MacDonald, Joyce Green. "Finding Black Women in Shakespeare." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/finding-black-women-in-shakespeare. [Date accessed].

Finding Black women in Shakespeare

Tracing ways early modern texts and genres process the classical past.

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Joyce Green MacDonald
University of Kentucky

Finding Black Women in Shakespeare | Watch the full talk

Presented by Joyce Green McDonald at Politics: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Joyce Green MacDonald traces ways early modern texts and genres process the classical past, and how that construction of the past is made known in the present, through honored resources of the ancient world. In particular, she emphasizes that classical and early modern texts can become tools for excavating Black presences that have been deliberately lost. Through Richard Ligon’s eyewitness account in Barbados (1647) and Thomas Thistlewood’s eyewitness account in Jamaica (1748-1786), Black women’s innate modesty and exclusion from normal orders of civic or human status converts them to objects. Building upon Ben Jonson’s notions “exactness of study” and the “poetic imitation a modern poet creates,” Green MacDonald argues that while Black women are not often visible in Shakespeare’s plays and his contemporaries', disappearance does not mean absence.

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Ruben Espinosa's annotated syllabus offers entry points to broaching conversations about race and racism within a course that isn’t necessarily devoted to Shakespeare and critical race studies.

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Suggested readings from Ian Smith for an in-depth understanding of the "cliché of race."

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