Course Description

Shakespeare’s Othello has been one of the most controversial and popular Shakespearean plays. In this class, we examine issues of race, religion, gender, class, and sexuality in the past as well as the present. Beginning with the play’s earliest performance, we study Othello from various critical perspectives through close analysis of the play-text and adaptations on film and stage. For several weeks students read the text of the play slowly and closely, paying particular attention to Shakespeare’s use of language, metaphor, genre, and dramatic form. Then they investigate the complex meanings of race, religion, gender, social status, and sexuality in premodern England through Othello as well as other medieval and early modern materials.

In addition to recent interpretative criticism and the performance history of the play, including the use of blackface on stage and in film, the course also includes global adaptations of the play in various forms, including Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Otello, Vishal Bhardwaj’s film Omkara, Toni Morrison’s play Desdemona, Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North, and Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor. By using Othello and its afterlives as a case study, the course considers the relevance of Othello, and Shakespeare in general, to our understanding of race, religion, gender, sexuality, class, and immigration today.

Modules

1. Texts, contexts, and sources

• The Text of the Play: Shakespeare, William. Othello. Edited by Michael Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
  
  I typically assign Neill’s edition as I find its introduction and appendix particularly rich for teaching and query. In the final assignment, I ask students to return to Neill’s introduction and critique it—identifying what they would omit, add, or reorganize—while drafting their own version. I encourage students to own the text as experts and to consider what themes, critical frameworks, performance histories, or scholarly debates they find most essential to an engaged reading of the play.
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• Cinthio, Giraldi. The Moor of Venice, 1565.
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• Excerpts from Leo Africanus. A Geographical Historie of Africa. Translated by John Pory, 1600.
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• Selections from Loomba, Ania, and Jonathan Burton, eds. Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

2. Critical responses: race, religion, gender, sexuality, class

In this module, students write four short close-reading papers—on gender, race, sexuality, and religion, respectively—in which they focus on a single, specific moment, word, phrase, image, or short passage from Othello. This method of literary analysis allows us to notice how Shakespeare’s language invites multiple interpretations and generates complex messages. Each paper shares the same task—close read a passage with a strong thesis—but requires students to re-read the play through a different critical lens.

When students write about race, my goal is for them to consider how race is constructed through language, skin color, foreignness, nationhood, and/or hierarchy. How does the play racialize characters, and to what effect? Students should focus on terms of description, metaphor, otherness, idealization, or insult, and note when race is made visible or invisible.

3. Concluding assignment: Rewriting the introduction to Othello

After students have read Othello multiple times and critically engaged with the play through close reading, performance analysis, and thematic exploration, the final assignment invites them to step into the role of editor, scholar, or teacher. In this assignment students demonstrate what they have learned this semester by showing how they would now guide others into the play.

Students revise the introduction of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Othello—the one they have used throughout the class. They rethink how the play should be presented to students and readers today. Rather than rewriting the introduction itself, their task is to critique, reimagine, and design a new one.

Students organize their response into these required sections:

1. What’s missing?

Students identify what they think is absent from the current Oxford edition introduction.

• What key themes, perspectives, or contexts are underdeveloped or missing entirely?
• In the 21st century, what conversations about Othello should be foregrounded that the edition sidelines or omits?

2. What would you omit, and why?

Students consider how space in a scholarly edition should be used purposefully and inclusively.

• Are there aspects of the existing introduction that feel outdated, overly canonical, or unnecessarily emphasized?
• What would students cut or shorten—and why?

3. What would you add?

This final assignment requires students to articulate their vision for the edition:

• What would they include in their new introduction?
• What themes, critical frameworks, performance histories, or scholarly debates did students find most essential to an engaged reading of the play?
• What perspectives—feminist, queer, postcolonial, Black studies, disability studies, performance studies—should be centered?
• Are there recent adaptations or performances that shift how we understand the play?
• Students have the option to respond as a teacher (what would I want students to learn from Othello?) or as a scholar (what does the public need to rethink or revisit?). They may imagine their new introduction as part of a public-facing edition or as a classroom tool.

4. How would you organize It?

Students may submit their work in outline form or as continuous prose (or a combination). Bullet points, headings, and short paragraphs are welcome: they do not need to write a formal essay.

Students must propose a possible structure or table of contents for their new introduction. They may list:

• Section headings and subtitles
• Topics to be included in each section
• Examples of key texts, productions, or scholarly perspectives to reference
• New questions readers should consider

Readings and bibliography

• Boyarin, Daniel. “Othello’s Penis: Or, Islam in the Closet.” In Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by Madhavi Menon, 254–62. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
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• Burton, Jonathan, Kate Fisher, and Sarah Toulalan. “Western Encounters with Sex and Bodies in Non-European Cultures, 1500–1750.” In The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, edited by Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher, 495–510. London: Routledge, 2016.
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• Harris, Jonathan Gil. “Shakespeare and Race.” In The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, 201–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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• Little Jr., Arthur L. Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice. Chapter 2. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
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• Loomba, Ania. “Identities and Bodies in Early Modern Studies.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, edited by Valerie Traub, 228–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
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• Masten, Jeffrey, and Valerie Traub. “Glossing and T*pping: Editing Sexuality, Race, and Gender in Othello.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, edited by Valerie Traub, 569-586. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
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• Neill, Michael. “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1989): 383–412.
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• Newman, Karen. “‘And Wash the Ethiop White’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello.” In Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited by Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor, 142–62. New York: Methuen, 1987.
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• Sanchez, Melissa E. “The Erotic Life of Racism in The Merchant of Venice and Othello.” In Shakespeare and Queer Theory, 111-142. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2019.
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• Smith, Ian. “We Are Othello.” In Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race, 156–181. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
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• Smith, Ian, and Jyotsna G. Singh. “The Queer Moor: Bodies, Borders, and Barbary Inns.” In A Companion to the Global Renaissance, edited by Jyotsna G. Singh. 190–204. Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2009.
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• Vitkus, Daniel J. “Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor." In Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630, 77–106. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Productions: stage and screen

• Orson Welles, dir. Othello. 1952.
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• Stuart Burge, dir. Othello. 1965.
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• Jonathan Miller, dir. Othello. 1981.
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• Trevor Nunn, dir. Othello. 1989.
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• Oliver Parker, dir. Othello. 1995.
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• Tim Blake Nelson, dir. O. 2001.
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• Vishal Bhardwaj, dir. Omkara. 2006.
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• Iqbal Khan, dir. Othello. 2015.
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• Mehmet Ali Sanlikol, dir. Othello in the Seraglio. 2015.

Whose Othello

• Cobb, Keith Hamilton. American Moor. Modern Plays. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2020.
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• Hall, Kim F. “I Can’t Love This the Way You Want Me To: Archival Blackness.” postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 11, no. 2–3 (2020): 171-79.
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• Morrison, Toni. Desdemona. New York: Vintage International, 2012.
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• Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North. Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. New York: New York Review Books, 2009.

In Turk plays like A Christian Turn'd Turk, The Renegado, Selimus, Tamburlaine, and Shakespeare’s Othello racial difference is sexualized, and sexual difference is racialized. These texts reveal patterns in the representation of the Mediterranean as an imagined world where racial and religious differences are often conflated and represented as failing in heterosexual norms. Racialized men of different religions are associated with homosexuality and effeminacy, and women with masculinity, witchcraft, and adultery.  Once students can trace the constructions of gender, sexuality, and race in the early modern past, they begin to see how unstable these markers of difference are in the present.

Understanding how the Europeans of the early modern period conceived of the gender binary—and how they connected gender plurality to racial and religious difference—can help us see how the rhetoric of difference continues to be mobilized today. As we read early modern texts, we might ask:  

• What do representations of racially othered figures—such as the Jewish man, the Black man, the Black woman, the Muslim, the Turk, the circumcised man, the eunuch, or the Amazonian—reveal about racial, religious, and gender variance?  

• Is Othello, the Black “Moor” of Venice, the same gender as the white Iago?  

