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.
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
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?
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