Description: Examining the racially white 'others' whom Shakespeare creates in characters like Richard III, Hamlet and Tamora - figures who are never quite 'white enough' - this bold and compelling work emphasises how such classification perpetuates anti-Blackness and re-affirms white supremacy. David Sterling Brown offers nothing less here than a wholesale deconstruction of whiteness in Shakespeare's plays, arguing that the 'white other' was a racialized category already in formation during the Elizabethan era - and also one to which Shakespeare was himself a crucial contributor. In exploring Shakespeare's determinative role and strategic investment in identity politics (while drawing powerfully on his own life experiences, including adolescence), the author argues that even as Shakespearean theatrical texts functioned as engines of white identity formation, they expose the illusion of white racial solidarity. This essential contribution to Shakespeare studies, critical whiteness studies and critical race studies is an authoritative, urgent dismantling of dramatized racial profiling.
Brief description: David Sterling Brown is Associate Professor of English at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, and a member of the Curatorial Team for The Racial Imaginary Institute, founded by Claudia Rankine. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society fellowship and the Shakespeare Association of America's Publics Award. Additionally, he is an Executive Board member of the Race Before Race conference series and he serves as dramaturg for the Untitled Othello Project, an ensemble that is reconceptualising how theatre practitioners engage with Shakespeare's work. His research, teaching and public speaking interests include African-American literature, drama, mental health, gender, performance, sexuality and the family. Learn more at www.DavidSterlingBrown.com.
Review Quotes: 'Conversant in the scholarship of race studies and Black literary studies of the past thirty years and built upon close readings of Shakespeare texts, Shakespeare's White Others offers a new way to explore the role of color in the communities of Shakespeare's plays. This examination of how the white other functions in these plays is a heartfelt project for Brown, who repeatedly urges readers to seek connections between Shakespeare's depiction of 'tiers in whiteness' and the fraught landscape in the United States today (xiii). This work furnishes insight not merely into Shakespeare's dramas but into the ways that our society has reproduced the social structures represented on the early modern English stage.' Jennifer A. Low, Shakespeare Quarterly