• Why and how does Captain Ward of A Christian Turned Turk change in terms of his masculine virility after he converts to Islam and gets circumcised?  

• Does Viola’s desire to become a eunuch in Twelfth Night suggest a wish to transition into a new, distinct gender that is neither man nor boy?  

When we understand gender, racial, and religious difference as interlocking structures, we can begin to denaturalize the supposed ubiquity of biological race and the gender binary.

There is no such thing as a neutral edition of Shakespeare. Each edition is interpreted, selected, and published within the context of the editor’s priorities, expectations, and audience. Teaching students the subjectivity with which Shakespeare editions are created helps them see beyond the plays themselves, and into the larger context of Shakespeare studies. Using Othello as a key example of the role of editors, Patrica Akhimie demonstrates how editorial decisions can transform how a play is interpreted.

Collaboration is key when researching an early global world. Geraldine Heng notes in her book Teaching Early Global Literatures and Cultures that teaching global literatures and cultures is a practice in humility. No one human can master the spectrum of languages, knowledges, and disciplinary expertise needed for global research. And while this may sound like a hinderance, it is actually a gift. It means that students become your collaborators.  

Heng underscores the importance of student-led research in her classes. Rather than a pedagogical model of knowledge dissemination followed by exams and papers, she asks her students to undertake rigorous, scholarly research based in their interests and curiosities.  

The structure of her classes asks: what if the outcome of a humanities course was not to demonstrate knowledge but to demonstrate process?  

Everyone is a learner. Everyone is a teacher.

At the beginning of the semester, Heng asks her students to keep an eye on topics that interest them and to follow those topics in the assigned readings. She emphasizes that these topics, characterizations, and themes should be close to their hearts. They should be things that students care about in their world today. Topics could include women, climate change or the environment, food, sexuality, modes of travel, race, wealth, art, etc.

Rather than limiting the class to the assigned readings, she lets students explore, ask questions, and seek answers, using not just literary texts, but artifacts, archives, and cultural texts that cross disciplinary categorizations.  

Instead of prioritizing rote knowledge through pop quizzes or exams, she assigns expansive research projects where students dive into their curiosities and passions. These presentations function as a major part of course content. Through presenting students are equally responsible for educating their peers as they are for learning themselves.

Practicing the process of learning

Once a student has chosen a topic to research, they meet with Heng for a one-on-one discussion. In this way, she can help the student refine the scope of their research and expand their access and knowledge of sources. Her role as professor is to support and expand the student’s interest, not evaluate their current knowledge. By pointing students to connections or recommending areas of focus within their project area, students can practice researching skills led by the pleasure of their own curiosity.

Sharing research and knowledge

Students will naturally have accrued a rich, comparative understanding of their topic over the duration of the course. They’ll see how that concern or question plays out in cultures and societies around the world and across centuries.  

At the end of the semester, students present their research to the class and turn in a paper on their research topic.  

Heng limits instructions to practical considerations: how long a presentation should be and formatting details for the end-of-term paper. She does not force a particular structure or prompting onto the students’ work. The rest of the research process develops organically through conversations between the professor and individual students and is entirely led by student interest and investigation.

Throughout the semester students have practiced, knowingly or not, what makes academic research satisfying. Students locate themselves in the context of the subject at hand, following the threads that speak most to them, and draw on a multiplicity of sources across disciplines to support their curiosity. This is a process that can be applied across the rest of their college career, and hopefully beyond.

Exemplar student research topics

These topics represent successful and compelling student research projects in Heng’s Early Global Literatures and Cultures course. Each topic is expected to cover “around the world,” meaning that, for their presentations, students pick 3-4 societies and cultures for comparison and analysis. For example, if a student wanted to research premodern medical systems, they would present on comparative systems in China, India, and Islamicate societies.  

• Agriculture, horticulture (including gardens and leisure environments  

• Alcoholic beverages  

• Birth rituals and customs, death rituals and customs, funerary practices  

• Childrearing  

• Cooking, foods, spices (e.g., a recent collaborative research paper was on cuisine and food in the Mediterranean, narrated through the travels of a captain and his ship around the northern, eastern, and southern Mediterranean)  

• Folklore, mythology, or supernatural/magical beings (one collaborative research paper on Southeast Asian mythology was so excellent, it bettered graduate term papers, and was nearly publishable)

• Games (e.g. chess/board games, but also sports and ball games)  

• Hostelries, “hotels,” accommodation  

• How time is told around the world (including the invention of clocks)  

• Medical systems (including hospitals, hospices, medicine, treatments, medical education, therapeutic measures like acupuncture or music)  

• Maps and mapping, cartography in different cultures  

• Musical instruments, music, musicians, dance (e.g., Mongolian throat singing, Malian griots, Indian Bharatanatyam; a recent collaborative term paper focused on object biography, in the form of a musical rattle that was fashioned in Mali and made its way around the many cultures and peoples of Trans-Saharan Africa)  

• Pets  

• Pottery and ceramics  

• Religious architecture  

• Science and technology (including optics like spectacles, instruments of calculation like the abacus, automata like metallic singing birds, etc.)  

• Ships and navigation  

• Sweets and confectionery (including chocolate, ice cream, sherbet, cakes, cookies)  

• Textiles, “fashion,” clothing, silk, wool, cotton, linen, flax, fabrics, carpets, etc. 

• Theater and drama (including puppetry, dolls, dance drama, etc.)  

• Weapons of offense and defense  

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Geraldine Heng is an influential, field-crossing scholar and one of the founding theorists of premodern critical race studies. Her classes on premodern European literature offer a critical understanding of the histories of race-making, all while supporting students to conduct interdisciplinary research that interrogates the social and cultural mechanisms of race in their everyday lives. Here, Heng offers a glimpse into the texts she teaches and her collaborative approach to student assignments. She identifies a new path forward for premodern European literature—one that is a provocation for our world today.

History is understood through narrative. The stories that are written, repeated, and taught give shape to the past. By decentering European narratives in our teaching, we can expand the scope of historical understanding that our students carry with them into the world. Studying early global literatures shakes the preconceived notions about the past that students bring into the classroom, especially when they are introduced to early global civilizations that were far more complex and modern than Europe.

Drawn from historian Mayte Green-Mercado’s courses, the resources here offer contemporary chronicles of refugee stories. Green-Mercado’s goal is to provide students expanded ways to think historically and critically about issues related to migrants, refugees, and displacements in the Mediterranean. Today’s graphic texts and video games offer visually charged versions of diasporic literature centered on identity, exile, and belonging. These narratives, read and experienced alongside historical texts, can deepen student understanding and, perhaps, empathy to refugees fleeing war, violence, conflict, and persecution today.

Graphic novels and memoirs written by refugees about the refugee experience

In assigning and discussing graphic novels and memoirs, Mayte Green-Mercado leans into questions of authority and perspective, highlighting whose story is being told, and what evidence readers have for trusting a particular point of view. For instance, Green-Mercado assigns excerpts from Aivali Solúp’s A Story of Greeks and Turks in 1922, which narrates Solúp’s grandfather’s story when Orthodox Greeks became refugees from Turkey, and the narrative of “the catastrophe” unfolds from that viewpoint.

In combining art and storytelling, graphic works can create an emotional recognition of the humanity of refugees. Graphic novels and memoirs often depict politically marginalized refugee families through the eyes of children who contend with parental powerlessness, or worrisome decision-making. Students can pay new attention to depictions of everyday moments—the mundane routines of cooking, going to work, or bickering with siblings—set against horrific historical moments of violence or unsettling community fear.  

Recommended graphic novels and memoirs

Abdelrazaq, Leila. Baddawi. Washington, DC: Just World Books, 2015.

The author retells the stories of her father, a Palestinian growing up in a Lebanese refugee camp in the 1960s. His illustrated anecdotes combine playground games and adolescent crushes with military raids and acts of rebellion. The author uses Palestinian embroidery, tatreez, as a visual motif she chooses as resistance to cultural appropriation of the traditional craft.

