Siteless substances : staging Black placelessness in Shakespeare adaptations

This project analyzes the connections between race, place, and identity as articulated by Shakespeare’s modern-day Black adaptors. My research on race and placelessness makes a literal consideration of what Dr. Koritha Mitchell has termed “know-your-place aggression,” which considers how anti-Black racists deploy violence to keep Black people from achieving civic and social success. Centering land and locality, my research highlights how the prevailing focus on acts of racist aggression themselves has overshadowed the significance of landscape, geography, and geopolitics in race formation and how racist violence often intersects with a desire to prevent Black people’s access to certain places. My approach brings nation, region, migration, and other forms of “placehood” to the analysis of Black culture and anti-Black racism throughout the African diaspora, especially in USian, Canadian, and Caribbean contexts. In this multidisciplinary project, I assemble scholarship on medieval and early modern history, early modern literary and performance cultures, records of 19th-century European and American Shakespeare performances, and 20th an 21st-century critical interventions on the topics of race and identity in Shakespeare studies. From this array of primary and secondary sources, I argue that Black artists’ engagement with Shakespeare’s plays necessarily interrogate the notions of origin and originality as they pertain to diasporic identity and adaptation, respectively. I further argue that the literary and artistic output of Black diasporic people can be examined as a constellation of adaptive strategies that respond to Shakespeare and other Western canonical writers and thinkers. Doing so, these creators recuperate progressive potential in diasporic placelessness from the histories of colonialism, expropriation, and chattel slavery that obscure racial and cultural origins.Englis