Shakespeare and Antiblack World-Making

This book is about Shakespeare’s role in sustaining the antiblack paradigm of modernity. This work re-reads both Shakespearean texts and performances from the 16th century to the present to argue that American and English societies have deployed Shakespeare for four hundred years as a mechanism to construct and reinforce paradigmatic antiblackness. Framed within the author’s experiences as a Black scholar, actor, and director of Shakespeare and using both contemporary Critical Race Theory (CRT), as well as Pre-Modern Critical Race Studies (PCRS), this book uses civil society’s engagement with and performance of Shakespeare in various times and places to reveal the continuum of antiblackness that predates chattel slavery in America and contributes to antiblack world-making across oceans and centuries.

Chapter 1: Shakespeare and the “Human”: An Introduction.- Chapter 2: Shakespeare and Time: An Introduction.- Chapter 3: Shakespeare and Violence: An Introduction.- Chapter 4: Interlude: The Epiphenomenal Monograph.- Chapter 5: The First Time: Whitewashing White Permanence: The (Dis)/(re)Membering of White Corporeality in Early Modern England.- Chapter 6: The Second Time: “What a piece of worke is a man!”: Biocentrism, Gender, and Experimenting with The (un)Birth of Blackness in Shakespeare’s Plays.-  Chapter 7: The Third Time: Red, White, and Black: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Structuring of Racial Antagonisms in Early Modern England and the New World.- Chapter 8: Time Warp: Who? What? When? Where? Why? Othello is a Black Man.- Chapter 9: The Fourth Time: The Affect of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Black Lives: A Song to Underscore the Burning of Police Stations.- Chapter 10: The Fifth Time: Rewriting Shakespeare Through Performance: The Meta-Aporia of Black Flesh and White Bloodlust.

Matthieu Chapman is an Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz and the Literary Director of NY Classical Theatre, USA. His memoir, Shattered: Fragments of a Black Life is available from WVU Press (2023). His first monograph, Antiblack Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other "Other” was published in 2017.  He is the co-editor along with Anna Wainwright of Teaching Race in the Early Modern World: A Classroom Guide (2023). Matthieu has also published articles in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Theatre Topics, Shakespeare, Literature Compass, TheatreForum, Theatre History Studies, Early Theatre, and others. His creative writing and essays have been featured in Pithead Chapel, Prose Online, Beyond Words, Revolute, and the Huffington Post.