Bui, Thi. The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir. New York, NY: Abrams Comicarts, 2017.

This graphic memoir depicts the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s as experienced by author Thi Bui’s family and their escape and migration to the US. Bui’s narrative alternates between the US-Vietnam war as experienced by her parents and her life years later. In the context of loss and displacement, Bui reflects on the impact on community and culture as well as parental sacrifice and the family histories she has inherited.

Jamieson, Victoria and Omar Mohamed. When Stars Are Scattered. Solon, OH: Findaway World, 2023.  

Omar Mohamed spent his childhood in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya. In collaboration with children’s author/artist Victoria Jamieson, this graphic memoir recounts his violent displacement from home in Somalia and the loss of his family except for his brother Hassan, who is epileptic and nonverbal. In the camp there is never enough food, with no access to medical care, and the narrative focuses on the consequences of extreme poverty. The title references children in a refugee camp who are denied education and opportunities to realize their potential as human beings.  

Soloúp, Aivali. Aivali: A Story of Greeks and Turks in 1922. Trans. Tom Papademetriou. Boston, MA: Somerset Hall Press, 2019.

This graphic novel depicts Solúp’s grandfather’s experience of “the catastrophe” for Greeks: their defeat in the 1922 Greco-Turkish War and the resulting violence and displacement. In these events, Orthodox Greeks became refugees as more than a million people were displaced because of a negotiated population exchange.

Sulaiman, Hamid. Freedom Hospital: A Syrian story. Translated by Francesca Barrie. New York, NY: Interlink Publishing, 2018.

Written and illustrated by an author who escaped Syria after the Arab Spring, this graphic novel portrays a secret hospital that physicians, patients, and friends keep functioning while evading the Assad-backed army and its daily death toll. While based on true events, this work focuses on the nature of war and the consequences of cycles of suffering and retaliation.

Video games written by refugees about the refugee experience

While graphic novels and memoirs amplify refugee voices and experiences, video games written by and for refugees viscerally depict challenges and illustrate resilience. Mayte Green-Mercado encourages students to appreciate as well as interrogate how the refugee perspectives are portrayed. Green-Mercado points students to news releases and research studies that suggest the value in virtual experiences of expulsion and escape, sometimes seen to benefit refugees themselves.  

Path Out

Path Out was designed by Jack Gutmann, who was brought up in Hama, Syria. Gutmann and four brothers were raised by parents who sought to keep them safe from war by keeping them inside and gaming. His game Path Out puts students in the virtual shoes of refugees who are trying to get to safety and must make decisions to avoid hazards and stay alive.  

Salaam

Lual Mayen’s family escaped South Sudan and survived the journey to a refugee camp in Northern Uganda where they lived for 22 years. Mayen, a game designer now in Washington DC, founded Junub Games. Salaam (Arabic for “peace”) was release in 2020 and engages players in the role of refugees seeking to escape violence and capture and find food, water, medicine, and safety. Through a partnership with UNHCR, players also can contribute financial support to actual refugees in camps.

Gaming supports refugees’ wellbeing

A video game consultant and officer for digital innovation in the UNHCR lead a project where they co-create video games with refugees. They create spaces and events where diverse refugee audiences can play games and experience “digital leisure time” that enables them to recuperate from traumatic experiences and connect with distant families and home communities. The researchers intend to support refugees as game designers to encourage self-expression about their communities.

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Race in the premodern world

(Created for the fall semester of 2022) 

In this course, Mayte Green-Mercado asks students to examine the construction of race and ethnicity in the premodern Mediterranean. By understanding how constructions of race developed in the premodern world, students are invited to consider their own ideas about race and ethnicity. How do these ideas connect to the premodern world? How do they play out in our world today? 

Course Objectives 

• Students will gain a critical understanding of categories such as race, ethnicity, identity, etc. and should be able to question and explore the ways in which these categories were constructed in the premodern world. 
• Students will develop skills in oral and written communication, including sustained argument, and independent thought. 
• Students will have ample practice in reading primary sources and employing primary evidence in textual and historical analysis and argumentation.   

Journaling 

For each primary source students will select ONE word in the assigned source (i.e. cast, race, religion, etc.) and write a 500-word journal entry. The entry must analyze what the word means within the context of the source. Students will also reflect on what the terms mean today and to them.  

Course sequence and topics  

Week 1 - Introductions

Week 2 - The social construction of race

Primary source 

Schaub, Jean-Frédéric, Race Is About Politics: Lessons from History, trans. Lara Vergnaud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019): 61-121 (Chapter 2: Historiographical Debate). 

Secondary sources 

Heng, Geraldine, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018): selections. 

López, Ian F. Haney, “The Social Construction of Race,” in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting  Edge, 3rd ed., Jean Stefanic and Richard Delgado (eds.) (Philadelphia: Temple University  Press, 2013): 238-248. 

Documentary 

Strain, Tracey Heather, et al. Race: The Power of an Illusion (San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel, 2003).

Week 3 - Vocabularies and periodization of premodern race 

Primary source 

Heng, Geraldine.The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018): selections. 

Audio 

Heng, Geraldine, "Defining Race, Periodizing Race," Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/defining-race-periodizing-race.  [Accessed 9/1/25].

Secondary sources 

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, “Race,” in A Handbook of Middle English Studies ed. Marion Turner (Malden, MA, 2013): 109–22. 

Chaves, María Eugenia, “Race and Caste: Other Words and Other Worlds,” in Race and Blood in the Iberian World, ed. María Elena Martínez, Max. S. Hering Torres, David Nirenberg (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012): 39-58.   

Week 4 - Statutes of purity of blood  

Primary source 

Wolf, Kenneth B., “Sentencia-Estatuto de Toledo, 1449,” Medieval Texts in Translation, 2008. 

Secondary sources 

Martínez, María Elena, Genealogical Fictions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008): 25-41.  

Hering Torres, Max S., “Purity of Blood: Problems of Interpretation,” in Race and Blood in the Iberian World, eds. María Elena Martínez, Max. S. Hering Torres, David Nirenberg (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012): 11-38.   

Week 5 - Race and religion in medieval and early modern Spain  

Primary sources 

Muley, Nuñez, A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery of the City and Kingdom of Granada, ed. Vincent Barletta (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007): 55-64; 68-73; 90-99. 

“Renegade Jew: Luis de la Ysla,” in Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics, eds. Richard Kagan and Abigail Dyer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004): 21-35. 

Secondary source 

Amelang, James, Parallel Histories: Muslims and Jews in Inquisitorial Spain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013): 26-40; 69-79; 83-97.   

Week 6 - Orientalism: Muslims in the early modern European imaginary  

Primary source 

de Cervantes, Miguel, “The Bagnios of Algiers,” in The Bagnios of Algiers, and “The Great Sultana": Two Plays of Captivity, eds. and trans. Barbara Fuchs and Aaron J. Ilika (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010): 2-98.  

Secondary source 

Vitkus, Daniel J., “Early Modern Orientalism: Representations of Islam in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe,” in Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1999): 207-230.   

Week 7 - Race or ethnicity in early modern Spain: The Romani

Primary source  

de Cervantes, Miguel, “The Novel of the Little Gypsy Girl,” in Exemplary Novels, trans. Edith Grossman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016): 11-68. 

Secondary source 

Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, “Vagrants or vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies in early modern Europe,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, eds. Miriam Eliav Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 276-291. 

Week 8 - The curse of Ham in Christian and Islamic discourse

Video 

El Hamel, Chouki, "What is the 'curse' of Ham?" Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/what-is-the-curse-of-ham. [Accessed 9/1/24]. 

Secondary sources 

El Hamel, Chouki, "Race-making and the myth of Ham," Throughlines.  www.throughlines.org/suite-content/race-making-and-the-myth-of-ham. [Accessed 9/1/24]. 

Bashir, Haroon, “Black Excellence and the Curse of Ham: Debating Race and Slavery in the Islamic Tradition,” ReOrient 5/1 (2019): 92–116. 

