Shakespeare's White Others

Gives readers a sharp new critical understanding of how racial whiteness in Shakespeare begets anti-Blackness and sustains white supremacy.

David Sterling Brown (Author)

9781009384162, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 July 2023

208 pages
28 x 19 x 2 cm, 0.545 kg

'Maintaining that tensions between white characters are themselves racial conflicts, this paradigm-changing book establishes that all of Shakespeare's plays are about race. Rather than understand early modern race in binary terms, Shakespeare's White Others attends to the intraracial color line to reveal that whiteness is not an inalienable property, but rather an unstable commodity that is policed and confiscated through the deployment of anti-Black racism and white supremacy.' Melissa E. Sanchez, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania

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.

Introduction: Negotiating whiteness
1. Somatic similarity
2. Engendering the fall of white masculinity in Hamlet
3. On the other hand
4. 'Hear me, see me'
Conclusion: Artifactually.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]