This collection examines the theories of both race and adaptation that help scholars and teachers better engage with Shakespeare, race and pop culture. Chapters take a range of investigative approaches, some centering Shakespeare and others using Shakespeare to theorize pop culture, but all focusing on the ethical implications of the triangulation between Shakespeare, pop culture and race.
Just as the analysis of race expands within Shakespeare studies, so too should the archives for analyzing Shakespeare and race grow. While it is now more common to consider race and embodiment in both early modern and contemporary Shakespearean performance and adaptation, pop culture remains underexplored and undertheorized. Given pop culture’s accessibility and far-reaching circulation, as an archive, it offers a range of interventions in 'the Shakespearean' that contest hierarchies of difference and confront power disequilibriums. As this collection demonstrates, rigorous theoretical and methodological approaches can illuminate how pop culture uses Shakespeare to uphold, contest and shape existing racial imaginaries for broad audiences.
Chapters explore the tensions between the 'low', racialized status of a pop culture form and Shakespeare’s 'high' status; the ways race informs a specific Shakespearean reference (in film, television, music, graphic novels, memes, among other forms); and the influence loop between Shakespeare and the systemic racism of creative industries, such as Hollywood and book publishing.
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Shakespeare, Race and the Power of the Popular
Vanessa I. Corredera (Baylor University, USA) and L. Monique Pittman (Andrews University, USA)
1. ‘The King I Know He Is’: Black Masculinity in the Intertextual Network of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Disney’s The Lion King and Beyoncé’s Black is King
Claire Dawkins (Stanford University Online High School, USA)
2. Adapting Whiteness: Race and the Politics of Shakespeare for Young Readers
Tyler Sasser (University of Alabama, USA)
3. ‘Calling all the Tiger Mom wannabes!’: Parenting with and without Shakespeare across Racial Lines
Jeanette Nguyen Tran (Drake University, USA)
4. ‘The future in the instant’: Whiteness, Temporality and Frances McDormand’s Coen Brothers Archive in Joel Coen’s Postmenopausal Macbeth
Jennie M. Votava (Allegheny College, USA)
5. Pop Remix: Shakespeare and White Womanhood in The Mexican-American Novel
Daniel G. Lauby (University of Maine Farmington and Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School, USA)
6. Emily Dickinson Casts Othello: Shakespeare and White Allyship in AppleTV+’s Dickinson
Marianne Montgomery (Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University, USA) and Vanessa L. Rapatz (Ball State University, USA)
7. ‘Alpha, Beta, Cuck’: King Lear, Succession and the Rescripting of White Masculinity
Maya Mathur (University of Mary Washington, USA)
8. Shakespeare and Race in Two Pop Culture Versions of Station Eleven
Michael D. Friedman (University of Scranton, USA)
9. Shakespeare and Bridgerton: The Myths of Race and Gender in Regency Romance
Taarini Mookherjee (Queen's University Belfast, UK)
Epilogue: Moonflower Murders and the Racial Evasions of Pop
Vanessa I. Corredera (Baylor University, USA) and L. Monique Pittman (Andrews University, USA)
Bibliography
Index
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