Mixed Race Studies

Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America by Ayanna Thompson (Klett review)

Theatre Journal
Volume 65, Number 2, May 2013
pages 303-304
DOI: 10.1353/tj.2013.0043

Elizabeth Klett, Assistant Professor of Literature
University of Houston, Clear Lake

Ayanna Thompson’s exciting book analyzes a wide variety of sites for performing, interrogating, and dismantling Shakespeare and race in contemporary American popular culture. Arguing that “Shakespeare’s American cultural value and legacy cannot be weighed through performances in traditional venues only” (7), Thompson extends her purview beyond expected forms (such as professional theatre productions and literary and film adaptations) to include nontraditional modes of performance (such as YouTube videos and prison and youth-oriented productions). The book as a whole provides a fascinating and multilayered appraisal of the uses (and misuses) of race in American appropriations of Shakespeare and his plays.

One of the most notable aspects of Thompson’s book is her ability to work with conflicting statements and oppositional ideas, which she often presents, at least initially, as epigraphs to her chapters. For example, she tackles the debate over so-called color-blind casting by foregrounding the very different views of August Wilson and Robert Brustein. Similarly, the book revisits the eternal tensions between universalizing and historically particularist interpretations of Shakespeare, suggesting that Shakespeare is both freeing and something from which one must be freed. Thompson does not attempt to resolve these kinds of contradictions and instabilities; instead, she revels in them, exploring what they reveal about contemporary American culture and its preoccupations with Shakespeare and race. She does take sides, however; as her first chapter warns, the book is occasionally polemical, “because this is a project that requires action and not just passive reflection” (14). Her main goal is “to bring contemporary race studies and contemporary Shakespeare studies into an honest and sustained dialogue,” contending that many performances, citations, and analyses of Shakespeare ignore or elide racial issues (3).

The second and third chapters focus on two films and a young adult novel that engage with Shakespeare and race in varied ways. Thompson’s analysis of each is intriguing and made me want to watch the films and read the novel for myself. In Suture (1993), a film noir about two brothers, one white and one black, Thompson finds a vexed “desire for colorblindness in contemporary American life” (27); although the film strategically ignores the racial differences between them, it also exposes the seam of the racial divide in a culture that elevates stereotypically white standards of beauty. Her argument is fascinating, but the connection to Shakespeare (cited several times in the film) feels somewhat tenuous. Her analysis of Bringing Down the House (2003), a studio vehicle for Steve Martin and Queen Latifah, however, is brilliant. Unpacking the meanings implicit in the character of “William Shakespeare,” a dog owned by a rich conservative, played by Joan Plowright, Thompson concludes that in this satirical film, “Shakespeare represents the epitome of Western culture because he represents the exclusivity of white culture” (37). Targeting both bardolatry and the false universality of whiteness, this big-budget film thus reveals larger ideas circulating in American culture about the meanings of Shakespeare and race and justifies Thompson’s choice of popular materials for her analysis. She goes on to place a more obscure source, the 1992 novel Black Swan by Farrukh Dhondy, in the context of other writers (such as Maya Angelou) who have imagined a black Shakespeare. While she argues that the novel “asks the reader to interrogate if/how the identity and race of Shakespeare impact one’s understanding of the plays,” she also notes that reviewers of the novel tend to whitewash the main characters’ racial identities (55).

Thompson’s fourth chapter is one of the strongest, offering an intelligent discussion and analysis of cross-racial casting. In it, she analyzes the rhetoric employed by classical theatre companies, such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), to describe their approach to race and casting practices, revealing how these companies attempt to yoke Shakespearean universality and multiculturalism together to create “relevant” performances (73). Thompson does not find the results wholly satisfactory, even at well-intentioned companies like OSF. Her “holistic” approach to multicultural casting would incorporate “diversity initiatives” at every level of production to ensure…

Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (review)

Shakespeare Quarterly
Volume 63, Number 2 (Summer 2012)
pages 244-246
DOI: 10.1353/shq.2012.0017

Virginia Mason Vaughan, Professor of English
Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts

If you teach Shakespeare’s plays at an American university, college, or secondary school (as I do), and if you’ve ever felt a disconnect between what you do in the classroom and the real lives of your students, this book is the antidote you need. With unfailing honesty, clarity, and courage, Ayanna Thompson’s Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America confronts the elephant in the room we so seldom admit to seeing—race—particularly in regard to Shakespeare’s cultural authority. Thompson casts her questioning gaze on the ways Shakespeare is studied, taught, and performed in twenty-first-century America; less traditionally, she examines the plays’ appropriation in film, novels, prison and reform programs, and new media such as YouTube. Her wide-ranging inquiry compels the reader to question all sorts of assumptions—about Shakespeare, race, and (most often) the ways both of these are entwined in American thought and practice.

