Race B4 Race 2024 Seminar 1: What We’re Reading and Why

See previous installments in this series here.

The RaceB4Race Mentorship Network began its work in 2022, intended to ‘offer new scholars support as they develop the research that will drive the academic conversation forward’. This Mellon-funded initiative spearheaded by Folger director Dr. Patricia Akhimie not only includes individual mentorship opportunities, but also ‘a semester-long virtual reading/research group, meeting monthly to connect participants with a larger network of premodern critical race scholars.’

The first meeting of this year’s seminar group occurred on Friday September 20, 2024, and featured Dr. Ambereen Dadabhoy, author of Shakespeare Through Islamic Worlds (Routledge, 2024), part of the Spotlight on Shakespeare series.

Dr. Ambereen Dadabhoy is Associate Professor of Literature at Harvey Mudd College in California. Her research and teaching focuses on early modern contact zones, such as the Mediterranean, and how those geographies are represented in early modern English drama. In addition to Shakespeare Through Islamic Worlds, she has also co-authored Anti-Racist Shakespeare (Cambridge Elements, 2023) with Dr. Nedda Mehdizadeh, and recently published chapters in Seeing Race Before Race (ACMRS, 2023) and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race (Oxford, 2024).

Why are we reading this?

Shakespeare Through Islamic Worlds offers a remarkable intervention into Shakespeare’s body of work, arguing ‘that the occlusion and repression of Islam and Muslims within Shakespeare’s plays, particularly given his mediterranean, demands attending to the implicit, the opaque, the referential, the absent-present, and the repressed’ (2). Dadabhoy frames her analysis through the work of bell hooks and, most prominently, Edward Said, whose Orientalism she treats as an invitation to add complexity and nuance to the seeming absence of Muslim characters in Shakespeare’s works.

This absence, Dadabhoy argues, is unusual enough for the time period—when it was easy to find plays featuring “Moors,” “Turks,” or other similarly stereotyped figures—that she reads it as ‘deliberate and exclusionary, as part of a project of European worldmaking’ (11). This mode of analysis ‘reveals the cultural and ideological contours of the plays and their insistence on a Mediterranean void of the religious, racial, and cultural differences that formed its quotidian reality’ (11). Nor does this exclusion end with Shakespeare himself—Dadabhoy points to generations of Shakespeare scholarship that, through avoidance of work like Said’s, indulges ‘a need to morally secure the early modern period from the imperial degradations that ensue in the following centuries’ (23).

The book’s four chapters roughly map onto the four genres of Shakespeare’s plays—romance, history, tragedy, and comedy. The first delves into the Mediterranean setting of The Tempest, a play more frequently associated with colonization efforts on the far side of the Atlantic; the second explores the rhetorical use of the “Turk” figure in the history plays; the third draws compelling parallels between three “Moors” in the Shakespearean canon—Aaron in Titus Andronicus, the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, and of course Othello—and modern discourses of anti-Muslim prejudice in the United States; and the fourth chapter reads Twelfth Night’s unconventional gender dynamics as potentially inspired by stories of Suleiman I from Elizabethan travelogues.

This book is not only a magnificent contribution to Shakespeare studies; it offers a model for ethical scholarship through its insistence on naming things as they are, rather than letting racist and prejudiced terminology persist simply because others have done so. The deliberate and careful deployment of both Said and Stuart Hall, moreover, function as a corrective to those scholars who decry this kind of work as anachronistic and presentist. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of work that we in the RaceB4Race community want to see.

Further Reading

While I will not be going into the particulars of the discussion, in order to preserve the seminar space as a safe and private one, below is a list of scholarship that came up at different points during the discussion.

Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell UP, 1995).

Stuart Hall, ‘Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities’, in Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture (Duke UP, 2024) [open access]

bell hooks, ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance’, in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992)

Women, ‘Race’, and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (Routledge, 1994).

Margo Hendricks, ‘Coloring the Past, Considerations on Our Future: Race B4Race’, New Literary History 52 (2021), 365-84.

Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (Routledge, 1995).

Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1979)

Also a special shout-out to Nikki Payne, whose romance novels were recommended by several people in the group.