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Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now

Hillary Eklund
Wendy Beth Hyman
Copyright Date: 2019
Pages: 288
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https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvrs912p
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  • Book Info
    Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare
    Book Description:

    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."

    eISBN: 978-1-4744-5560-2
    Subjects: Language & Literature, British Studies, European Studies

Table of Contents

  1. (pp. 1-24)
    Wendy Beth Hyman and Hillary Eklund

    On January 22, 2017, in a “Meet the Press” interview that soon became infamous, Donald Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway defended the exaggerated claims made by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer about attendance numbers at Trump’s presidential inauguration. According to Spicer, “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe.”³ Given the chance to correct Spicer’s exaggeration or supplant it with a less blatantly fraudulent form of presidential praise, Conway made the curious choice to double down on error, positing Spicer’s claim as an “alternative fact.” What universe was this? As...

  2. I. Defamiliarizing Shakespeare

    • (pp. 27-35)
      Adhaar Noor Desai

      In the winter of 2016, in the wake of the U.S. presidential election, I reflected on the privilege of studying Shakespeare in a country wounded by grotesque racism, inequality, and distrust. I found myself cheering as students replaced his portrait at the University of Pennsylvania with a photo of Audre Lorde, and felt dismay when I heard that white supremacists and ideological pundits rallied behind him to mock the students.¹ I did not resent Shakespeare, but I certainly needed to rekindle my enthusiasm for teaching his works. An essay I had last read as an undergraduate, “Why I Stopped Hating...

    • (pp. 36-45)
      Sawyer Kemp

      In May 2017, the Globe theater released a short blog post promoting its summer production of Twelfth Night. In the blog, scholar Will Tosh compared Viola’s disguise as Cesario to the experience of contemporary transgender and gender-nonconforming youth. He wrote:

      Shakespeare’s vision of a gender identity that can slip along the scale from female to male and back seems, in 2017, intriguingly familiar. […] But if the number of transgender people seems greater today than in the past […] it’s worth remembering that gender fluidity is no 21st-century invention: Shakespeare’s comedies show that when it comes to gender, it’s all...

    • (pp. 46-54)
      Allison P. Hobgood

      On Wednesday, July 27, 2016, I woke to a CNN live news report that Satoshi Uematsu had broken into Tsukui Yamayuri-en, a residential care center for people with mental and physical disabilities in Sagamihara, Japan, and perpetrated the worst mass killing in the country in eighty years. The facility housed approximately 140 residents between the ages of nineteen and seventy-five. In the early morning hours, Uematsu, a former employee of the facility, entered Tsukui Yamayuri-en and stabbed to death nineteen people and injured twenty-six others, some quite severely. The Japan Times described Uematsu as “methodically cutting the throats of his...

    • (pp. 55-64)
      Emily Griffiths Jones

      Like many of us, I learned Shakespeare as a student almost entirely from reading play texts edited by Anglo-American scholars, and I spent my graduate school years teaching Shakespeare almost entirely from such books. Then, in 2013, I had the great good fortune of being hired as a postdoc affiliated with MIT’s Global Shakespeares project.¹ Over the next few years, I first helped design an online module for teaching global performances of Hamlet—featuring annotated and searchable archives of full videos and video clips of parallel moments from numerous global cinematic and theatrical adaptations—and then spent a semester piloting...

  3. II. Decolonizing Shakespeare

    • (pp. 67-75)
      Jason M. Demeter

      What follows is a reflection on my recent experience designing and teaching a Shakespeare course that attempted specifically to push students to interrogate the poet’s racially charged signification within contemporary American culture. Prompted by my uneasiness regarding Shakespeare’s use within American education as an instrument of white racial consolidation and non-white marginalization, I aimed to create a class that foregrounded the ways that a number of African-American writers recognized and responded to popular perceptions of Shakespeare as the exclusive property of a white majority culture. In addition to the work of exploring Shakespeare’s life, times, and literary output, my course...

    • (pp. 76-84)
      Ruben Espinosa

      In 2007, civil rights activist Dolores Huerta spoke to a student assembly at Tucson High School to encourage Chicanx involvement in the democratic process and uttered three words that would ignite a decade-long legal battle in Arizona: “Republicans hate Latinos.” With remarkable candor, Huerta took aim at anti-immigrant legislative initiatives that had garnered support from Arizona Republicans. When Superintendent Tom Horne, a Republican who later served as Arizona’s attorney general, learned of Huerta’s comments, he was infuriated. He deployed his Republican aide, Margaret Garcia Dugan, to follow up with these students and explain that Republicans did not, in fact, hate...

