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Ian Smith, "Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
01:10:35
An interview with Ian Smith
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- [00:00]
Ian Smith
We heard you. Nine years of Bring back the Snack Wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the Hot Honey Snack Wrap. Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can.
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Podcast Intro/Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to New Books and Literary Studies. I'm your host, John Yargo. In Black Shakespeare, Reading and Misreading Race, Ian Smith urged urges readers of Othello, the Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet to develop racial literacy through both wide social influence 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, quote, shift the focus to conditions that shape readers, inform their epistemologies, and influence their reading practices. Today's guest is Ian Smith, professor of English at the University of Southern California. Ian is the author of the previous monograph Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance Barbarian Errors from Palgrave, as well as one of the most important articles in the early modern literary criticism of the last 20 years, Othello's black Handkerchief. Ian is the current president of the Shakespeare association of America.
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John Yargo
Welcome to the podcast, Ian.
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Ian Smith
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the invitation and I'm happy to be here.
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John Yargo
In Black Shakespeare, you offer a longer history of how professionalized readers are trained to grapple with or not grapple with, to engage with or to ignore certain pieces of evidence, topics, themes. This reader, situated in the US Academy is more or less trained to overlook or minimize the operation of race. You name this as systemic whiteness. Talk to us about what systemic whiteness is and how it determines what is acknowledged and what is written about within Shakespeare's studies.
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Ian Smith
Right. I need to step back a little bit to give you some, to give us some both some background before I actually arrive at the point where I can say what systemic whiteness is, if that's okay. One of the things I talk about in this book and one of the things I think that anybody who does work in Shakespeare studies generally, but in certainly in pre modern critical race studies, will understand, is that there has been this history of sort of denial, avoidance and resistance to talking about or recognizing the role of race in the works that we study, whether it's Shakespeare or works even around Shakespeare's contemporaries as well. That has been well documented. That resistance has been well documented, but still it continues to be a significant part of the reading response around Shakespeare's. Studies still today, even now, still in 2023, it continues to be so. So I was motivated to try and examine the cause for this resistance. As I said, we have talked about the resistance being a thing now. I wanted to talk about why or the cause of it being something that we had to. To consider and think about. And so that's where one of the key, I think, moves in the book was to sort of address this question of cause. I started by thinking about a line that I'd read a long time ago from Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark, where she. She makes this rather, I think, provocative and very interesting claim that is almost a throwaway line. And I don't really mean that as a throwaway, but it's sort of hidden in the preface to the work. It's not even the body of the text. And she talks about American readers being positioned as white. And I was just struck for many years by that phrasing, positioned as white, because I thought it was just quite memorable, but I thought it was somehow not just provocative, as I said, but somehow very important to try to grapple with what she was getting at. And so for a long time, I thought about it. And so in writing this book, I was, in fact, trying to understand what that. What she was trying to get us to think about, expand it in a way that made sense for the kind of work I was doing and applied to Shakespeare's studies in the early modern period. And so I thought about this notion of epistemological formation as a way to think about what she meant as positioned as white, in part. Right. That the epistemological formation, or what one may call intellectual conditioning of the reader, that would predispose readers towards not seeing certain kinds of evidence in texts, that is to say, what we've been calling the resistance or the avoidance or what I have called the blind spots that readers seem to have or kind of bias that one might display, and a kind of white preference that exists among readers as well. Those were the things that I was trying to grapple with and explain. And it turns out that scholars in experimental psychology were also looking at some of those issues as well. And some scholars who, in fact, actually worked on some of these issues, related issues, I should say, recognized that about 75% of this was an American study, a study done on American readers, I should say American citizens, 75% of those tested showed what they called a sort of a white preference. And they were surprised at how high that figure was, that 75%. And what was interesting Is that this preference held and continues to hold true for subjects, whether even those who subscribe consciously to a sort of different, non biased outlooks. So despite sometimes one sort of conscious efforts, there was something in the culture that predisposed us anyway to thinking in certain, to have certain views and to have this sort of conditioning that we eventually somehow find ourselves employing and deploying. And so this is what I begin to began to think about as systemic whiteness. That is to say, systemic whiteness speaks to the way societies develop and perpetuate this kind of white preference or bias through their institutions and systems, whether it's an educational system or the legal system or the economic system, or any number of systems or institutions really that inform, build the society. And in this book, therefore, I call attention in particular to the congressional role that is the. In 1790, Congress, through its Naturalization act, describes citizenship as based on a white requirement to be a citizen was to be white. That was one of the minimum requirements. And so beyond that, well into the 20th century, the idea that whiteness sort of prevailed in immigration law and policy continued to shape and dominate our thinking in the United States as well. As a result, then, this intellectual bias that I've been describing, it has been propounded in so many ways and has become so much a part of American life and culture. And for the purposes of the kind of work that I was trying to address in literary studies and Shakespeare studies, I've decided to call the systemic whiteness. And it leads to a kind, it leads to affecting what I also call or racial literacy, our capacity to read Shakespeare and not forget or ignore signs of race other than a kind of neutralizing whitewashing of texts. Because that is how not only have been trained, but that is our epistemological sort of foundation or conditioning that propels us to not see. And so hence the racial blind spots that I think we're constantly sort of besieged by.
