Shakespeare, Race and Anglophone Popular Culture

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.