    • (pp. 85-94)
      Kim F. Hall

      On June 6, 1916, Manhattan was temperate but overcast: on the streets, cars and double trolleys vied for space with horses, carts, and pedestrians. The latest arrivals from Europe, the West Indies, and the American South marveled with native New Yorkers at the new buildings springing up everywhere. While skyscrapers replaced downtown mansions in America’s largest city, eastern European Jews, southern Italians and Chinese traversed their respective enclaves on the east side. Uptown, whites had fled Harlem as blacks moved there in search of better conditions. By 1916 Harlem was a black “city within a city” where both the better...

  4. III. Ethical Queries and Practices

    • (pp. 97-105)
      Kirsten N. Mendoza

      Over the last decade, a heated controversy over calls for trigger warnings has emerged among students, faculty, administrators, and those outside of academia. Critics often decry these alerts as antithetical to the purpose of education, cautioning students that “a perfectly safe university would not be worth attending.”¹ Not only do trigger warnings and safe spaces purportedly stifle dialogue and censor the contentious but meaningful subjects that professors teach, but it is argued that they even pose a significant threat to free speech. According to a report issued in 2014 by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), when teachers are...

    • (pp. 106-114)
      Jeffrey Osborne

      Over the past five years or so, a spate of books, articles, and columns have appeared with the aim of assessing the value of postsecondary education, but they ultimately reveal not so much the extent to which university learning is beneficial (economically or otherwise), but what the university has become in the cultural imagination. The reduction of education to an economic investment coincides with the once-gradual and now-precipitous decline in state funding of public higher education. What funding remains is in many places tied to performance metrics that often explicitly devalue arts and humanities study. Because these cuts coincide with...

    • (pp. 115-123)
      Mary Janell Metzger

      In the wake of 9/11 and the anti-Muslim fervor that followed, I set out to create a Shakespeare course relevant to my students’ lives beyond the classroom. The upshot is a course rooted in ethical theory and the transformational power of Shakespeare’s tragic forms as representations of human vulnerability, individual and collective needs for community, and the long history of social injustice in which these take shape. By heightening students’ sense of literary form, historical violence, and forms of ethical resistance offered in philosophical discourse, I develop their understanding of Shakespeare, theories of virtue and social justice, and the potential...

    • (pp. 124-133)
      Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe

      Human-precipitated climate change promises to be an issue of great import, perhaps the single greatest issue, in this century. Exploring its relationship to social justice—the refugee crises, war, food and water shortages, species extinction, and other problems already underway, as well as the countless more that will inevitably follow as a result of resource scarcity and habitat depletion—will only become more urgent as the planet continues to warm, perhaps irreversibly. Human animals need, have always needed, food, shelter, water, and clothing, and in those needs lie the continuities and gaps—both temporal and geographic—of production and consumption...

    • (pp. 134-142)
      Steve Mentz

      The man who wanted to rule stood apart, downstage left, staring at his body in a full-length mirror. The Dutch actor Hans Kesting, playing Richard III in Brooklyn the weekend before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, projected a sinuous intensity that should have warned us all what was coming. Kesting’s Richard was enticing and violent, bare of physical props except a wine-colored stain under one eye. He threatened by standing still, separate, eying his reflection while the other aristocrats pretended they were in control of the kingdom.

      Kesting walked as if on springs, unstable and uncomfortable, with his hips slightly...

  5. IV. Revitalizing the Archive and Remixing Traditional Approaches

    • (pp. 145-154)
      Rachel E. Holmes

      A few years ago I was teaching a fairly standard undergraduate class on poetics in John Milton’s Paradise Lost when a student asked me, point blank, “Why does any of this matter?” The next class, I ditched my lesson plan and instead handed out Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Revenge” and a passage from Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England, and told the students we were going to look at justice and revenge, all to a chorus of semi-audible groans. Then I asked whether they had ever listened to Serial, the record-breaking NPR podcast fronted by Sarah Koenig. They...

    • (pp. 155-164)
      Matthew Harrison

      Bouncing from teaching job to teaching job, I learned to read sonnets differently. In my portable academic life—graduate student, writing consultant, visiting assistant professor, adjunct—sonnets spoke to me in their contingency, their disarray, and the painful realization that no amount of skill (of craft, of mastery) can merit love.

      More than 1,000 English Ph.D.s graduate each year and fight for fewer than 200 tenure-track jobs.¹ The number of degrees granted continues to rise. The number of jobs continues to fall. The effect of this reserve army of labor is a wholesale transformation of the economy of higher education:...