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John Yargo
You share this anecdote. I believe it was a Shakespeare association of America panel in which one of the participants said, declared, othello is not a play about race, I believe, or something like that. And without any further explanation, almost as if the statement itself was self evident and didn't need to be defended or expanded upon. That's a kind of example of this whitewashing, as you call it, right?
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Ian Smith
Yes, it's an example of this, what I've called sort of the racial denial in existence and resistance that I've talked about. And as I said, that continues, you know, folks continue to make those kinds of statements in One way or the other. And it is very familiar. One sees it all the time, but then one has to respond to those questions still all the time. So, yes, and I did share that story from some time ago, and that is an example of what. You're right, of that kind of sort of racial denial and racial sort of resistance. Yes. But as I said, rather than just simply leave it there, which is, I think, as far as we had come, I wanted to probe and ask why. And why wouldn't be just about, oh, they're bad people, because that's not the point. It's a different kind of response that leads to the response to, well, why is it that people, and we all are sort of skeptical or afraid of or refusing to, or in denial about, And a whole range of expressions about seeing, let's say in this case, of this work, blackness in Shakespeare. Why is that? And that's a question I was trying to tackle in a serious way, inspired.
- [11:55]
John Yargo
By this study of the formation of a reader. I want to ask you how you conceptualize the reader of Black Shakespeare. Do you have an ideal reader or reader you're writing against? How do you hope this book will work upon a reader? And what uses do you see a reader putting this book to?
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Ian Smith
There's a couple ways to answer that question. I think that that might be helpful. One is methodological, and the other is to respond more directly to, well, what do I think? What am I doing? When I started thinking about this project some time ago, one of the issues that I was told I'd have to confront is how do I conceptualize reading when, you know, each reader is an individual and separate and marked by a host of social identities in some way. And so what I've tried to do by talking about systemic whiteness as a kind. As an institutional thing and not an individual thing, because now we understand that distinction much more clearly. It afforded me the. The possibility of still writing a book about readers wherein I didn't have to talk about every individual reader in the world, but rather than to talk about types of readers who are informed and formed in particular ways. So that's sort of the method and the problem that I was told I'd have to sort of confront. So that was interesting. And that was. Fortunately, I think, I was able to get to find a way to do that. What really did I have in mind? Well, on the one hand, as I said before, there's a sort of idea from Toni Morrison about readers being positioned as white. And why is that important? That's important because What I am saying is when I speak about systemic whiteness, I'm not speaking about individuals who bear some sort of white racial identity, or, to put it bluntly, white people. That's not what I'm writing about. I'm writing about because the truth is, systemic whiteness affects all of us. The question is to varying degrees, right? So when, as I cited before, the study shows that 75% means that there's a 25% who have somehow managed to evolve in a different way, right? So it's about, you know, where are you on that line? Where are you in that journey of your sort of evolution in change and transformation as a reader, or what I call sort of acquiring a certain kind of racial literacy, Right? That's what I'm talking about. So by talking about systemic whiteness, it means that I'm saying we are all affected by this thing, regardless of how we choose to identify racially. Whether we say I am X or I am Y, it affects us all. But then we need to unpack the degrees to which it does affect us and where we on that sort of trajectory of learning and unpacking and discovery. That is also important because I don't want us to lose sight of the fact that this is not about white people versus black people. So that's not the point. Now, one's experience, I think, can also affect our journey along the line, that is to say, as people who have had a certain kind of experience in the United States. I know I've had an experience from the day they were 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I think one is more alert to certain kinds of ways of reading than some people who don't