How We Can Teach Race in the Renaissance: An Interview with Matthieu Chapman and Anna Wainwright
Interview by Shanelle Kim in conversation with Matthieu Chapman and Anna Wainwright, editors of Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide (ACMRS Press, 2023)
While reading the collection Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide, I was struck not only by the breadth and depth of pedagogical knowledge in this collection, but also its intellectual generosity. The essays in this volume speak to each other, cite each other, and invite a wide audience of readers — instructors at every level of education as well as students — into a larger conversation about the narratives we reproduce when speaking of “the Renaissance” and to consider our own investments when doing so.
In their introduction, Matthieu Chapman and Anna Wainwright remind us that “[t]he truth is that we all teach race in our classrooms, even if we do not do so consciously” (xvii). These essays offer a wide range of pedagogical methods for teaching race consciously, including exercises for students and also personal reflections on teaching moments in the classroom. As a reader, I am grateful for how the scholars in this volume model creativity as well as self-reflection and community in pedagogical practice. I had the pleasure of interviewing Chapman and Wainwright about the exigency of their new collection.
Shanelle Kim: The introduction to this collection draws attention to how recent events reveal white supremacists’ investment in white-washed narratives of the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. How have your own teaching experiences drawn attention to the need for a volume about engaging students in connecting past to present, right now?
Matthieu Chapman: As someone whose background is in theatre and who teaches in a theater department, I constantly find myself in situations where students and other faculty inadvertently perpetuate racial violence through a lack of understanding surrounding race. Most commonly, these issues arise in attempting to incorporate contemporary white liberal sensibilities into casting plays from the past. I understand the desire for equity and inclusivity, and I understand that for many, this stops at representation — putting non-white bodies into dramaturgically white roles. I intentionally use dramaturgically here as opposed to traditionally, because the counterargument to this is often, “well, the character is never CALLED white, so they can be anything!”
But dramaturgically, that isn’t the case. And while I encourage students and faculty to consider issues of race and representation in staging plays, they rarely have the knowledge and experience to consider race outside of their own training and own experience. All of this leaves us as professors who engage race in our classrooms facing more and more obstacles every year and having to unpack more and more of the world’s history and investments in racism with each new incoming class. But a volume like this hopefully will help teachers to engage their students in the continuum of racial thinking across the world and how that thinking shapes our world.
Anna Wainwright: I would agree with Matt wholeheartedly here, and add that, as someone who teaches Italian culture and literature, I find that there’s often an assumption among my students that race simply won’t be an issue of discussion in our classroom. Students might have heard a bit about immigration in contemporary Italy, and how race and racism operate in that context, but not in the past — even though the racialized thinking in the Middle Ages and Renaissance Italy has much in common with contemporary America. It always feels important to point out that race, and white supremacy, really are everywhere, not just in the English-speaking world, not just in the present.
SK: I am struck by how this collection draws together a variety of teaching modalities, including work with Italian Renaissance paintings, digital map-making exercises, and textual editing. What are some activities from this volume that you hope to incorporate into your own classrooms?
MC: Personally, I have adjusted my teaching where I will no longer teach a course on Shakespeare or Western Drama or any other course that silently centers white maleness unless I can offer a minimum 50% of material from artists, authors, and scholars of historically excluded groups in my syllabus. For instance, I won’t teach Othello without teaching Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet or Toni Morrison’s Desdemona alongside it. I won’t teach Plato without also teaching Charles Mills. I won’t teach Aristotle without Wole Soyinka. On and on.
So, while each piece of the volume offers something for me to think about and take forward into my teaching, I am particularly thankful for those pieces that put the past in conversation with the present and introduce me to new artists and thinkers who are calling attention to and challenging the unspoken whiteness of history and knowledge. Amrita Dhar’s piece offering intersectional analyses of two sonnets of the same name — “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent” — written centuries apart is the type of work that is most in line with where my own pedagogy is heading, and I look forward to building off of her work in this volume in my own classrooms, as well as Christensen’s and Turchi’s “Re-editing” exercise and Rebecca Howard’s Titus Kaphar piece.
AW: The pieces by both Suzanne Magnanini and Emily Wilbourne have really changed how I teach the Italian Renaissance — not just through their fabulous suggestions for lesson plans, but the material themselves. Fairy tales and early modern music don’t always make it into survey courses on Italy, but they were two of the most popular forms of cultural production in the era, and they’re often more accessible to our students than others.
Like Matt, I have also found myself in recent years almost always teaching contemporary texts alongside historical ones, and the students really respond to it — and are able to engage more actively with plays and poems from long ago. This past year, I taught Cinthio’s novella upon which Othello is based with Morrison’s Desdemonda, and the reception I got, especially in response to Morrison’s work was so rich. And Morrison was of course such a brilliant observer of the past — I may never teach another course without including a text by her again. She works extremely well alongside Dante.
SK: This open-access collection pushes the boundaries of periodization and discipline, calling for more conversation between scholars from different fields of study. Anna Wainwright’s essay, for example, considers how those studying the Italian Renaissance might look to English literature scholars as models for investigating race in the classroom. How does this volume help advance a conversation between fields and disciplines? What might be some accessible entry points for instructors who are still arriving into Premodern Critical Race Studies (PMCRS), such as high school teachers?
MC: One of the goals of this project was to create a volume that crossed divisions of time and space and instead worked to unify around an idea — race. In doing so, we hoped to create a safe path for those in various disciplines who wished to explore Premodern Critical Race Studies but fell down the rabbit hole and couldn’t find a footing to climb out. While this book does include sections based on disciplines and geography, we do hope that by putting all these ideas and focuses in one place, we can encourage people to think how these ideas circulated among these various regions and cultures.