    • (pp. 165-173)
      Carla Della Gatta

      Recent terms such as “alternative facts,” “fake news,” and the more relaxed protocols of social media have changed the standards of spoken and written English. At the same time, technology has enabled widespread dissemination of both public and private information in the twenty-first century. But it has also brought forth a greater questioning of truth, as images and language can be easily manipulated or erased. Here I present a pedagogy that engages Shakespeare plays as key tools for teaching students how to recognize evidence that confuses facts, feelings, and opinions. In 2017, the political climate was marked by reading lessons...

    • (pp. 174-184)
      Debapriya Sarkar

      In an era that increasingly turned to empirical methods to understand the physical universe, early modern poets and dramatists reveled in the unseen, the intangible, and the unverifiable. This tendency repeatedly converges around the idea of possible worlds. As Philip Sidney declares in the Defence of Poetry (1595), the poet deals with what “may be and should be.”¹ Sidney’s contemporary Edmund Spenser refines the formulation, claiming that The Faerie Queene depicts what “might best be” rather than prescribing what “should be.”² Several decades later, Margaret Cavendish deploys possibility to underscore an egalitarian principle of creation in The Blazing World (1666):...

  6. V. Shakespeare, Service, and Community

    • (pp. 187-196)
      Hillary Eklund

      In a cultural landscape increasingly suspicious of higher education and of the utility of the humanities, the study of Shakespeare has been cast as—at best—a kind of benevolent excess. The head of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, for instance, recently advocated that students review their “employment and wage prospects” before choosing a major. “We don’t want to take away Shakespeare,” he said. “We’re just talking about helping people make good decisions.”¹ And while Shakespeare’s still-elevated status in the curriculum may protect our subject from the kind of targeted criticism lobbied at French, philosophy, and gender studies,...

    • (pp. 197-205)
      Jayme M. Yeo

      A glance down any British literature survey syllabus yields an astonishing number of authors who spent time in prison: Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt, Robert Southwell, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, John Milton, John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe. And yet, despite recent critical interest in early modern prison writing,¹ issues of incarceration remain relatively removed from early modern literature classrooms. This elision seems strange, particularly given the recent surge of popular interest in prisons. The gritty glamour of media depictions of prison, however, perpetuates stereotypes about incarcerated people that underscore the injustices of the carceral system. Particularly troubling among these injustices...

    • (pp. 206-214)
      Eric L. De Barros

      After Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), begins a diary, a “thoughtcrime” punishable by death, he continues the unearthing of a complex range of vague emotions and fragmented memories that “the Party” has systematically attempted to destroy. Eventually, those emotions and memories come together in the form of a dream that ends in a physical act of political rebellion:

      The girl with dark hair was coming toward him across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside … What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for...

    • (pp. 215-224)
      Tania Boster

      Taking a slight departure from this volume’s emphasis on Shakespeare, this chapter explores a model of social justice pedagogy that brings historical methods of documentary analysis into a community-based learning (CBL) course.¹ My approach to CBL is illustrated by a method of teaching first-year students to situate texts—historical and contemporary—into their contexts to support the critical evaluation of underlying structures that inform their creation and reception. This method could be applied in a variety of CBL classes, for instance to introduce students to historical contexts of Shakespeare’s plays or their performance throughout time and place, or to support...

    • (pp. 225-234)
      Todd Butler and Ashley Boyd

      For college and university faculty in literary studies, there is perhaps no greater—or more neglected—opportunity to support social justice and change than by working with those students who, as pre-service teachers preparing for careers in secondary education, represent the next generation of educators. Especially in large state universities, students with a focus in English education frequently comprise the majority of English majors, and in an era when the curriculum of many English departments has become increasingly attentive to the diversity of national and world literatures, courses of study for English education majors still at least expect, if not...

  7. (pp. 235-238)
    Ayanna Thompson

    It is interesting to note that the terms “Shakespeare” and “social justice” are neither assumed to be synonymous nor necessarily “relevant” to each other. I find this particularly ironic because as a black, female Shakespeare scholar, I have come to think of Shakespeare as my great secret weapon. I frequently wield him in the service of dialogues about equality, justice, and progress as a hidden dagger that slices to the heart of the matter. As a graduate student, I specifically chose not to specialize in African-American literature and culture because I thought (naively and mistakenly) that I would not get...

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This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Funding is provided by Knowledge Unlatched Open Services