have that sort of experience. So, yes, one's experience can inform how quickly one arrives at a way of not being positioned completely as white, as Toni Morrison would say, but are somewhere different along that sort of trajectory of knowledge and relearning and awareness and so on. So that's part of my answer to your question. The other part is at the very end of the book, I do write an epilogue, which is about what I call forms of whiteness. And there I do address more specifically the readers who are positioned as white, who are probably likely to identify socially as white in the culture. And I talk about what W.E. dubois raises in the Souls of white Folks, where he says, essentially, and what has been the character of America for all these years? And he says the character of American life is that whiteness has trended in the direction of possession. And my question was, can we find an alternative to whiteness as a form of possession. Because when Du Bois makes that kind of statement, I think it is a searing comment on possession, which covers everything from owning land to owning bodies to owning people, et cetera, and the unwillingness to let it go, the unwillingness to change those forms of ownership when it is clearly seen as immoral, unjust, and something that we. And that we need to somehow transform. And so at the very end, I wanted to respond in some way to Du Bois by saying, well, hopefully when we talk about systemic whiteness and racial literacy, that what I'm hoping that this is not just a static critique, but it's a dynamic set of possibilities for change. And so the caption for the epilogue, which is forms of whiteness plural, suggests that. And for those who identify as white, or for those who still occupy the sort of position of whiteness, how can you reimagine what your whiteness is? Is how can you imagine your positionality as being right? And. And this is work that one has to do. And I'll close with this section of your answer with this. It's a long response. I'm sorry, but I end with this. There is this thing that in the brain which I heard about a long time ago, and this is not in the book, but, you know, as I, you know, after the book, still things resonate still with you. And I remember hearing this a long time ago, and it's called the ras, the reticular activating system. And it's a part of. It's what the brain does. And I'm saying it in very simplistic terms. So if anybody who is listening, who is far more a specialist in this, forgive my oversimplification, but the RAS is really a sort of filtering part of the brain that also foregrounds. So what I was told when I first heard about this was that if, say, somebody sort of drive along every day on the freeway or the highway, one may not notice certain kinds of cars. You're just going along, doing your thing. But if you were to suddenly, to purchase or buy, say, a Volkswagen, then suddenly you start noticing a whole lot of Volkswagens. And it's the brain that does that. The brain begins to sort of filter in the things that suddenly know you have an intentional interest in. But then the brain picks up on that. This idea of the ras has been picked up, let's say, in management studies where employers understand that they can create a much better sort of management set of programs if they can foreground certain ways of thinking, certain policies or practices in house among their employees. In the same way. What I'm suggesting, well, similar, I should say, way I'm suggesting is that as we continue to learn more and unpack more and commit, because the commitment has to be there more regarding critical race studies, then we can in fact turn the classroom into a place where we too can foreground and highlight in such a way that. That we can in fact encourage our students to become transformative so that they can begin to think about the forms of whiteness that they. That they want to establish for themselves in a productive, positive, humane way.
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John Yargo
I love that idea of moral formation or epistemological self formation as being one of the things you're inviting readers into. That's very powerful. And W.E.B. du Bois equation of whiteness as possession and unwillingness to let it go, I think is powerful. I want to turn to a technique I see you using throughout the book. It is the framing of pre modern material with case studies from the United States. In one example, you frame a discussion of the Merchant of Venice through a narrative written by J.W.C. pennington, an escaped slave who is writing in 1861 about the fugitive Jordan H. Banks. You frame a fresh analysis of hamlet through the January 6th insurrection. I think it works very successfully to direct our attention to the primary Shakespearean text in. In very intentional ways. How do you. How did you settle on that technique and structure?
