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.
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
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?
Othello and Othello and Othello
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.
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