Thompson explains her title’s significance in her introduction. In his address to the Venetian Senate, Othello describes Desdemona’s fascination with his adventures; she found his stories “‘passing strange’” and listened to them “with a greedy ear.” The phrase conveys the unusual wonder Desdemona felt, but Thompson connects the words to the American trope of “passing,” often used in narratives about individuals who pretend to be a member of a racial category other than their own; passing implies the creation of an alternative identity and reflects the desire to “rewrite a story from a different point of view” (11). Finally, “passing” also connotes the changes that take place through time. She stresses that Shakespeare “was / is always defined through the recreation of his identity, image, texts, and performances. . . . [He] needs to be rendered as contingent—as in process and as passing—as the creative moment in which his name, image, text, and performance are invoked” (17).

In the next chapter, Thompson tackles assumptions about Shakespeare’s universalism as reflected in two contemporary films: the small-budget, independent Suture (1993) and the Hollywood comedy Bringing Down the House (2003). Although neither film is about Shakespeare, Thompson shows how the concept of Shakespeare as a universal figure can be appropriated to stand for white, Western culture. Thompson next interrogates the implications of Maya Angelou’s often-repeated claim that Shakespeare was black. She frames Farrukh Dhondy’s Black Swan, a young adult novel whose Afro-Caribbean hero tries to seize Shakespeare’s cultural capital for himself, as a kind of “strategic essentialism”—“the practice of promoting racial differences as inherent, fundamentally different, and therefore fixed in order to create affiliation, cohesion, and unity within a racialized group” (13, 49). Even though most readers will not be familiar with these texts, they will find Thompson’s detailed analysis intriguing.

Chapter 4 moves to multicultural theater, a topic in which Thompson, who edited the collection Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (2006), has particular expertise. Here, she probes the inconsistencies in contemporary casting practices. Although most regional Shakespeare festivals profess to be multicultural, their actual practices can be divided into four categories: (1) colorblind casting, assigning actors according to ability without regard to race; (2) societal casting, assigning actors of color to roles that were originally written for white actors; (3) conceptual casting, assigning actors of color to roles that will “enhance the play’s social resonance” (76); and cross-cultural casting, moving the play’s milieu to a different location and culture. Yet, Thompson argues, theater practitioners seldom interrogate their own practices or face up to those practices’ messy contradictions. Using the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as her primary example, Thompson calls for theater practitioners to recognize and discuss the semiotics of race in their productions.

Thompson’s next topic is even more nervous making: whether a role originally intended for a white actor in blackface (Othello, for example) should ever be performed according to “original-staging” practices. As someone who has written on this controversial topic, I appreciated…

Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America

Oxford University Press
April 2011
240 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195385854; ISBN10: 0195385853

Ayanna Thompson, Professor of English
Arizona State University

Notions, constructions, and performances of race continue to define the contemporary American experience, including America’s relationship to Shakespeare. In Passing Strange, Ayanna Thompson explores the myriad ways U.S. culture draws on the works and the mythology of the Bard to redefine the boundaries of the color line.

Drawing on an extensive—frequently unconventional—range of examples, Thompson examines the contact zones between constructions of Shakespeare and constructions of race. Among the questions she addresses are: Do Shakespeare’s plays need to be edited, appropriated, updated, or rewritten to affirm racial equality and retain relevance? Can discussions of Shakespeare’s universalism tell us anything beneficial about race? What advantages, if any, can a knowledge of Shakespeare provide to disadvantaged people of color, including those in prison? Do the answers to these questions impact our understandings of authorship, authority, and authenticity? In investigating this under-explored territory, Passing Strange examines a wide variety of contemporary texts, including films, novels, theatrical productions, YouTube videos, performances, and arts education programs.

Scholars, teachers, and performers will find a wealth of insights into the staging and performance of familiar plays, but they will also encounter new ways of viewing Shakespeare and American racial identity, enriching their understanding of each.

Features

• Productively engages a topic of perennial debate: race and Shakespeare
• Offers first sustained examination of the relationship between contemporary American constructions of Shakespeare and race
• Explores the seldom considered ways Shakespeare has infiltrated American popular culture, from films like the screwball comedy Bringing Down the House to DIY performances on YouTube

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The Passing Strangeness of Shakespeare in America
• 2. Universalism: Two Films that Brush with the Bard, Suture and Bringing Down the House
• 3. Essentialism: Meditations Inspired by Farrukh Dondy’s novel Black Swan
• 4. Multiculturalism: The Classics, Casting, and Confusion
• 5. Original(ity): Othello and Blackface
• 6. Reform: Redefining Authenticity in Shakespeare Reform Programs
• 7. Archives: Classroom-Inspired Performance Videos on YouTube
• 8. Conclusion: Passing Race and Passing Shakespeare in Peter Sellars’s Othello
• Works Cited
• Index