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Teacher Trouble: Performing Race in the Majority-White Shakespeare Classroom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2019

ERIC L. DE BARROS
ERIC L. DE BARROS*
Affiliation:
Department of English, Old Dominion University. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

The topic of race has long enriched Shakespeare scholarship. Race scholarship remains marginalized in the broader world of Shakespeare studies. The simultaneous “truth” of these statements reveals a deeply rooted professional ambivalence. And while recent attention has been paid to its manifestation at conferences and in journals, this essay explores its challenge to black teacher–scholars in the majority-white classroom. Rethinking The Merchant of Venice as an educational play, with Portia and Shylock performing as nontraditional teachers, I develop the concept of “teacher trouble” from Judith Butler's “gender trouble” to reflect personally on the perils and liberatory potential of antiracist performative strategies.

Type
Forum
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 74 - 81
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2019

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References

1 Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Greenblatt, Stephen, Cohen, Walter, Howard, Jean E., and Maus, Katharine Eisaman (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1997), 4.1.151Google Scholar. All Shakespeare quotations are from this edition.

2 Ibid., 4.1.143.

3 Ibid., 4.1.104.

4 Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, 1.1. 2.

5 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 4.1. 153.

6 Castiglione, Baldesar, The Book of the Courtier, ed. Javitch, Daniel (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2002), 94Google Scholar.

7 Waiting for “Superman” (dir. Davis Guggenheim. Paramount Home Entertainment, 2011), DVD.

8 See Diane Ravitch, “The Myth of Charter Schools,” New York Review of Books, 11 Nov. 2010, for a scathing critique of the charter-school movement's scapegoating of teachers and teacher unions as represented in Waiting for “Superman”.

9 Jardine, Lisa, “Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare's Learned Heroines: ‘These Are Old Paradoxes’,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 38, 1 (1987), 1–18, 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Ibid., 4, original emphasis.

11 Ibid., 16.

12 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 187Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., 188.

14 bell hooks, “schooling black males,” in hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2004), 32–43, 34Google Scholar.

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16 Ibid., 2.

17 Ibid., 2.

18 Ibid., 3.

19 This seminar was one of several sessions on race, including The Color of Membership plenary panel session organized by Arthur Little Jr., at www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f8_sOAucWw.

20 Herman, Edward and Brodhead, Frank, Demonstration Elections (Boston: South End Press, 1984)Google Scholar, quoted in Chomsky, Noam, “The Responsibility of the Intellectuals,” in The Chomsky Reader, ed. Peck, James (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 57–136, 129Google Scholar.

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23 Nast, Heidi J., “‘Sex’, ‘Race’ and Multiculturalism: Critical Consumption and the Politics of Course Evaluations,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 23, 1 (1999), 102–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jackson, Ronald L. II and Crawley, Rex, “White Student Confessions about a Black Male Professor: A Cultural Contracts Theory Approach to Intimate Conversations about Race and Worldview,” Journal of Men's Studies, 12, 1 (Fall 2003), 25–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Bettye P. and Hawkins, Billy, “Examining Student Evaluations of Black College Faculty: Does Race Matter?”, Journal of Negro Education, 80, 2 (Spring 2011), 149–62Google Scholar; Reid, Landon D., “The Role of Perceived Race and Gender in the Evaluation of College Teaching on RateMyProfessor.com,” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 3, 3 (2010), 137–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See McGee, Ebony O. and Kazembe, Lasana, “Entertainer or Education Researcher? The Challenge Associated with Presenting While Black,” Race Ethnicity and Education, 19, 1 (2105), 96–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a discussion of the historical tendency to situate the black body as a source of entertainment, amusement, and spectacle.

25 Jackson and Crawley, 27.

26 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1.3.118.

27 Ibid., 3.1.49–50.

28 Ibid., 4.1.88.

29 Ibid., 4.1.91.

30 Ibid., 1.3.41.

31 Ibid., 1.3.42.

32 Ibid., 1.3.139.

33 Ibid., 2.5.12.

34 Ibid., 2.5.36.

35 Ibid., 2.5.36–37.

36 Goddard, Harold C., The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume I (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), 94Google Scholar, original emphasis.

37 Ibid., 94.