Week 9 - African diasporas in early modern Europe

Video

Whitaker, Cord J., “Where were the Black people in the Middle Ages?” Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/black-people-in-the-middle-ages.  [Accessed 9/1/24]. 

Secondary sources 

Zhang, Angela, “Rethinking ‘Domestic Enemies’: Slavery and Race Formation in Late Medieval Florence,” Speculum 99/2 (2024): 409-431. 

Jones, Nicholas, Staging Habla de Negros. Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019): selections. 

Week 10 - Infrastructures of race in colonial Spanish America 

Primary source 

de Vitoria, Francisco, “On the American Indians” in: Vitoria: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): selections. 

Video 

Stevens, Scott Manning, "The Doctrine of Discovery," Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/the-doctrine-of-discovery. [Accessed 9/1/24]. 

Secondary source 

Nemser, Daniel, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017): Chapter 1. 

Week 11 - Race and slavery in colonial Spanish America

Primary source 

de Sandoval, Alonso, “Treatise on Slavery” in De instauranda Aethiopum salute, ed. Nicole Von Germeten (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 2008): selections. 

Podcast 

BBC Podcast In Our Time: “Slavery and Empire” 

Secondary source 

Nemser, Daniel, "The Iberian Slave Trade and the Racialization of Freedom," in History of the Present Vol. 8, Issue 2 (2018): 117-139.   

Week 12 - Negotiating identities in colonial Spanish America

Primary source 

Poma de Ayala, Felipe Guamán, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, abridged, trans. David Frye (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2006): 263-277; 231-239. 

Video 

Stevens, Scott Manning, "Indigenous sovereignty," Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/indigenous-sovereignty. [Accessed 9/1/24]. 

Secondary source 

Hidalgo, Javiera Jaque and Miguel A. Valerio, “Negotiating Status through Confraternal Practices,” in Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status Through Religious Practices, eds. Javiera Jaque Hidalgo and Miguel A. Valerio (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022): 9-34. 

Week 13 - Geographies of race  

Primary sources 

Crewe, Ryan Dominic, “A Moluccan Crypto-Muslim before the Transpacific Inquisition (1623–1645),” in The Spanish Pacific, 1521–1815: A Reader of Primary Sources, eds. C.H. Lee and R. Padrón. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 171-187. 

Souza, George Bryan and Jeffrey S. Turley, eds., The Boxer Codex: transcription and translation of an illustrated late sixteenth-century Spanish manuscript concerning the geography, ethnography and history of the Pacific, South-East Asia and East Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2016): selections. 

Secondary sources 

Davies, Surekha, Renaissance Ethnology and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016): 23-46. 

Padrón, Ricardo, “Sinophobia vs. Sinophilia in the 16th Century Iberian World,” Review of Culture (Instituto Cultural do Governo R.A.E. de Macau, 22014) 46: 95-107. 

Week 14 - Casta paintings 

Secondary source 

Carrera, Magali, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003): chapter 1. 

Mediterranean crossings:  refugees, migration, and displacements (1492-today) 

(Created for the fall semester of 2022) 

Scholars often characterize the Mediterranean Sea as a multicultural space of encounter, competition, and exchange. It is widely taught that the Mediterranean’s geographic placement affords it a significant degree of unity even amidst its racial and religious diversity. But there is another facet to this history that is missing from the narrative.  

This course aims to understand how human displacements in the premodern Mediterranean contribute to the narrative of a diverse, united Iberian Peninsula. In addition, we will use this history as a lens to study the phenomenon of human displacements more widely.  

This course focuses on the expulsion of religious minorities like Jews and Muslims, accounts of captivity and slavery, histories of European colonization and decolonization in North Africa, the rise of the nation state, and population exchanges.  Students will also study how modern wars, climate change, and economic instability and inequality have set off an unprecedented mass scale of contemporary population displacements.    

Learning objectives 

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: 

• Demonstrate a basic level of competence in differentiating between periods in the history of the Mediterranean and articulating the significance of historical context. 

• Grasp how and why migrations have differed in time and space. 

• Read scholarship critically. 

• Read and analyze primary sources. 

• Interrogate maps as historical artifacts. 

• Think historically and critically about issues related to migrants, refugees, and displacements in the Mediterranean. 

• Learn to use digital tools for producing knowledge (such as historical and interactive maps of displacement in the Mediterranean). 

Required texts

Lalami, Laila. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (New York & Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005). 

Pearlman, Wendy. We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2018). 

All other required readings will be online reading/viewing or supplied by PDF. 

Course schedule

Week 1 - Introduction and organization 

Week 2 - The Mediterranean: geographies, chronologies, boundaries 

Calvino, Italo, “On reading a wave” in Mr. Palomar, trans. by William Weaver (San Diego: Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, 1983): 3-8.   

Diaz, Clarisa, “Where Afghan—and all other—refugees are going,” Quartz, 8/31/21 .

Film (in class)  

4.1 Miles, Daphne Matziaraki 

“In the Oscar-nominated short film 4.1 Miles, Daphne Matziaraki follows a day in the life of Kyriakos Papadopoulos, a captain in the Greek coast guard who is caught in the middle of the refugee crisis in which Europe is embroiled. Despite limited resources, the captain and his crew attempt to save thousands of migrants from drowning in the Aegean Sea. Nominated, 2017 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.” 

Secondary sources 

Chatty, Dawn, “Dispossession and Displacement within the Contemporary Middle East: An Overview of Theories and Concepts,” in Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 

Pessani, Lorenzo, “Liquid Violence: Investigations of boundaries at sea by Forensic Oceanography,” The Architectural Review, 4/10/19. 

Optional podcast 

“Roundtable on Narrating Migration: Emerging Methods and Cross-Disciplinary Directions” Ottoman History Podcast, No. 436 (11/24/2019). 

Unit I - The early modern Mediterranean

Week 3 - Expulsions and the creation of diasporas: Jews and Moriscos 

Primary sources 

“Charter of the Expulsion of the Jews,” trans. Edward Peters, in Medieval Iberia, ed. Olivia Remie Constable, second edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012): 508-513. 

“Jewish Account of the Expulsion,” in Medieval Iberia, trans. Jacob R. Marcus: 513-516. 

“Royal Edict of the Muslim Expulsion, 1502,” in Medieval Iberia, trans. Dayle Seidenspinner-Nuñez: 535-539. 

Philip III, “Decree of the Expulsion of the Moriscos,” in Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, ed. Jon Cowans (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003): 145-148. 

Secondary sources 

Ray, Johnathan, “The Long Road into Exile,” in After Expulsion, 1492 and the Making of a Sephardic Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 

Feros, Antonio, “Rhetoric of the Expulsion,” in The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain: A Mediterranean Diaspora, ed. Mercedes García Arenal and Gerard Wiegers (Leiden: Brill, 2014): 60-101.   

Week 4 - Slavery and captivity in the premodern Mediterranean 

Virtual visit by Prof. Hannah Barker (Arizona State University).

Virtual visit by Prof. Daniel Hershenzon (University of Connecticut).

Secondary sources 

Barker, Hannah, The Most Precious Merchandise. The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019): selections.

Unit II - The modern Mediterranean

Week 5 - Disease and displacement 

Virtual visit by Prof. Nukhet Varlik (Rutgers University-Newark).

Secondary source 

Robarts, Andrew, “Nowhere to Run To, Nowhere to Hide? Society, State, and Epidemic Diseases in the Early Nineteenth Century Ottoman Balkans,” in Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 

Week 6 - Migration in the Ottoman Empire 

Virtual visit by Prof. Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular (Rutgers University-Newark).

Secondary source 

Chatty, Dawn, “Dispossession and Forced Migration in the Late Ottoman Empire: Distinct Cultures and Separated Communities,” in Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).  

Week 7 - Forced population transfers, membership and belonging 

Virtual visit by Prof. Joseph Viscomi (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill).

Primary source 

Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations signed at Lausanne 

Documentary 

Aljazeera, “The Great Population Exchange Between Turkey and Greece,” 2/28/18. 

