This essay is written from my conviction that there is no point to Shakespeare in the twenty-first century if the stakes of Shakespeare performance, scholarship, and pedagogy are not firmly anchored in the anticolonial (as opposed to the colonial), the reparative (as opposed to the exploitative), and the just (as opposed to the overtly or covertly accepting of the injustice of imperialism). The outsize presence of Shakespeare in the world of letters and theater today is a direct result of English imperialism, and I must begin by stating that fact without reservation. Just as I take Shakespeare's worldwide presence today as a given, I also take the fact that our world's interlocked history is an ongoing outcome of colonialism as a given. Any discussion of anticolonial pedagogy must first take into account that we are living in continuously colonial conditions. Thus, everything that I write here comes from my commitment to anticolonial thought and action, and from acknowledging that there is no way to work toward justice in and through Shakespeare studies without taking into account the matter of European and especially English colonialism and the aftermaths of that colonialism, which include Indigenous genocide, chattel slavery, and profiteering war. Meditating on anticolonialism as an ethic brought to my professional life in the United States—an ethic that I have been compelled to explicitly develop because of my third-world and immigrant identity in the global North—and examining my pedagogy of Shakespeare, anticolonialism, race, and disability across campuses of a large Midwestern state university, this essay assesses the possibilities and impossibilities of decolonizing curricula, and justice-oriented pedagogy more broadly, at my institution and in the academy at large.

A roundtable from the World Shakespeare Congress of 2021, discussing the state of play around race and postcoloniality in Shakespeare studies.

This essay studies how John Milton, going blind some three decades after Shakespeare’s lifetime and caught in his own tumultuous historical moment, engaged with Shakespeare’s sonnets. Readings two pairs of sonnets by the two poets, it shows that Shakespeare remained a sustaining poetic companion for Milton’s journey into blindness.