Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare

Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now

Edited by Hillary Eklund, Wendy Beth Hyman

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New ideas for teaching contemporary social justice through Shakespeare and Renaissance literature

  • Describes innovative and portable teaching methods informed by recent scholarship in early modern literature, cultural studies, and critical pedagogy
  • Offers strategies for effective teaching and advocacy amidst the growing cultural and economic complexities of higher education
  • Demonstrates the relevance of historical literary study to contemporary cultural conversations, especially those about social justice
  • Historicizes the malicious "whitening" of Shakespeare and European culture, recognizing instead multiple, multicultural, accessible Shakespeares
  • Presents Shakespeare’s plays as a common corpus of great value to democratic conversations in widely divergent contexts
  • Gives educators language for promoting the virtue of humanistic inquiry and when higher education is on the defensive

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

Hillary Eklund is Provost Distinguished Professor, Associate Professor of English, and Chair of the department at Loyola University New Orleans. She is the author of Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies (Ashgate, 2015) and the editor of Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science (Duquesne University Press, 2017). She has essays published or forthcoming in journals such as Shakespeare Studies, SEL, and Criticism, and in essay collections on a variety of topics from Shakespeare and Spenser to the environmental humanities. Her book in progress investigates the representations, uses, and controversies surrounding wetlands in the early modern period.

Wendy Beth Hyman is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. She is author of the Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry (Oxford UP, 2019), and editor of The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Ashgate 2011). She has published essays on early modern mechanical birds, insect poetry and early modern microscopy, the inner lives of Renaissance machines, physics and metaphysics in early modern lyric, metaphoricity and science, jacquemarts and Jack Falstaff, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, and the pedagogy of book history. Professor Hyman is at work on a second monograph, attending to the relationships among mimesis, myth, and other kinds of literary fictions in Shakespearean and Spenserian romance.

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.

Karen Raber, University of Mississippi

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