Corredera, Vanessa I. "Resisting Lobotomized Shakespeare: Race in/and Appropriation." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/pcrs-and-appropriation-studies. [Date accessed].

PCRS and appropriation studies

Appropriation studies and PCRS give students more complete interpretive tools for analyzing racial representation.

Download the transcript
Vanessa I. Corredera
Andrews University

Resisting Lobotomized Shakespeare: Race in/and Appropriation | Watch the full talk

Presented by Vanessa I. Corredera at Appropriations: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2020

Vanessa I. Corredera puts forward two premises for productively understanding racial representations in premodern critical race studies and in adaptations: first, that appropriations need PCRS; second, PCRS needs appropriation studies. She analyzes the Q Brothers’ adaptation Othello: The Remix as an example of an appropriation that does not critically engage with race and illustrates how crucially they need PCRS. Corredera reads Jordan Peele’s Get Out as an appropriation of Othello that offers a productive lens for engaging Shakespeare’s play. She concludes that taken together, appropriation studies and PCRS give students and scholars more complete interpretive tools for analyzing racial representation.

Further learning

Recommended

RaceB4Race Highlight

Othello and Barbary's blues

Justin P. Shaw is interested in how appropriation can mean theft as well as “making something new.” Using a framework of Black music and the history of appropriation of the Blues to shed light on Desdemona’s memory of Barbary’s song in Shakespeare's Othello, Shaw asks the question: where is the line between tribute and theft?

Justin P. Shaw
Video

Racial mixing in Titus Andronicus

Teaching Titus Andronicus can open up conversations about early modern English familiarity with race, racial difference, and mixed-race identity.

Kyle Grady
Essay

Navigating mixed-race identities in Shakespeare

Titus Andronicus is a play that demonstrates early modern English dexterity with racial constructs. This nuance is demonstrated in part through its representations of racial mixing and mixed-race identity.

Kyle Grady