This volume offers a comprehensive array of readings of 'skin' in Shakespeare's works, a term that embraces the human and animal, noun and verb.
Shakespeare / Skin departs from previous studies as it deliberately and often explicitly engages with issues of social and racial justice. Each of the chapters interrogates and centres 'skin' in relation to areas of expertise that include performance studies, aesthetics, animal studies, religious studies, queer theory, Indigenous studies, history, food studies, border studies, postcolonial studies, Black feminism, disease studies and pedagogy. By considering contemporary understandings of skin, this volume examines how the literature of the early modern past creates paths to constructing racial hierarchies.
With contributors from the USA, UK, South Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Australia, chapters are informed by an array of histories, shedding light on how skin was understood in Shakespeare's time and at key moments during the past 400 years in different media and cultures. Chapters include considerations of plays such as
Titus Andronicus, The Tempest and
A Midsummer Night's Dream, and work by Borderlands Theater,
Los Colochos and Satyajit Ray, among many others.
For researchers and instructors, this book will help to shape teaching and inform research through its modelling of antiracist critical practice. Collectively, the chapters in this collection allow us to consider how sustained attention to skin via cross-historical and innovative approaches can reveal to us the various uses of Shakespeare that shed light on the fraught nature of our interrelatedness. They set a path for readers to consider how much skin they have in the game when it comes to challenging structures of racism.
Shakespeare / Skin offers a comprehensive array of readings of 'skin' in Shakespeare's works, a term that embraces the human and animal, noun and verb. Deliberate in its reimagining of critical and theoretical categories such as queer theory, animal studies and indigenous studies, to name a few, Shakespeare / Skin intervenes in various areas of the field to offer a wide range of methodological approaches grounded in antiracist practice.
Each of the chapters interrogates and centres 'skin' in relation to a specific area of expertise: performance studies, eco-criticism, aesthetics, animal studies, religious studies, queer theory, indigenous studies, digital humanities, history, food studies, affect theory, border studies, trans studies, disability studies, Black feminism, disease studies, or pedagogy and together they offer a panoramic reading of skin in Shakespeare's work. With contributors from the USA, UK, South Africa, India, Singapore and Australia, readings are informed by a wide array of histories and shed light on how skin was understood in Shakespeare's time and at key moments during the past 400 years in different media and cultures.
For researchers and instructors, Shakespeare / Skin offers an encyclopedic range of readings that will help to shape teaching and inform research through its modelling of antiracist critical practice.