Secondary sources 

Shields, Sarah, "The Greek-Turkish Population Exchange: Internationally Administered Ethnic Cleansing," Middle East Report 267 (2013): 2-6. 

Nail, Thomas, “Introduction” and “The Figure of the Migrant,” in The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015): 1-17. 

Bosma, Ulber, Gijs Kessler, and Leo Lucassen, “Migration and Membership Regimes in Global and Historical Perspective: An Introduction,” in Migration and Membership Regimes in Global and Historical Perspective: An Introduction, eds. Ulber Bosma, Gijs Kessler and Leo Lucassen (Brill, 2013): 1-20. 

Graphic novel 

Solúp, Aivali. A Story of Greeks and Turks in 1922, trans. Tom Papademetriou (Boston: Somerset Hall Press, 2019): selections. 

Film 

Dedemin Insanları (My Grandfather’s People), Dir. Çagan Irmak, 2011.   

Week 8 - The colonial Mediterranean  

Primary sources 

Clancy-Smith, Julia and Charles D. Smith, eds., “Algeria: French Colonization and the Algerian Response,” in The Modern Middle East and North Africa: A History in Documents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 29-32. 

Secondary sources 

Manuel, Borutta and Sakis Gekas, “A Colonial Sea: the Mediterranean, 1798-1956,” European Review of History - Revue européenne d'histoire, 19/1 (2012): 1-13. 

Blais, Hélène, “The Mediterranean. A Territory Between France and Colonial Algeria: Imperial Constructions,” European Review of History 19/1 (2012): 33-57. 

Podcast 

Ottoman History Podcast, France and Algeria: Origins and Legacies (episode 409, 4/7/19).  

Week 9 - Migration and displacement after the two world wars 

Primary sources 

Arendt, Hannah, “We Refugees."

UNHCR, The Refugee Convention, 1951: excerpts.

Secondary sources 

Gatrell, Peter, "Trajectories of Population Displacement in the Aftermaths of Two World Wars," in The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Postwar Europe, eds. J. Reinisch & E. White, 1944-49 (London, 2011): 3-26. 

Eley, Geoff, “A Disorder of Peoples: The Uncertain Ground of Reconstruction in 1945,” in The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Postwar Europe, 1944-49 (London, 2011): 291-314. 

Week 10 - Decolonization and repatriation in the 20th Century 

Secondary sources 

Ballinger, Pamela, “Entangled or ‘Extruded’ Histories? Displacement, National Refugees, and Repatriation after the Second World War,” Journal of Refugee Studies 25/3 (2012): 366-386. 

Viscomi, Joseph John, “Pontremoli’s cry: Personhood, Scale, and History in the Eastern Mediterranean,” History and Anthropology (2019). 

Week 11 - Postcolonial migrations and the multicultural Mediterranean 

Primary sources

“Les Pieds Noirs,” The New Yorker, 11/18/1972. 

‘Oranîmes’ - Susan Slyomovics’ interview with Pierre Claverie.

Secondary sources 

Jordi, Jean-Jacques, “The Creation of the Pieds-Noirs: Arrival and Settlement in Marseilles,” in Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. Andrea L. Smith (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003): 61-74. 

Cooper, Frederick, “Postcolonial Peoples: A Commentary,” in Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. Andrea L. Smith (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003): 169-184. 

Week 12 - Childhood and dispossession: Palestine 

Secondary sources 

Chatty, Dawn and Gillian Lewando Hundt, eds., Children of Palestine. Experiencing Forced Migration in the Middle East (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2005): Introduction, chapter 2, and chapter 6.   

Week 13 - “Burning the Sea”: North African migrants in the Mediterranean   

Reading 

Lalami, Laila, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (New York & Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005). 

Video reports 

Aljazeera, Spain-Morocco migrants hope to leave Ceuta for European mainland, 5/23/21. 

Aljazeera, “Hundreds of children stranded at Spanish enclave of Ceuta,” 5/20/21. 

Secondary source 

Ciucci, Alessandra, “Performing l-ḥrig: music, sound and undocumented migration across the contemporary Mediterranean (Morocco–Italy),” Journal of North African Studies (August, 2019). 

Week 14 - War and displacement in the contemporary Mediterranean 

Secondary source 

Pearlman, Wendy, We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2018). 

Film

Cassel, Matthew and Aboud Shalhoub, “The Journey from Syria” (2016).   

The contemporary rhetoric around refugees and asylum seekers is one of vitriol and villainization. These narratives have social and political consequences, influencing elections and legislation around the globe. But how did we get to these assumptions and tropes that continue to scapegoat people affected by mass displacement? By understanding the construction of the concept “refugee,” students can trace a lineage of racialization and oppression back to the medieval Mediterranean. Green-Mercado asks her students to complicate the political script of migration and displacement by reading and playing narratives outside of the tropes handed down through time.

The language of racialization was tied to religious difference in premodern Spain. After the forced conversion of Muslims and Jews in the 15th century, Spain needed a way to distinguish so-called “new” Christians, or conversos, from “pure” Christians. This division was reified in an early Spanish dictionary from Sebastian de Covarrubias. His definition of words such as "raza" and "casta" reflected the growing system of racial caste across the Iberian Peninsula, and eventually the globe. This rhetoric of racialization, with the assumed superiority of white Christians, lives on in modern day Spain’s far-right political discourse.

Anti-Muslim racism has been a decades-long project in the US and the West broadly, and it's important for students to think about the representation of Muslims as dangerous and threatening, as aliens and outsiders to Europe and its population.  

Using the frame of Shakespeare, and how many of his plays set in the Mediterranean negate and erase Islam and Muslims, students will investigate how individual, cultural, and political identity is manufactured and reinforced through his canon.  Thinking through these historical representations can help students understand and challenge how these stereotypes travel across time and reappear in our contemporary context.  

Readings  

For this class, each Shakespeare play is paired with secondary sources that offer cultural context or critical readings, exposing the wide-ranging knowledge that early modern English people possessed about Islam, its geographies, and its cultures.   

For brief foundational context

A Very Short Introduction to Islamic History. Adam J. Silverstein. Oxford UP, 2010. 

This text offers students a sufficient, if imperfect, background for understanding early modern Islamic cultures and the vast and diverse cultures that encompass the Islamicate. Silverstein provides context for engaging with the representations of Islam that we find in Shakespeare texts.

Suggested pairings

The Merchant of Venice  

"Muslims in Seventeenth-Century England," Matar, Nabil I. Journal of Islamic Studies 8.1 (1997): 63-82. 

Othello 

"Two Faced: The Problem of Othello's Visage," Dadabhoy, Ambereen. Othello: The State of Play (2014): 121-47. 

Richard II & Henry V 

'''Not Amurath an Amurath Succeeds': Playing Doubles in Shakespeare's Henriad." Richard Hillman.  English Literary Renaissance, 21.2 (1991): 161-189. 

"The Glorious Empire of the Turks, the Present Terrour of the World," Richmond Barbour. Before Orientalism: London's Theatre of the East, 1576-1626. 

Twelfth Night  

"Was Illyria as Mysterious and Foreign as We Think?" Patricia Parker, in The Mysterious and Foreign in Early Modern England (209-34). 

"The Frontiers of Twelfth Night," Su Fang Ng, in Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds (173-96). 

The Tempest 

"Carthage and Tunis, The Tempest and Tapestries," Jerry Brotton, in The Tempest and Its Travels (121-130). 

Films 

Two films, adaptations of Hamlet (Haider) and Measure for Measure (Rahm), offer students a more contemporary lens through which to think about Shakespeare and Islam. Both films are set in Islamicate societies and use Shakespeare to tell particularly local stories. I assign these films to demonstrate how these cultures have a way of speaking with, to, and through Shakespeare to make his work speak to their realities and worlds. 

