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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
This article and the two following were prepared as complementary contributions to a panel of the American Association for Higher Education conference on ‘Theatre and Cultural Pluralism’, held in Atlanta, Georgia, in August 1992. In the first, Kim F. Hall, from the Department of English at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, describes her experiences as an African American feminist teaching Shakespeare – often against the expectations of students who expect either an affirmation of his supposed universality, a simplistic condemnation of his politically incorrect positions on race and gender – or his appropriation, on behalf of those wishing to stake their own claim to the ‘culture of power’ he is taken to represent. Instead, Kim F. Hall proposes that feminism offers ‘one way of helping students look at Shakespeare ‘multiculturally’, since gender is one area of inquiry that both crosses cultures and forces one to think about the differences between cultures’.
1. This should not be taken as a naive faith in feminism. The US feminist movement has been consistently critiqued for its neglect of issues of race, gender, and sexuality. I refer more to the potential of the feminist movement developed by these women of color. See, for example, Anzaldua, Gloria, ed., Making Face, Making Soul=Hacienda Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation, 1990)Google Scholar; Anzaldua, Gloria and Moraga, Cherrie, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Hooks, Bell, Feminist Theory from Sargin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Lorde, Audre, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1986)Google Scholar.
2. See Davis, Angela, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981)Google Scholar.
3. Barbara A. Mowat. ‘Placing Shakespeare’, paper delivered at the CUNY Graduate Center Conference, ‘Multicultural Shakespeare’, 25 April 1992.
4. In all fairness to the intellectual diversity of the students, in my upper division classes a good number of students come to the class with oppressive experiences of Shakespeare and hope that the class will offer them something different.
5. I think here specifically of Paolo Freire's ‘banking concept’ of education: ‘Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor’. See Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1990), p. 58Google Scholar.
6. I borrow the phrase ‘culture of power’ from Lisa Delpit's works, particularly ‘Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive “Black Educator”’, Harvard Educational Review, LVI, No. 4, p. 379–85, and ‘The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children’, Harvard Educational Review, LVIII, No. 3, p. 280–98. In the latter, she explains how the rules of a culture of power reflect the culture that has power: ‘success in institutions – schools, workplaces, and so on – is predicated upon acquisition of the culture of those who are in power’ (p. 283). Interestingly, she includes in this essay an example of a woman who had students classified as ‘slow learners’ analyze the patterns of RAP songs and used their knowledge as a base for ‘the structure of grammar, and then of Shakespeare's plays’ (p. 290).
7. Henry Louis Gates is represented as sensing a similar ‘irony and paradox’: ‘Afrocentrists downgrade the significance of western culture, yet go to so much trouble to claim authorship of it’. Adler, Janet, Smith, Vern et al. , ‘African Dreams’, Newsweek, 23 09 1991, p. 45Google Scholar.
8. Her statements also made me modify my somewhat naive belief that having students think more about performance – which I assumed would mean thinking about audiences and human diversity – would also help dislodge a monolithic Shakespeare.
9. ‘Folger Library, Memorial to Shakespeare, Dedicated’, Washington Post, 24 April 1932, p. 10.
10. Molefi Asante, quoted in Adler and Smith, op. cit., p. 46. Asante is one of the most prominent theorists of Afrocentrism. His prominent works in this area include Afrocentricity and Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge.
11. Adler and Smith, op. cit., p. 44.
12. I acknowledge Don E. Wayne's more careful historical argument that the formalism currently contested became dominant because of a need in the post-war period to negotiate the national and ethnic differences amongst scholars who were ‘first generation Americans of non-English ancestry’. Formalism took hold as a ‘strategy of reification [that] successfully established English and American literature as a cultural object which poets and critics of incredibly diverse backgrounds could share in common’. See his ‘Power, Politics, and the Shakespearean Text: Recent Criticism in England and the United States’, in Shakespeare Reproduced: the Text in History and Ideology (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 47–67, espec. p. 53. Thus the ‘universalizing’ in Porter's rhetoric is qualitatively different from later New Critical concerns, although I would add that both can enable a repressive pedagogy rooted in ‘prescription’ (Freire, p. 31).
13. Freire, p. 58.
14. Bringing out issues of race in the classroom is risky at all levels – and not just for ‘white’ students. One Jewish teacher in the New York city schools said that he would not want to teach The Merchant of Venice to his predominantly Black students because of the hostilities between Jews and Blacks, particularly in that city.
15. Ironically, after this tutorial was over, I found another discussion of Sharazad Ali's book which recognized how ‘historically linked’ sixteenth-century misogynist pamphlets were to Sharazad Ali's book. See Hooks, Bell and West, Cornel, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (Boston: South End Pres, 1991), p. 88Google Scholar.