The unbearable whiteness of being (in) Shakespeare
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The unbearable whiteness of being (in) Shakespeare
Ambereen Dadabhoy Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA, USA.
Abstract What happens to the critical work of scholars, teachers, and performers of Shakespeare if we take very seriously the whiteness of our author and the critical epistemologies that develop and contour the body of his corpus? How is such work affected by the BIPOC identities of these scholars, teachers, and performers? In this essay I consider these questions through a sustained critique of Shakespeare’s whiteness and the whiteness of the critical gaze that has been directed at Shakespearean canon. My essay is subtended by the personal, which is an important facet of the confessional mode being considered, interrogated, and recapitulated in this issue. My confession, to which I turn at the close of this essay, rehearses a pedagogical experience wherein the wages of whiteness exact their usual cost from me and my students, demanding that we yield to white practices of knowledge-making in Shakespeare. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020) 11, 228–235. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00169-6
And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. – Frantz Fanon A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only ‘universal’ but also ‘race-free’ risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist. – Toni Morrison
2020 Springer Nature Limited. 2040-5960
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave.com/journals
Vol. 11, 2-3, 228–235
The unbearable whiteness of being (in) Shakespeare
1
To assert that William Shakespeare was a white man is to state the obvious. The fact of Shakespeare’s whiteness is indisputable. Indeed, the facts of his life, sparse as they are, allow us to know this thing about him, that he was a white English man. What might be up for dispute is what that whiteness means and how it can function to – forgive me – color the man and his work. The unmarked and unremarkable nature of these white bodies and white people has resulted in an understanding of the early modern period as race-less or race-free even as technologies to understand cultural, ethnic, and somatic differences (what we might now call race) were being developed in the period through various media, such as drama, travelogue, political treatises, and royal proclamations. In this essay, I argue that this unremarkable positioning of whiteness must be interrogated and made visible because the period’s interest in so-called Others served to construct and affirm white identity. To call attention to the operations of whiteness in our period and its literary giant, Shakespeare, is also to do so in our field, the scholarship it produces, and See Grier (2018). in our pedagogy. It is also to indict the same technologies in their fashioning of the bodies and critical output of scholars of color as both hyper-visible and identity-based because of that hyper-visibility. In other
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