Theatre History Studies

As part of the Cambridge Elements: Shakespeare and Pedagogy series, this book is a slim slip of a thing, a fast read, freely and openly available, and an absolutely vital tool for any educator. Ambereen Dadabhoy and Nedda Mehdizadeh offer a powerhouse of pedagogical tactics and resources for anyone who is looking to make themselves more conversant in contemporary best practices regarding race and pedagogy. The book is not just for early modernists but any scholar who wishes to connect their teaching with the urgent and necessary labor of deconstructing whiteness, talking about race with students, and braiding anti-racist methods into the university classroom. This book is here not to be an exhaustive encyclopedic tome of all things Critical Race Theory (CRT) in early modern literature but rather a rigorous introduction to the concepts that will help researchers and instructors unpack the ways that whiteness has been centered in certain methodological schools of thought and how to begin decentering it via the classroom. Think of this book as a resource map: it will alert the reader to the most pressing aspects of critical race pedagogy and show them where they can learn more about the ideas the book presents.

Given the volume's important dialogues, it is thrilling that it is open access and freely available online. This accessibility coupled with the approachable writing style make this book easily teachable in the graduate classroom, and perhaps even in undergraduate classrooms where conversations about pedagogy are already happening. It is a must-read for instructors of any humanist subject and will pair well with the kind of thought that goes into early syllabus development/planning.

The book is broken down into four body sections with an introduction and conclusion, each section building upon the previous. Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh begin by asking "Why an Anti-racist Shakespeare?" in an introduction that acquaints the reader with the import of this kind of work, providing a brief yet rigorous survey of the field as-established. A great strength of this book is [End Page 219] that the authors do not assume a reader's prior engagement with the material, instead guiding someone who might be new to anti-racism through what they can learn and where they can find this knowledge. This book onboards its reader thoroughly, offering a decisive entry point with clear-cut homework for further reading. Concepts like race (6–7), racism (7), racial literacy (5–6), and critical race theory are not left dangling; they are thoroughly explained as they pertain to the work of this volume. This introduction visibly and loudly cites important work by prior scholars, using authors' names and titles in body paragraphs rather than relegating them to footnotes in order to establish a clear genealogy of the work. Because of this, the reader is provided with a clear path to take should they wish to know more and bring themselves up to date with current conversations. The book then addresses "Shakespeare's Racial Invisibility," establishing how unmarked whiteness is a destructive, though standard, mode through which to analyze Shakespeare (or any literature).

The second section discusses "Conceptualizing and Designing an Anti-Racist Shakespeare Course" and asks the reader to consider basic elements of course design that can dismantle or enforce institutional and social hierarchies, depending on use. Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh then discuss "Building Shakespearean Communities" through course design that can decenter hegemonic institutions of power and allow students to take an active hand in their own learning. Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh trace this pedagogical lineage to Paulo Freire and bell hooks, arguing that a community-centered approach to teaching and learning has always been a keystone to anti-racist work in the classroom in addition to being good pedagogy. Section four, "The Salience of Shakespeare," interrogates how Shakespeare's cultural capital must be reconfigured from the myth of universality to what Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh call "salience": the ways in which individual students identify with pieces of Shakespeare's cultural capital from their own positionality. Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh explain: "Salience centers students' orientation and affective connection towards what strikes them as vital in the work based on what 'leaps' of the page … which we argue is an active response to reading Shakespeare that animates students' investments in ideas and themes that emerge from his work. Salience prioritizes student agency over Shakespearean authority" (65). The book's conclusion invites further work on this topic and enforces that this work must continue as teaching methods evolve with the times.

Each section offers a teaching reflection, which invites the reader to spend time with a series of questions the authors have posed to help understand their own positionality as humans, as instructors, and as scholars. These teaching reflections are, in the authors' words, "meant to help teachers examine potential intellectual and affective blocks to developing an anti-racist pedagogy" (20). The [End Page 220] work of anti-racism can be uncomfortable, difficult, and can meet with both internal and external resistance. These reflections are both a guide and a tool to help the reader overcome this resistance by better understanding it.

This book calls to task the place of unmarked whiteness in the classroom, and argues that confining discussions of race to Shakespeare's "race plays" (Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest) is damaging, limiting, and allows this unmarked whiteness to continue being centered (26). Rather, the book asks instructors to weave conversations about race into the fabric of their course regardless of content because race is ever-present. In other words: we can't not talk about race because it is, in fact, embedded in everything whether hegemonic cultures recognize this fact or not. Talking (or not talking) about whiteness is talking about race, and Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh educate the reader as to why and how. It should be noted that the authors have been quite vocal on Twitter about the backlash they've received from largely white male-identifying readers regarding this work. To this reader, if the hegemony is protesting, it's probably because the work is hitting a sore spot. In this case, it's hitting hard. Such backlash is indicative of the power and quality of this work, and the authors are to be commended for creating something that so thoroughly destabilizes damaging and outdated norms.

The book offers a selection of classroom exercises that the authors implement in their own teaching, and it brings the receipts for what Shakespeareans have known for some time: the field of Shakespeare studies has roots in the rhetoric of anti-racism, and the field has a rich body of circulating knowledge about power, hierarchy, and racialization. It also presents the idea that anti-racist pedagogy is not just about what is taught but also about how teaching works in the classroom. Throughout, Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh offer principles and tactics to help align one's classroom with ideals that will best support an empowered, community-focused environment for educators and students.