TEACHING SOCIAL JUSTICE THROUGH SHAKESPEARE Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now Edited by Hillary Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now Edited by Hillary Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and produc- tion values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Hillary Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman, 2019 © the chapters their several authors, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Sabon and Futura by R. J. Fooring Ltd, Derby, UK, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5558 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5560 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5561 9 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Acknowledgments viii Notes on the Contributors ix Introduction: Making Meaning and Doing Justice with Early Modern Texts 1 Wendy Beth Hyman and Hillary Eklund I. Defamiliarizing Shakespeare 1. Topical Shakespeare and the Urgency of Ambiguity 27 Adhaar Noor Desai 2. Shakespeare in Transition: Pedagogies of Transgender Justice and Performance 36 Sawyer Kemp 3. Shakespeare in Japan: Disability and a Pedagogy of Disorientation 46 Allison P. Hobgood 4. Global Performance and Local Reception: Teaching Hamlet and More in Singapore 55 Emily Griffiths Jones II. Decolonizing Shakespeare 5. African-American Shakespeares: Loving Blackness as Political Resistance 67 Jason M. Demeter 6. Chicano Shakespeare: The Bard, the Border, and the Peripheries of Performance 76 Ruben Espinosa vi Contents 7. “Intelligently organized resistance”: Shakespeare in the Diasporic Politics of John E. Bruce 85 Kim F. Hall III. Ethical Queries and Practices 8. Sexual Violence, Trigger Warnings, and the Early Modern Classroom 97 Kirsten N. Mendoza 9. Rural Shakespeare and the Tragedy of Education 106 Jeffrey Osborne 10. Shakespearean Tragedy, Ethics, and Social Justice 115 Mary Janell Metzger 11. Teaching Environmental Justice and Early Modern Texts: Collaboration and Connected Classrooms 124 Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe 12. Failing with Shakespeare: Political Pedagogy in Trump’s America 134 Steve Mentz IV. Revitalizing the Archive and Remixing Traditional Approaches 13. Teaching Serial with Shakespeare: Using Rhetoric to Resist 145 Rachel E. Holmes 14. Adjunct Pleasure: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Writing on the Walls 155 Matthew Harrison 15. Confronting Bias and Identifying Facts: Teaching Resistance Through Shakespeare 165 Carla Della Gatta 16. Literary Justice: The Participatory Ethics of Early Modern Possible Worlds 174 Debapriya Sarkar V. Shakespeare, Service, and Community 17. Shakespeare, Service Learning, and the Embattled Humanities 187 Hillary Eklund Contents vii 18. Teaching Shakespeare Inside Out: Creating a Dialogue Between Traditional and Incarcerated Students 197 Jayme M. Yeo 19. “‘Shakespeare’ on his lips”: Dreaming of the Shakespeare Center for Radical Thought and Transformative Action 206 Eric L. De Barros 20. From Pansophia to Public Humanities: Connecting Past and Present Through Community-Based Learning 215 Tania Boster 21. Cultivating Critical Content Knowledge: Early Modern Literature, Pre-service Teachers, and New Methodologies for Social Justice 225 Todd Butler and Ashley Boyd An Afterword About Self/Communal Care 235 Ayanna Thompson Bibliography 239 Index 261 Acknowledgments Our first thanks go to each other and to the contributors, with whom it has been our sincere honor and pleasure to work. Ayanna Thompson has generously supported this project from the start, not only writing the Afterword, but also first putting us in touch with several of our contributors. We would like the thank the Shakespeare Association of America for making room for conversations whose fuller expressions have found their way onto these pages, and the countless colleagues and several editors we chatted with as this project took shape. Carla Mazzio, Jeffrey Cohen, and David Lee Miller provided invaluable feedback, as did two anonymous reviewers. We thank them, and our wonderful editor Michelle Houston, for their time and expertise. To our students, whose commitment to making the world a more just place has inspired this project, we extend our deepest gratitude. Special thanks to interns Eva Garcia and Leah Shain, who provided indispens- able help in assembling the typescript. Hillary would like to thank Maria Calzada and John Biguenet for supporting this project, Kelly Brotzman, Ashley Howard, and Jennifer Jeanfreau for insightful comments on early drafts, and Greg Larsen for his steady support and replenishing company. Wendy would like to thank Oberlin College for grant-in-aid support, Sandra Young and Chris Thurman for the Shakespeare and Social Justice Conference in Cape Town, Elizabeth Hamilton for her encourag- ing feedback on the Introduction, Rian Brown Orso for friendship and inspiration, and Eric Matthew Laferty for everything. Notes on the Contributors Tania Boster is Executive Director of Integrative and Experiential Learning and Assistant Professor of History at Oberlin College. She teaches courses in which students use traditional historical methods, community-based participatory research, and digital tools to advance community-expressed goals in local, national, and global contexts. Ashley Boyd is Associate Professor of English Education at Washing- ton State University. Her forthcoming book Survive and Subvert: Social Justice in the Secondary English Classroom (Teachers College Press) analyzes case studies to identify specific pedagogic approaches for ad- vancing equity both inside and outside the classroom. She has published in the Teacher Education Quarterly, Educational Studies, the Interna- tional Journal of Critical Pedagogy, and the ALAN Review. Todd Butler is Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean for Faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Washington State Uni- versity. He is the author of two books, the more recent of which is Literature and Political Intellection in Early Stuart England (Oxford University Press, 2019), as well as nearly twenty articles. At Washing- ton State University he serves on the programming committee for the campus Multicultural Center, leads the “Advancing Opportunity and Equity” initiative, and serves on an interdisciplinary research task force on minority health. Eric L. De Barros is Assistant Professor of English in Early Modern British Literature and Culture at Old Dominion University. His re- search centers on the politics of embodied subjectivity in early modern liter ary and educational texts. He has authored several articles, and his main book project, with the working title “Shakespeare and the x Notes on the Contributors Pedagogy of Sexual Violence,” endeavors to rethink Shakespeare as a socially and politically responsive educational theorist with much to teach us about the role of education in combatting sexual violence in present-day society. Carla Della Gatta is Assistant Professor of English at Florida State Uni- versity. She specializes in theatrical constructions of race and ethnicity. She serves on the Steering Committee for the Latinx Theatre Commons. In 2016, she received the J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize from the Shakespeare Association of America. She is completing her first mono- graph, tentatively titled “Shakespeare and Latinidad: The Staging of Intracultural Theatre.” Jason M. Demeter is Assistant Professor of English at Norfolk State University. He specializes in Shakespeare, early modern race studies, critical race theory, and twentieth-century African-American litera- ture and culture. His current book project considers manifestations of Shakespeare within American civil rights, black power, and black arts discourses of the 1960s and 1970s. He has published essays in the Journal of Narrative Theory and The Shakespearean International Yearbook, and in various edited collections. Adhaar Noor Desai is Assistant Professor of Literature at Bard College, where he teaches courses on Shakespeare and Renaissance poetry. He is completing his first monograph with the aid of fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library. The book, tenta tively titled “The Poetics of Hesitation,” examines how the vagaries and anxieties of the writing process, from composition to transmission, became grounds for poets and playwrights to address the multiple and often contradictory currents of early modern political, religious, and scientific thought. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Con- figurations, Philological Quarterly, the Shakespeare Newsletter, and Marginalia: The Los Angeles Review of Books. Hillary Eklund is Provost Distinguished Professor, Associate Professor of English, and Department Chair at Loyola University New Orleans. Working at a Jesuit university has encouraged her to find ways of linking early modern literary texts to matters of social