These assignments, created by Ambereen Dadabhoy, can function as a semester-long sequence of assignments which ask students to engage in close readings to construct strong, thoughtful arguments rooted in their own insights. The sequence starts with a demonstration of close reading, moves into an analysis of a trope’s mobility in time, and ends with an original piece of writing that uses these skills to interrogate a contemporary instance of Orientalism. By the end of the semester, students successfully participate in their own knowledge production and create a methodology to interpret texts and the issues they see in their world today.  

The rhetorical and political service of tropes in Shakespeare  

Assignment 1

Explicit Muslim presence in Shakespeare is almost nil. However, the influence of early modern England’s cultural understanding of Muslim and Arab people is embedded in Shakespeare’s texts. To illuminate these subtextual meanings, we must decode the ways Shakespeare conjures Islam and Muslim tropes in his texts. One example of this is in Shakespeare's use of the word “Turk,” usually in some version of the phrase “turning Turk.” By employing the identity or idea of the “Turk,” Shakespeare is communicating something to his audience—something already legible to early modern English people, requiring little explanation.  

To introduce this assignment, I demonstrate how to trace tropes in class. I ask my students first to use context clues to help them decipher what the word “Turk” is doing or signifying in the passage. Students look for words that imply or clearly state forms of Othering, like demonization or denigration. Then students free associate what “Turk” might mean to the audience and to themselves.  

Once we have a preliminary hypothesis of how “Turk” is being employed in the text, I provide historical material on Turks in early modern England to further consider what the trope might have meant for Shakespeare. We gather data from excerpts from:

• Dallam, Thomas. Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant: The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam, 1599-1600.
• de Nicolay, Nicolas. The Navigations, Peregrinations and Voyages Made into Turkie, 1585.
• Knolles, Richard. General History of the Turks, 1603.
• Rycaut, Paul. The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, 1668.
• Sandys, George. Relation of a Journey, 1610.

We then collectively build an argument about the utility of this trope in the speech or scene.

Following the steps we modeled in class, I ask students to choose another trope or referent, which can be an identity marker, a stage prop, or even a geographical allusion. Students write a 500-700 word argument that offers a claim on what ideological and cultural work this referent (or series of referents) is doing in the play, and how their identified trope relates to the play's larger thematic concerns.  

Through this assignment, students understand the kind of rhetorical and political service these seemingly insignificant tropes are performing in the play and Shakespeare's canon more broadly. This initial writing acts as the foundation for the development of an argument they will explore and articulate throughout the semester.  

Troping Islam  

Assignment 2  

In his seminal work, Orientalism, Edward Said identifies the familiar repertoire from which the Orientalist draws and rehearses his knowledge about the Orient. Utilizing the metaphor of the stage, Said writes,  

The idea of representation is a theatrical one: the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe. … In the depths of this Oriental stage stands a prodigious cultural repertoire whose individual items evoke a fabulously rich world (63). 

In this assignment, students trace Orientalist terms in premodern literature to recognize how Islam is articulated as a concept. Students are asked to identify an Orientalist trope in a medieval text and follow it through two early modern texts.  

Students should identify how and why the trope changes (if it does) according to the shifting political relations of the periods. Their argument must explain what the ideological or cultural purpose in depicting Islam in this way seems to be, and what makes the chosen trope significant.  This assignment allows students to create temporal linkages between texts, tracing the development of a particular trope and its deployment through time. By learning to read through vast swaths of time, students develop the necessary analytical and argumentation skills to take stock of their contemporary worlds.  

21st century Orientalism as trope 

Assignment 3

Using the methodologies, research, and analysis employed in the last two assignments, students will exercise their ability to construct a well-researched argument and turn their understanding of the past to deconstruct an issue in their present moment. This short paper assignment requires students to explore the ramifications of the mobilization of Orientalism and make connections between their study of the early modern period and our contemporary moment.  

In this assignment, students find an instance of contemporary Orientalism (within the last five years) and explain why it exemplifies an Orientalist depiction. These instances of Orientalism can be derived from any media the student chooses, including literature, news media, social media, political rhetoric, etc. The paper should discuss the ideological purpose of the chosen depiction and its utility for an identified target audience.  

Students are expected to cite Said and at least one of the primary texts the class has considered. This analysis, much like that of the second assignment, asks students to track the mobility of their chosen trope through time and space. Students should note the differences in the representations and offer an argument to explain shifts in the cultural work that these representations are performing.  

Through this assignment, students can see that Orientalism remains vital to how the West understands itself and constructs the alterity of Muslim difference. These assignments in sequence ask students to construct a well-researched and thoughtful argument in stages, allowing them to exercise the skill of developing an idea to a scholarly analysis.  

This course, created by Ambereen Dadabhoy, couples Edward Said's theorization of Orientalism with early modern period texts. Students will examine traces of Orientalist ideas and stereotypes, and how they are being used to create a particular European orientation toward Islam and Muslims across time.  

The course starts in the late medieval period, reading several texts by European and English writers across different genres. These readings demonstrate how early modern European cultures were already global in their engagement with peoples across a variety of different belief systems and geographies. Examining these exposures combats the false notion of a totally insular England and Europe, one that had no knowledge of or experience with people from different cultures, religions, or races.  

By the end of the semester, students will see how ideas about Islam and Muslims have a long history in the West and that this history has many enduring fictions. This is especially important in our current moment, with a Western-backed Israeli genocide in Palestine. Understanding the longue durée of Orientalism, and how tropes about Islam and Muslims change and shift according to the contingencies of power, exposes Europe's very long interest in and engagement with Islamicate cultures and its peoples.  

Readings 

• Edward Said, Orientalism, Introduction, Chapter 1 
• Adam J. Silverstein, A Short Introduction to Islamic History 
• Anon, The King of Tars 
• Chaucer, "The Man of Law's Tale" - The Canterbury Tales 
• Anon, The Song of Roland 
• Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine 
• William Shakespeare, Othello 
• Philip Massinger, The Renegado 
• Richard Knolles, General History of the Turkes (selections) 
• Nicolas de Nicolay, The Navigations, Peregrinations and Voyages Made into Turkie (selections) 
• George Sandys, Relation of a Journey (selections) 
• Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (selections) 

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Preview image: Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

The coded language of the War on Terror, the 2017 Muslim ban, and the conflict in Gaza is not new. Muslims have been stereotypically portrayed as violent and tyrannical since the premodern periods. It’s important for students to be able to identify these strategic maneuvers in premodern literature and culture so that they can see these reflected in our present moment and identify them as false and misleading constructions. Ambereen Dadabhoy uses Shakespeare’s Othello as a text through which students can think about contemporary Islamophobia and the tropes about Muslim people that we still encounter today.

The supposed supremacy of “Western” civilization is a fiction that has its roots in the premodern past. A major requirement of the development of this narrative is an intentional severance of the “West” from the culture and influence of the “East.” The east, in this construct, is being represented by Islam and Muslim people. Guiding students through early modern texts reveals the entangled relationship between Christian Europe and Muslim culture and can help our students understand how the fictions we live with today were developed and maintained.

Students often perceive premodern texts, especially those with origins beyond the English language, as inscrutable or “foreign.” To help bridge students’ relationship between their present and the cultures and histories of the premodern, Hicks-Bartlett assigns texts across temporal and linguistic ranges. Putting premodern texts in conversation with contemporary critical theory and scholarship guides students to deeper understandings of the reverberations of race, gender, and class across time.

In the 17th century, English intellectuals saw their home country as lagging behind other European powers. It was amid this anxiety that the idea of the need for a universal language swept the nation. Through the accounts of Jesuit missionaries to China, English theorists knew the Chinese used a writing system that could be understood across many countries and cultures. This writing system, the Chinese language, was imagined to be the lingua humana, the language of Adam. In The Man in the Moone, Godwin undermines the advancement of Chinese language and culture by making the lunarian language an allegory for Mandarin. This allegory combines the racial with the linguistic, reinforcing the alienation and orientalization of Asia.

