Premodern critical race studies, long intertwined with Shakespeare studies, has broadened our understanding of the definitions and discourse of race and racism to include not only phenotype, but also religious and political identity, regional, national, and linguistic difference, and systems of differentiation based upon culture and custom. Replete with fresh readings of the plays and poems, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race brings together some of the most important scholars thinking about the subject today. The volume offers a thorough overview of the most significant theoretical and methodological paradigms such as critical race theory, feminist, and postcolonial studies; a dynamic look at intersections of race with queer, trans, disability, and indigenous studies; and a vibrant array of new approaches from ecocriticism, to animality, and human rights, from book history, to scholarly editing, and repertory studies; and an exploration of Shakespeare and race in our contemporary moment through discussions of political activism, pedagogy, visual arts, film, and theatre. Woven through the collection are the voices of practicing theatre professionals who have grappled with the challenges of race and racism both in performance and in the profession itself.

This book... offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom.

This title offers literary scholars a variety of perspectives, insights and methodologies found in current historical work that inform the study of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Presents current scholarship on race and racism in Shakespeare's works. The Handbook offers an overview of approaches used in early modern critical race studies through fresh readings of the plays; an exploration of new methodologies and archives; and sustained engagement with race in contemporary performance, adaptation, and activism.

Contains forty original essays.

The series statement "Oxford handbooks to Shakespeare" taken from dust jacket.

For centuries, plays like Othello and The Tempest have spoken about 'race' to audiences whose lives have been, and continue to be, enormously affected by the racial question. But are concepts such as 'race' or 'racism', 'xenophobia', 'ethnicity', or even 'nation' appropriate for analysing communities and identities in early modern Europe? Did skin colour matter to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, or was religious difference more important to them? This book examines how Shakespeare's plays contribute to, and are themselves crafted from, contemporary ideas about social and cultural difference. It considers how such ideas might have been different from later ideologies of 'race' that emerged during colonialism, but also from older ideas about barbarism, blackness, and religious difference. Thus it places the racial question in Shakespeare's plays alongside the histories with which they converse. Shakespeare uses and plays with the vocabularies of difference prevailing in his time, repeatedly turning to religious and cultural cross-overs and conversions - their impossibility, or the traumas they engender, or the social upheavals they can generate. Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism looks in depth at Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and Titus Andronicus, and also shows how racial difference shapes the language and themes of other plays.