ABSTRACT
As violence against African Americans has rocked the United States over the last few years, many who work in academia feel a pressing need to incorporate social justice activism into our working lives. These traumatic events are a significant source of stress for our African American students, many of whom who already struggle with economic and educational barriers to completing their degrees. Because “[n]otions, constructions, and performances of race continue to define the contemporary American experience, including our conceptions, performances, and employments of Shakespeare,” many students in our Shakespeare courses feel a pressing need to speak out about, and deepen their understanding of, current political issues (Thompson 2011: 3). Finding a place for such discussions can seem difficult when our course content addresses racism infrequently (with the exception of what Erickson and Hall call an early modern “race canon of sorts” – works like Othello and Titus Andronicus) and does so from a perspective far removed from twenty-first-century America (2016: 7). By actively centering students’ perspectives and adapting the course’s approach in response, however, instructors can appropriate the Shakespearean text to provide marginalized students with an opportunity to both deepen their understanding of his work and to speak and think critically about the forces that shape their lives.