Godwin's The Man in the Moone can be taught in conversation with modern science fiction and speculative fiction texts that explore the yellow peril and anti-Asian racism. Galarrita suggests pairing texts such as Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Edward Said's Orientalism alongside Godwin to present students a new understanding of the relationship between language and race.

For the past several years Larissa FastHorse, Michael John Garcés, and Ty Defoe have been traveling around the world, visiting various Native communities to lend their expertise in theater and multidisciplinary arts.

The creative principles that guide FastHorse, Garcés, and Defoe offer insights into how to approach any creative endeavor, including pedagogy. At the center of their practice is a deep humility and interest in restoration and care. Focusing on listening and offering their support in roles that may appear to stem beyond the boundaries of theater-making, they demonstrate how attention, connection, and curiosity infuse creative spaces with value that cannot be quantified.

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Collaborators Larissa FastHorse, Michael John Garcés, and Ty Defoe discuss what ‘centering’ Indigenous voices really looks like. In this conversation, these three theater makers reveal how institutions and their structures can mean well, while failing to acknowledge the power differentials their institutional perimeters create.  

The institutional norms of theater, not unlike those of higher education, require self-reflection and revision in order to foster inclusive spaces. If we are to ‘center’ Indigenous voices, or any other voices from marginalized community, we must reflect on the way our institutions have created obstacles for and the erasure of BIPOC communities.  

Centering these voices calls to a 500-year history of extraction—a history and present that should not go unacknowledged as we work to create inclusive and just futures.

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As a book artist specializing in printmaking, poetry, embroidery, and bookbinding, Suzanne Coley reimagines the words of Shakespeare through the medium of book art. Her work brings Shakespeare into the contemporary world and reshapes his texts into culturally and socially significant art objects. In the last 10 years she has made over 500 unique traditional hardback books expanding the traditional bookbinding and book arts practices. Suzanne's art combines painting, poetry, printmaking, and textile manipulation to examine the human condition and modern-day social justice issues.

An annotated syllabus created by Ruben Espinosa

I recognize that it isn’t always possible to offer a special topics course on Shakespeare and race, and as such, this syllabus offers a way to engage critical race studies within a Shakespeare Survey course. What I offer below are entry points to broaching conversations about race and racism within a course that isn’t necessarily devoted to Shakespeare and critical race studies.

Course description

This course is an introduction to Shakespeare’s plays and poetry. This semester, we will critically read, analyze, and interpret the works of Shakespeare to develop a greater understanding of his dramatic works and poetry. We will study plays from the genres of history, comedy, tragedy, and romance. In the process, we will examine the cultural forces in Shakespeare’s England, and scrutinize how his works register attitudes and apprehensions surrounding religion, race, gender, immigration, xenophobia, imperialism, and national identity. More importantly, we will consider how Shakespeare’s attention to these issues bears significance in our present moment, and we will explore how our own views of these issues influence the ongoing making of Shakespeare in our time.

Primary readings

• Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Selections: Although my intent is not to be prescriptive, as I recognize people will be drawn to particular sonnets when teaching, these are the sonnets I typically assign – 1-5; 18-21; 55; 73; 106; 127; 129-131; 138; 152)
• As You Like It
• The Merchant of Venice
• Henry V
• Hamlet
• Othello
• The Tempest

Rationale for selections

While there is quite a bit from which to choose, I select these works to trace across them sustained attention to issues of race and racism. While I note in my course description that we will consider a host of issues, ALL of those issues can point back to structures of power and racism, and as such I search for that thread. As opposed to focusing the course on understood “race plays”—that is, plays that feature non-white characters—I try to show how whiteness, and structures of white supremacy, are taking shape in these works.

I begin with the sonnets because the first line of the first sonnet in the sequence is telling: “From fairest creatures we desire increase.” I let students explore what “fair’ means here, and after expected ideas about beauty and virtue, I draw on Kim F. Hall’s work to show students how fairness equates to whiteness. As such, we establish early on in the class that the literary work, something as simple as a sonnet, is advancing notions of white supremacy.

Establishing how the text identifies the value of any given person (and the devaluation of those who diverge from that standard) is key for me. In this way, my class can explore how notions of belonging depend on who is deemed valuable, and who gets to establish such worth. In the sonnets, the young, noble, white man is the epitome of beauty and is invaluable. The dark lady, not so much. The sonnets are a starting point for us to begin having these conversations. As we move into Shakespeare’s plays, then, we can see this paradigm at work more fully.

As You Like It commits itself to thinking about gendered hierarchies, tyranny, and immigration. The Merchant of Venice is deeply invested in considering insider/outsider status, and while it is clearly a play focused on antisemitism, it is also makes clear the role of racism through the character of Portia. Henry V is a play that expounds a sense of English nationalism, but it undermines this through the questionable actions of Henry and through the cultural confidence of Fluellen. In Hamlet, I find value in tracing how patriarchal structures of oppression dominate the play (from Hamlet’s Ghost to Polonius to Claudius). Beyond the play, though, I like to trace how Hamlet exists, to the present moment, as a play focused on the struggles of a privileged white man. When we take some lines out of the mouth of a white Hamlet and imagine them through the voices of people of color, Hamlet’s deep sense of isolation and unbelonging offer rich possibilities.

When I arrive at Othello, I like to play an excerpt of Ayanna Thompson’s interview, “All that Glisters is not Gold,” on NPR’s Code Switch where she discusses why staging Othello is so problematic. Up front, I want students to recognize the racist structures both within and beyond the play. This allows students to see how Shakespeare was engaging with racism, and how Shakespeare is used (still, to this day) to promote racist perspectives. I finally arrive at The Tempest, and here I can consider all the salient topics of discussion that I outline in my course description and demonstrate how Shakespeare’s work are in fact thinking about the awful realities of imperialism. That imperialism defines us today, but it does not have to define the way we understand and find value in Shakespeare.

Secondary readings and sources

For Shakespeare’s Sonnets

• Kim F. Hall, “These Bastard Signs of Fair: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Postcolonial Shakespeares (ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin)
• James Baldwin, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare”

For As You Like It

• Ruben Espinosa, “Chapter 6: The Dangers of Indifference,” in Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism. [Note: I don’t assign my own work, but I do draw on it in class discussion]
• Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (Chapter 5 and/or Chapter 7)

For The Merchant of Venice

• Qualities of Mercy Project, Texas A&M San Antonio video (on YouTube)
• Katherine Gillen, “Language, Race, and Shakespeare Appropriation on San Antonio’s South Side: A Qualities of Mercy Dispatch,” in The Sundial
• Kim F. Hall, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice”

For Henry V

• Scott Newstok, “‘Step aside, I’ll show thee a president’: George W as Henry V?”
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The First White President,” in The Atlantic

For Hamlet

• Richard Dyer, White (Introduction and Chapter 1)
• Peter Erickson, “Can We Talk About Race in Hamlet?”
• New York Public Theater video, #ToBeBlack (available on YouTube)

For Othello

• Ian Smith, “Othello’s Black Handkerchief”
• Ayanna Thompson, “All that Glisters is not Gold” NPR Code Switch interview
• Toni Morrison, Desdemona (Acts 1, 2, 8, and 9)
• Keith Hamilton Cobb, American Moor (pp. 14-22)

For The Tempest

• Indira Karemcheti, “Caliban in the Classroom”
• Ruben Espinosa, “Beyond The Tempest: Language, Legitimacy, and La Frontera” [Note: I don’t assign my own work, but I do draw on it in class discussion]

I realize that it might not be feasible to assign all of these readings, especially for an undergraduate class. Some of these readings (like Karemcheti) are short and digestible, while others are not as short. What I often do is offer particularly poignant excerpts from the secondary readings and allow students to discuss these in small groups before asking them to share their thoughts on these excerpts. Often, if I assign the full readings, many students are underprepared. When I have students read excerpts together in class, in real time, they engage more meaningfully with the ideas because we are all on the same playing field. Fortunately, the readings offer quite a bit in the way of provocative arguments. The idea is to use these sources as a starting point for class discussions.