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Ian Smith
Right. I mean there, there is an obvious answer, but which I'll say in a moment and then another second obvious answer. I'll start with the second one, which is one of the things we need to remember is that in premodern clinical race studies, I think one of the overlooked things that we do or practices that we engage in is that we're always thinking about how this work in the early modern period exists in dialogue with today. And now I think there is hardly anybody who's working critical race studies that doesn't in some way or the other attempt to do that. Maybe in other fields people can sort of not necessarily do that. It's not clear to me why you would. But in critical race studies it just isn't just not been part of the formation of the field. The field has this sort of always speaking in this sort of dialogic way. So that's the first answer. In other words, that's just par for the course. That's kind of what we do now. In addition to that, the other answer that I was going to give you is that if we think about it, systemic whiteness is something that is formed over time. Systemic whiteness is not born in a day, as I said, Rome is not built in it. It's not born in a day. And flourish, and it doesn't flourish in a day. It's. It's about something which, you know, builds and grows and has power over time. And this is why it can be very hard to. To. To. To undo as well, because it has such deep roots. So in effect, then, when we talk about systemic whiteness, we're talking about history. And so it made sense that one would frame each chapter historically because each of those historic framing moments are also moments that reflect on systemic whiteness as it presents itself in American life and culture. So you think of those two things, the sort of dialogue, part of it, that is part of what we do, which is really part of what we call the relevance question. Why are we doing this kind of work? And then for the particular path I've chosen, it is history. Because of the nature of what I'm writing about, it is history. Then it means that you have. It's a particular kind of approach to shaping and presenting that notion of relevance, which is in historic terms.
- [25:33]
John Yargo
And I'm also hearing the contingency of whiteness or race more generally, the way in which it has emerged in fitful and in some ways unpredictable and nonlinear ways. And that's part of. Part of thinking through the discussion between critical race theory and early modern text. It's thinking through that contingency. Your second chapter looks at the dual history of US Anti literacy laws and codified readings of blackness. That is to say, at the same time as states like South Carolina were prohibiting the education of black people, punishable by the death penalty, in some cases, there was a concerted effort to fix who was allowed to interpret blackness and what blackness could mean. Talk to us about this dual movement in practices of reading.
- [26:32]
Ian Smith
Oh, yes, you know, it's one of these sort of profound ironies that I think sort of a part of American life, really. And the iron is. But they're of such magnitude and such that they make you. They just make you shake your head in wonderment about how could this have been right. So what you're referencing here is the. To continue the idea of the opening framework of the chapter, I talked about the anti literacy. The anti literacy laws and how it affected, you know, people of color and in particular, people who were black and who were slaves. And yet by 1818 in the Savannah laws, there was another dimension to this which talked about restricting literacy from any person who was black, whether they were slave or free. So now it's not only your status as a slave that would prevent you from reading. It was your very just status in terms of your body that would prevent you from having access to literacy according to this law. That's a significant shift in change because it moves it from a whole other section from kind of legal structure of, well, are you slave or free? To some other kind of thing which is about now who gets to be called black. Now, the irony is, which is why I think you called my attention to this passage, that in that moment, the work of determining who was going to be seen as black, whether slave or free, were whites. So suddenly white people were given the role and responsibility of determining who was black, which had nothing to do with some sort of legal status or, you know, any other. Not sure what sort of reliable frame of reference they could use or. But the complete irony is, so slaves couldn't read. And at the same moment that that reading was denied them a certain other kind of reading, which is the reading of their bodies was determined and put in place by law. And that reading was done by white people who could read and who were determined as the people who were best suited to read their bodies. So you have this shift from reading texts to reading bodies. And in a way that should alert us and alarm us. Because when we talk about reading and readers, moments like this remind us that we're dealing with something quite volatile and dangerous. That is, reading is never just in neutral thing that in the example for that you just asked me to talk about reading is in fact a very dangerous thing because it. We have this movement from reading texts to reading bodies, and reading bodies brings us to that place where one ability, one's ability to have a certain life, one's ability to move freely and have an education and to do something with that education is going to be determined by somebody saying, well, you can't, because I think you are black and therefore you can't have access to. So the slippage from text to life is so easy, but also so compelling in the degree to which one moves from text to life so quickly, so easily, and with all the consequences of that implied. And I think we want to remember when we talk about reading, because so often I think reading is talked about and people are talking about, you know, various acts of reading. And we forget sometimes that reading has this history in this country of profound magnitude with regard to certain forms of disenfranchisement and discrimination and delegitimation and dehumanization.