One of the ways we do this in the volume is by including pieces that attempt to meet people where they are — if you’re a poet, there’s a piece for that; an art historian, we got you covered; a high school teacher? We have a piece on podcasting assignments. As much as we wanted a broad spectrum of regions and eras covered, we wanted as diverse a collection of exercises, texts, and artworks as we could realistically include. Did we accomplish everything we initially set out to do? In some ways, no. We would have loved to have more pieces from Indigenous scholars that engaged with Indigenous histories. We would have loved more pieces that focused outside of Europe to offer a truly global perspective. And we hope in the future to be able to offer a “Teaching Race in the Premodern World” collection. But in another way, we accomplished so much more than we set out to do in the diversity of methods and scholars we were able to attract and engage.
AW: Just as the first round of submissions to our volume was starting to come in back in Fall 2019, before COVID hit, Ayanna Thompson, Kim F. Hall, and Kimberly Coles published their fantastic and inspiring piece, “BlacKKKShakespearean: A Call to Action for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.” Every point they made felt to me like it applied to Italian Studies as well as to English Literature — except kind of on steroids. As they write, “Future students, the pool from which we must recruit our majors, look less and less like the cohort of previous generations for whom our current degrees were constructed. There is a practical value in speaking to these students about the texts and histories that form their civilization. But there is also an ethical imperative to equip our students to understand and engage critically with the world as it is, not as it was imagined by the University of Chicago’s Great Books Program of the 1940s.” I was already feeling in my own teaching that the subjects students were most interested in learning more about during our discussions — race, gender, religion — were also changing, enhancing, broadening, their understanding of what they were studying outside of my classroom.
SK: Your introduction offers this powerful statement: “The truth is that we all teach race in our classrooms, even if we do not do so consciously” (xvii). Several essays include personal reflections about teaching moments in the classroom. How do you hope instructors will use the essays in this classroom to examine their own teaching practices? How might this collection provide support not only to students hungry to learn about race, but also for instructors of PMCRS who may feel alienated at their institutions?
MC: If we as professors want to communicate an accurate picture of the history, culture, and society of early modern Europe, it is imperative that we push back against the myths of the Enlightenment as the origin of race thinking, and one way to do so is to make sure that race is not absent from our discussions. Race, however, is typically relegated to the margins or completely absent from courses on Renaissance Italy or Shakespeare’s Europe. I give my colleagues the benefit of the doubt and assume this erasure isn’t intentional — I, too, have had to teach the survey course where we have to cram dozens of countries and thousands of years into 15 weeks or even less. But whether the erasure arises from time constraints or discomfort with the material or abject disdain for it, I hope that presenting this collection — which spans hundreds of years and numerous regions — will at least get those professors who eschew race in their classrooms to at least ask themselves why?
And often, it is the students who are interested in premodern conceptions of race who find themselves alienated. I myself was the only black student in my Shakespeare grad program, so when I would bring up race, my cohort lacked either the interest or the knowledge to engage. So I hope this volume can serve as an invitation to a growing network of scholars and ideas that exists beyond their classrooms and departments. We never intended to write the final word on the topic, but instead ask a series of questions that we ourselves have come across in our teaching.
AW: We’ve tried to give people a lot of grace with this volume, and offer it as a compass, as Matt says — not a cudgel. We put it together during COVID, when everyone’s lives turned totally upside down, and it took longer than we’d planned as a result. This led to a lot of kindness and humanity in email correspondences with contributors, and we’re grateful that so many wonderful scholars and teachers stuck with us during this long process. It was also exciting to see a community of scholars, many of whom we’ve never met in person, who all really cared about this topic, from so many different disciplines. This includes seasoned scholars in the field of PCRS, but also newer scholars just starting to work on and teach the presence of race in their classrooms, and who know how badly this material is needed. We hope this volume will inspire many other scholars, and students, to keep moving forward in their teaching, their research, and their lives outside the classroom.
Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide will be published in February 2023 and available in open access. You can also preorder a copy of the paperback or hardback version on the ACMRS Press website.
Matthieu Chapman is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz and the Literary Director of NY Classical Theatre. His research focuses on ontological structures of blackness in the Early Modern World. His memoir, Shattered: Fragments of a Black Life is forthcoming from WVU Press in 2023. His monograph Antiblack Racism in Early Modern English Drama: “The Other Other” is available from Routledge Press. He has also published articles in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Theatre Topics, TheatreForum, Theatre History Studies and Early Theatre, and he has chapters in Race and Affect in Early Modern England (edited by Carol Mejia-LaPerle) and Shakespeare and Atrocity.
Shanelle E. Kim is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, She is currently working on a dissertation about the racialization of appetite on the early modern stage and the association of whiteness with careful control over one’s desire to consume. When not reading, writing, or thinking about early modern eating, you can find Shanelle cooking, eating, or consuming all kinds of entertainment media — activities she best enjoys in community with others.
Anna Wainwright is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies and Core Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research considers gender, race, politics, and emotion in medieval and early modern Italy. Her book, Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in Renaissance Italy, investigates the cultural and political significance of widowhood in early modern Italy from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to the women poets of the Counter-Reformation (Delaware), and she is now at work on a second book project on women writers, gender, and race in the Italian Renaissance. She is the co-editor of the volumes Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation (Delaware, 2020) and The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden: Women, Politics and Reform in Renaissance Italy (Brill, 2023).