Possible assignments

Public facing project (in lieu of a traditional essay and often much, much cooler)

For this assignment, you will be asked to craft a public facing essay that uses any work of early modern literature as a vehicle to explore a contemporary social issue. Please take time to look at the short essays published in ACMRS’s online journal, The Sundial. These public facing works will give you a sense of what is possible and possibly inspire the approach you take to this assignment. Your essays should be 750-1000.  

Video adaptation project

Students will collaborate to perform and film a rendition of a scene from any of the Shakespeare plays we cover during the semester. These films should not be more than five minutes in length, should employ at least some of Shakespeare’s original dialogue, and should find a way to speak to contemporary/regional social issues. Beyond these guidelines, you have absolute creative license for the production of these films. Students will submit a 1-page written “reflection” about the cultural significance of their production, and the groups will present their film near the end of the semester.

Defining Race, Periodizing Race | Listen to the full talk

Presented by Geraldine Heng at Race and Periodization: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2019

Geraldine Heng argues for thinking about race in transhistorical terms. Because the concept of race uses a vocabulary that defers to modern understanding, premodern scholars have been missing a vocabulary to analyze the breadth of racial “phenomena, institutions, and practices” that premodern critical race scholarship now uncovers. Heng describes archival evidence of racialized atrocities that PCRS reveals: stigmatized bodies blamed and punished, identified as not only not-human but also evil personified. Heng outlines the repetition of racial thinking across history, despite the differences in eras. By tracing the wide variations of the conditions and targets of enslavement over time, for instance, Heng demonstrates the persistence of racialization and its consequences for peoples perceived as essentially different. Heng closes with a description of the Cagots, European peoples labeled “monstrous” and ostracized from the 13th-17th centuries. To demonstrate the persistence of racialization, Heng illustrates how the Cagot suffered intersections of religious, class, and gender prejudice coupled with fear of disease, and were discriminated against based on changing biological markers of disability and non-normative bodies.

Read a transcript

Having convinced (and assigned) students to read Titus Andronicus by establishing that this is not the Bard they know from high school, I am very strategic in the discussions that follow. After all, I have assured them I will help them make sense of this crazypants play.

Defining the revenge tragedy

Before we discuss the play in earnest, it’s important to review the generic constructions of early modern drama: comedies, tragedies, histories, and romances. Many students come into my classroom already understanding the distinctions of the genres, but it is not often that they’ve dug deeper into how these narrative structures generate meaning in the play.

This is why students need to understand that a revenge tragedy like Titus is all about agency: who is able to act and who is denied. Revengers become agents of action instead of objects acted upon. For example, we’ll often discuss how Tamora’s sexuality, like her desire for revenge, transforms her from an object of the state into a subject of force. We’ll also discuss and examine how Lavinia’s rape and mutilation make literal the way she is objectified by everyone in this Roman society, including her father, as Titus sees her as his handmaiden for revenge.

Aaron the Moor and the construction of racial difference

Once we’ve discussed how the narrative structure forces the question of agency in the play, I like to ask the students why Aaron, as a character, is in the play.

First, we talk about the early modern conceptions of Moors, and why, if the play is inherently interested in the nature of action and agency, Shakespeare would have included a Moor. There was a great deal of confusion in early modern England about what a Moor was and what Blackness signified. I begin by offering students the OED definition:

A native or inhabitant of ancient Mauretania, a region of North Africa corresponding to parts of present-day Morocco and Algeria. Later usually: a member of a Muslim people of mixed Berber and Arab descent inhabiting North-Western Africa (now mainly present-day Mauritania), who in the 8th century conquered Spain. In the Middle Ages, and as late as the 17th century, the Moors were widely supposed to be mostly black or very dark-skinned, although the existence of “white Moors” was recognized. Thus, the term was often used, even into the 20th century, with the sense “Black person.”

Additionally, according to Anthony Barthelemy, “The only certainty a reader has when he sees the word is that the person referred to is not a [white] Christian.” Students need to remember, however, that the performance of Blackness in premodern England was often associated with representations of the devil. In medieval morality plays, for example, the devil was often performed in blackface.

In 1577, George Best wrote that racial differences stem from the biblical story of Noah. When Noah and his family were saved from the flood, they were told to “abstain from carnal copulation with their wives.” Noah’s son Cham (also known as Ham or Shem), however, disobeyed, and God punished him:

For the which wicked and detestable fact, as an example for contempt of Almighty God, and disobedience of parents, God would a son should be born whose name was Chus, who not only in self, but all his posterity after him should be so black and loathsome, that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the world. And of this black and cursed Chus came all black Moors which are in Africa, for after the water was vanished from off the face of the earth, and that the land was dry…, Africa remained for Cham and his black son Chus… being perhaps a cursed, dry, sandy, and unfruitful ground, fit for such a generation to inhabit it.

The early modern construction of racial difference was evolving, changing, and adapting from the influence of travel narratives like Best’s. In the end, whatever version or conflation of the story, this “curse” of Ham mythology solidified the belief that Black people were, by divine decree, inferior and associated with evil.

Aaron’s silence

It’s important to remind students that Aaron the Moor is (probably) onstage for the entire first act, but he does not say anything. He is brought in as a slave with the Gothic prisoners of war.

Aaron’s silence in the first act is significant because it can be interpreted in different ways. And this is an ideal place for conversation with students. I ask them to consider how Aaron’s Blackness is present on stage, especially in comparison to the Goths, and what function his visual presence serves. Why is Aaron here?

This is also a moment where I might discuss early modern staging practices and the likelihood of Aaron being played by a white actor in racial prosthetics (probably a wig, arm and leg coverings, and blackface). This explicit and constructed racial difference has an agenda—how is it affecting our understanding of this first act?

When Aaron does speak, it is in a long soliloquy, which is a marker of interiority. We read act 2 scene 1 aloud, noting that Aaron’s language is unlike any other characters in the play: he has a linguistic dexterity that is awe-inspiring. He is able to plot schemes to control the people around him: he controls Chiron, Demetrius (and by extension Lavinia), Titus, and Tamora (and by extension Saturninus and the Roman state).

Aaron’s awareness of stereotypes

I ask my students: is Aaron, the character, aware of the stereotypes and mythologies that are thrust onto him? We read act 4 scene 2 aloud while considering this question.

Aaron does not make references to his color or race until after characters like Lavinia, Bassianus, Titus, and the Nurse keep maligning him because of his Blackness. After these repeated comments, however, Aaron attempts to turn notions of color prejudice on their heads. Aaron condemns whiteness for being inconstant. He praises Blackness for its constancy and for its proof of paternity.

Shakespeare seems to be testing the audience’s conceptions of Blackness by having Aaron be the only parent who actually protects his offspring (both Titus and Tamora are willing to kill their own children to protect their positions in the state). By the end of the play, however, Aaron’s language changes significantly, and he becomes the cursing devil instead of the punning trickster. We read act 5 scenes 1 and 3 aloud to experience the shift in Aaron’s diction. It is clear that Aaron’s fate at the end of the play is to fulfill the devil.

A will of their own?

Titus Andronicus replicates the revenge tragedy genre, but it is also bizarrely self-conscious in its use of allusions to literary devices and models for cruelty, suffering, and revenge (Ovid, Horace, Homer, etc). It is almost as if the characters feel that there is no original way to experience their own lives. They seem to express a notion that everything has been scripted for them. Examples I point out include:

• Chiron and Demetrius on rape (2.3.1ff/2.4.1ff)
• Marcus on suffering (2.3.38ff/2.4.38ff)
• Titus’s scrolls to the gods (4.2.18ff)
• Lavinia’s use of Ovid (4.1.40ff)

Titus Andronicus, then, seems to be deeply engaged with an interrogation of the force and power of societal constructions of identity. Although Aaron, Tamora, and Lavinia all begin the play with identities that are unique and original, they all succumb to the crushing pressure of the society’s expectations. “As the saying is” becomes a way to plot these figures, and ultimately it becomes a way to deny them agency also.