these trailblazers have acted as gate-openers, forging intellectual communities that are inclusive and political. A recent iteration of this model of activist scholarship is Race Before Race, a bi-annual symposium organized by the Arizona Center of Medieval and Renaissance studies in collaboration with the Folger Shakespeare Library. The symposium brings together scholars of color, including Dorothy Kim, Jonathan Hsy, Cord Whitaker, Ruben Espinosa, Patricia Akhimie, and Carol Mejia LaPerle, to name a few, who are advancing the study of premodern critical race in new ways.
From its inaugural focus on premodern race (January 2019), to periodization (September 2019), to appropriation (January 2020), Race Before Race maps out an array of literary issues, historical questions, and critical methodologies, where premodern scholars explore a range of concepts that shaped literary and cultural production. Medievalists make legible the connection between the idea of a white cultural heritage, epitomized in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, for example, and the adoption of these literary fantasies of racial supremacy by neo-Nazi groups. For early modernists, Race Before Race explodes the cultural myth of Shakespeare as a preracial figure of universality and timeless heritage. As Michael Whitmore, the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, observed at the opening of Race and Periodization in September 2019, Race Before Race is a conference that the library’s first director, Joseph Quincy Adams, “had hoped would never happen.” Whitmore was referring to Adams’s inaugural statement at the opening of the Folger in 1932 — a statement riddled with the vocabulary of white cultural supremacy: “[About] the time the forces of immigration became a menace to the preservation of our long-established English civilization” and “[Shakespeare] was made the cornerstone of cultural discipline… Not Homer, nor Dante, nor Goethe, nor Chaucer, nor Spenser, nor even Milton, but Shakespeare was made the chief object of [schoolchildren’s] study and veneration.” In Adams’s formulation, the Folger’s curriculum carried a political mission: to counter the threat of cultural impurity that non-Christian and non-White immigrants embodied. As the draconian immigration acts of 1905 and 1924 show, and the two centuries of black enslavement that came before them, Adams’s fear for the “long-established English civilization” was not a voice in the wilderness, but symptomatic of the historical and cultural contexts that have shaped our past and affect our present.
But the threat to white Western culture, and the weaponization of Shakespeare as a tool of white supremacy, did not only come from across the oceans. It is important to acknowledge Shakespeare’s role in one of the most brutal chapters of Native American history: the Indian boarding schools. In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, as the research of Scott Manning Stevens shows, indigenous children of North America were voluntarily or involuntarily severed from their families and placed in schools away from their tribal communities. These boarding schools were designed to assimilate Native children into whiteness. Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets were a staple in this curriculum of deculturation — a curriculum whose main object was the complete erasure of the rich native cultural, spiritual, and linguistic heritage and its replacement with English-language proficiency and domestic and manual labor skills. To Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the first boarding school, the Carlisle Indian School, the infamous driving mantra was: “Kill the Indian; Save the Man.”
Therefore, it is not innocuous, in our troubled historical present as in Pratt and Adams’s America, mired by social and racial injustices, local and global, to avoid a wide-ranging discussion of race. The same cultural fantasy that yearns for a post-racial America also lionizes an old-fashioned, universal Shakespeare. It is a logic that views race as significant for the oppressed only, one where whiteness or any other dominant idioms, such as the English language or Christianity, are rendered apolitical, invisible, or neutral.
As a scholar of early modern literature, I study the stories that a nation tells itself about national belonging — stories that invariably hinge on practices of exclusion. My work on dynastic unions demonstrates that these international events are moments of nation-building that also invite intense scrutiny of the racial character of the commonwealth. In my work on the racial anxieties surrounding foreign queens, I find the example of what Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton have called “travelling tropes” extremely helpful in thinking about the through line that connects the racial formations of the past to our lives in the present. Travelling tropes are stereotypes employed by a dominant group “to engage with, manage, and control peoples considered exotic, strange, or hostile,” as Loomba and Burton note. These discursive archetypes form a vocabulary of control that undermines and contains cultural, ethnic, or racial minorities in the early modern period. This vocabulary travels in a variety of texts and across periods, reaching us in the twentieth century as narrative tools to reduce Native American, African- American, Muslim, Asian, and Latinx communities to dehumanizing stereotypes. Some examples include the pernicious tropes of the magical negro, the drunken/noble/relapsing savage, the model minority, and the welfare queen.
But uncovering the racist origins of worn-out tropes is only the beginning of anti-racist scholarship. How can readers and writers participate in this methodological move towards social justice and inclusion? One avenue is applying the Gray Test — a citation test named for the black feminist scholar Kishonna Gray-Denson. To pass the Gray Test, an academic or general-interests article must cite and meaningfully discuss two women and two non-white authors. The purpose of this test is to ensure that writers and readers do not replicate the erasures of the past in their examination of race and gender dynamics. Another avenue is taking to heart the moving provocation of Kim F. Hall’s Shakespeare anniversary lecture, “Othello Was My Grandfather,” delivered at the Folger in 2016. In her concluding remarks, Hall projects the liberatory potential of engaging with Shakespeare from the margins: “It is not our access to Shakespeare that marks our freedom. It is our ability to inhabit a new Shakespeare in our own terms, to offer him our love, but with our difference.”
This is the Shakespeare of the future. This is the future of Shakespeare and premodern critical race studies. It is a Shakespeare without borders — without erasures, silences, and exclusions. Access and inclusion are the new cultural mainstream.
Mira Assaf Kafantaris
Senior Lecturer, Department of English