Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

13 results

  • Becoming Undisciplined: On Pathways to Environmental and Racial Justice in Early Modern Studies

  • Hillary Eklund, Jennifer Park, Debapriya Sarkar, Ayanna Thompson
  • Journal:
    PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 139 / Issue 5 / October 2024
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    06 January 2025, pp. 791-805
    Print publication:
    October 2024
    • Article
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation

  • This essay is born of the belief that racial justice, social justice, and environmental justice are mutually entangled. Despite their shared commitments to justice, early modern ecocriticism and premodern critical race studies have rarely been in conversation with each other. We address this aporia here and ponder how such intersections can create pathways to more inclusive futures for early modern studies, and for literary studies more broadly. We begin with a brief reflection about how we came to these topics; we then turn to literary and critical works that illustrate the interconnectedness of these issues in premodern literature and explore how those connections persist and haunt our own thinking and writing. This essay is not argumentative in the traditional sense, but rather invites our scholarly communities to unlearn our way to different possibilities.

  • The 2021 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: On Protean Acting: Race and Virtuosity

  • Ayanna Thompson
  • Journal:
    Renaissance Quarterly / Volume 75 / Issue 4 / Winter 2022
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    09 January 2023, pp. 1127-1143
    Print publication:
    Winter 2022

  • In November 2020, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, the New York Times film critics, published an article entitled “The Century's Greatest Actors,” in which they proclaimed, “We are in a golden age of acting—make that platinum.” Celebrating the fact that their list of the top twenty-five actors from the last twenty years “looked beyond Hollywood,” Dargis and Scott declared that while there are Oscar winners on their list, “there are also character actors and chameleons.” One of the “radical shape-shifting” actors on the list is Tilda Swinton, whom Dargis characterized in the following fashion:

    The woman of a thousand otherworldly faces, Tilda Swinton has created enough personas—with untold wigs, costumes and accents—to have become a roster of one. She's a star, a character actor, a performance artist, an extraterrestrial, a trickster. Her pale, sharply planed face is an ideal canvas for paint and prosthetics, and capable of unnerving stillness.

    I am interested in the way that Swinton's “pale, sharply planed face” is praised for being so malleable: as Dargis says, “an ideal canvas for paint and prosthetics.” Swinton's paleness—her whiteness—is appended to her ability to be a “trickster,” to sustain paints and prosthetics, and to radically shape-shift. Swinton's acting craft is rendered visible to Dargis, because her “canvas” is “pale.”

  • Chapter 1 - Did the Concept of Race Exist for Shakespeare and His Contemporaries?

  • Edited by Ayanna Thompson, Arizona State University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race
    Published online:
    09 February 2021
    Print publication:
    25 February 2021, pp 1-16

  • Summary

    This chapter explains how and why The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race would have been nearly impossible to create thirty years ago. It traces how the volume requires scholars who know not only Shakespeare’s works, the historical and cultural milieu of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in England and Europe, and the archives that hold the historical documents from these time periods, but also the history of imperialism, alternative archives that reveal more about the various lives of people of color in the early modern world, and the history of Shakespeare’s employment in various theatrical, educational, and political moments in history – from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century. Post-colonial studies, African American studies, critical race studies, and queer studies allow scholars to apply new methodologies to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race
  • Edited by Ayanna Thompson
  • Published online:
    09 February 2021
    Print publication:
    25 February 2021
  • The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race shows teachers and students how and why Shakespeare and race are inseparable. Moving well beyond Othello, the collection invites the reader to understand racialized discourses, rhetoric, and performances in all of Shakespeare's plays, including the comedies and histories. Race is presented through an intersectional approach with chapters that focus on the concepts of sexuality, lineage, nationality, and globalization. The collection helps students to grapple with the unique role performance plays in constructions of race by Shakespeare (and in Shakespearean performances), considering both historical and contemporary actors and directors. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race will be the first book that truly frames Shakespeare studies and early modern race studies for a non-specialist, student audience.