Edited by Hillary Eklund, Wendy Beth Hyman
This book is for teachers who want to heighten the intellectual impact of their courses by using their classrooms as a creative space for social formation and action. Its twenty-one chapters provide diverse perspectives on Shakespeare and early modern literature that engage innovation, collaboration, and forward-looking practices. They model ways of mobilizing justice with early modern texts and claim the intellectual benefits of integrating social justice into courses. The book reconceives the relationship between students and Renaissance literature in ways that enable them – and us – to move from classroom discussions to real-life applications.
Acknowledgments
Notes on the contributors
Introduction: Making Meaning and Doing Justice with Early Modern Texts, Wendy Beth Hyman and Hillary Eklund
Part I: Defamiliarizing Shakespeare
1. Topical Shakespeare and the Urgency of Ambiguity, Adhaar Noor Desai
2. Shakespeare in Transition, Sawyer Kemp
3. Shakespeare in Japan: Disability and a Pedagogy of Disorientation, Allison P. Hobgood
4. Global Performance and Local Reception: Teaching Hamlet and More in Singapore, Emily Griffiths Jones
Part II: Decolonizing Shakespeare
5. African-American Shakespeares: Loving Blackness as Political Resistance, Jason M. Demeter
6. Chicano Shakespeare: the Bard, the Border, and the Peripheries of Performance, Ruben Espinosa
7. "Intelligently organized resistance": Shakespeare in the Diasporic Politics of John E. Bruce, Kim F. Hall
Part III: Ethical Queries and Practices
8. Sexual Violence, Trigger Warnings, and the Early Modern Classroom, Kirsten Mendoza
9. Rural Shakespeare and the Tragedy of Education, Jeffrey Osborne
10. Shakespearean Tragedy, Ethics, and Social Justice, Mary Janell Metzger
11. Teaching Environmental Justice and Early Modern Texts: Collaboration and Connected Classrooms, Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe
12. Failing with Shakespeare: Political Pedagogy in Trump’s Autumn, Steve Mentz
Part IV: Revitalizing the Archive and Remixing Traditional Approaches
13. Teaching Serial with Shakespeare: Using Rhetoric to Resist, Rachel E. Holmes
14. Adjunct Pleasure: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Writing on the Walls, Matthew Harrison
15. Confronting Bias and Identifying Facts: Teaching Resistance Through Shakespeare, Carla Della Gatta
16. Literary Justice: The Participatory Ethics of Early Modern Possible Worlds, Debapriya Sarkar
Part V: Shakespeare, Service, and Community
17. Shakespeare, Service Learning, and the Embattled Humanities, Hillary Eklund
18. Teaching Shakespeare Inside-Out: Creating a Dialogue Between Traditional and Incarcerated Students, Jayme M. Yeo
19. "‘Shakespeare’ on his lips": Dreaming of The Shakespeare Center for Radical Thought and Transformative Action, Eric L. De Barros
20. From Pansophia to Public Humanities: Connecting Past and Present Through Community-Based Learning, Tania Boster
21. Cultivating Critical Content Knowledge: Early Modern Literature, Pre-Service Teachers, and New Methodologies for Social Justice, Todd Butler and Ashley Boyd
Afterword, Ayanna Thompson
Bibliography
Index
Eklund and Hyman brilliantly demonstrate how Shakespeare can be an instrument of social justice, providing a common discourse that unites communities, yet one that can defamiliarize and disrupt current systems of power and knowledge. If Shakespeare’s work has sometimes been enlisted as a vehicle of structural oppression, the essays in this volume reveal its value for pedagogies that resist, transform, and impel action.