Grady, Kyle. "Racial mixing in Titus Andronicus." www.throughlines.org/suite-content/racial-mixing-in-titus-andronicus. [Date accessed].

Racial mixing in Titus Andronicus

Early modern English familiarity with race and racial difference.

Download the transcript
Kyle Grady
University of California, Irvine

Teaching Titus Andronicus can open up conversations about early modern English familiarity with race and racial difference, as well as to help students consider the inconsistent ways that race operates in the world around them. In particular, Titus’s tendency to play up the significance of mixed identity helps students think through how mixedness often registers differently today depending on the context, sometimes being framed as meaningful and other times not registering at all. Especially in a moment like our present, when mixed-race identity is sometimes framed as a late 20th- and early 21st-century phenomenon, seeing it represented in an Elizabethan play can encourage students to investigate the past as a way to better understand the present.

Further learning

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
Activity

Journaling through questions of race

The journal is a place where students can engage in dialogue with themselves. This kind of reflection helps students track how their understandings of race develop over time.

Kyle Grady

Recommended

RaceB4Race Highlight

Shakespeare and the police

In his presentation at RaceB4Race in 2020, Little compares the policing of the Black body (Black persons) to intellectual theft that often surrounds Shakespeare and early modern studies.

Arthur L. Little, Jr.
Video

Racialized genders in the early modern world

Abdulhamit Arvas teaches on the interwoven concepts of race, religion, and gender within early modern Europe. Travel narratives offer insights on how race and religion were gendered, and how gender and sexuality became a mark of racialization.

Abdulhamit Arvas
Video

Immigration and Henry V

Ruben Espinosa draws attention to how the English language and the production of English identity are troubled in Henry V and asks students to reimagine their relationship with the Bard and his legacy.

Ruben Espinosa