Black Shakespeare

Ian Smith is the Richard H., Jr. '60 and Joan K. Sell Professor in the Humanities at Lafayette College. He is the author of Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (2009) and collaborator on Othello Re-imagined in Sepia (2012). He has held several fellowships including the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellowship in the History and Culture of the Americas. He is currently the vice president of the Shakespeare Association of America.

• Introduction. Toward racial literacy; 1. The racialized reader; 2. Racial blind spots: Misreading bodies, misreading texts; 3. Antonio's 'Fair Flesh' and the property of whiteness; 4. Hamlet: Playing in the dark; 5. We are Othello; Epilogue. Forms of whiteness.

'Ian Smith's Black Shakespeare begins by asserting that lingering contemporary resistance to the evidence that people in the early modern world believed that race was real and that it mattered participates in a larger denial of the kinds of work that race performs in our own time. In a series of subtle and revelatory readings-I am thinking particularly of the dazzling chapter on Hamlet-Smith implicitly argues that learning to recognize race's subtle and extensive operations in Shakespeare can be an important first step toward our own achievement of what he calls 'racial literacy'. To see and to know, Smith believes, is to begin to be able to recognize and resist white supremacy's purchase in our field and in the culture that shapes it. Persuasively argued and deeply ethically engaged throughout, Black Shakespeare is the work of a mature scholar who believes that Shakespeare matters and who calls on us both to embrace and to question the conditions under which he has achieved his place in our world.' Joyce MacDonald, University of Kentucky