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Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: Ian Smith, "Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Description: In Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Ian Smith urges readers of Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet to develop âracial literacy.â Through both wide social influences and specific professional pressures, Shakespearean critics have been taught to ignore, suppress, and explain away the racial thinking of the plays, a set of evasion strategies that inevitably have political and social ramifications in the contemporary United States. As Ian writes in the introduction, Black Shakespeare is intended to âshift the focus to conditions that shape readers, inform their epistemologies, and influence their reading practicesâ (3).Todayâs guest is Ian Smi...