- [31:38]
John Yargo
And I think one of the examples from that chapter is the racial theater of the audience's mind. The way in which literary texts kind of entrain audiences to fill in the gaps, fill in knowledge, make assumptions, prejudiced judgments.
- [31:59]
Ian Smith
Right, that's correct. I was intrigued to. To talk about that because that's part of. That's part of what I call the blind spot theory. Right. That, in fact, the blind spot theory really is modeled on, you know, the. The real human eye and you know, as a phys, As a physiological thing, that the human eye has blind spots, right. Where the photoreceptors on certain parts of the eye, of the retina, you know, don't exist. And so. But we don't notice that they're blind spots because we are accustomed to, in fact, that sort of blindness. And what the brain. And the theory is that the brain then sort of fills in from experience, that blind spot. And so we don't even notice that we're not actually seeing. We just fill in. And so the argument I made there is that Shakespeare in effect writes a play in which he lures the audience, he teases the audience to play around with their sort of social, intellectual blind spot by saying, hi, here's a more. And fill in the blind spot. Fill in what you think you know. And then he completely disabuses us in the next scene deliberately. And so you can see Shakespeare doing that sort of learning and unlearning in the theater, in which, quite powerfully, we are sort of brought up very quickly in a moment of sort of reckoning about why it is that we're thinking in the sort of particular way as opposed to having a much more open frame of reference. And it's really quite powerful. I agree. Yeah. Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
- [33:56]
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- [34:05]
Ian Smith
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John Yargo
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- [34:49]
John Yargo
In the Merchant of Venice, Shylock famously demands a pound of flesh from his debtor Antonio. Shylock's uncompromising demand for this debt to be paid has been understood in any number of ways. As you point out, though Antonio rejects wholesale the terms of Shylock's critique of Venetian racism and xenophobia. In turn, how do you invite us to reread Shylock's insistence on claiming this pound of flesh?
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Ian Smith
Oh, I remember. You're right. I mean, this play has been written about immersion of Venice. This play has been written about so much and in so many ways that. And yet I felt after just reading again at some point, that perhaps we had missed. Again, we'd missed something. I mean, quite literally, I think we did miss something that sort of dramatically plays to the. To the argument I'm making about racial blind spots. First, to your point, there is this. There's this, a famous sort of reading of this play in which the critic says that, well, Shylock is a bad businessman because, you know, he should have to ask for a pound of flesh is really not a good sort of financial strategy. So he's a bad businessman, et cetera, et cetera. And. And I get the point of the article, and you know, it, as I said, it was a quite famous article. And. And I get it. I understand what the person is saying. But it. But that argument, I think, is only true if you forget or ignore sort of racial contours of the play. And if you read it in terms of the racial sort of urgency and exigency of the play, then Shahlik is not a bad businessman at all. It means that that is exactly what the play is about. And so one has missed the point, I believe, if one reads it that way. So very briefly. What I mean is we talk about the pound of flesh, but when the play begins and the deed is drawn up, the text actually asks for a pound of fair flesh. And so it's not just pound of flesh, which we have often sort of repeated for the sake of. And again, one understands why we do that, because that phrase has become synonymous with the play in some way, and it is repeated in the play, too. But the actual legal document that is written to be signed and endorsed, that to which Antonio will be held, that document very specifically asks for a pound of his fair flesh. Now, of course, we have learned from a lot of scholars, we think of Kim Hall's work, obviously, where fair flesh is not just clearly beautiful, but it's his whiteness that's being talked about. And Shakespeare doesn't have to repeat that 10, 15 times because audiences see that Antonia is white the moment the document asserts the whiteness as a kind of legal standard of the transaction. And so when Shylock demands that white flesh, a couple things are happening. One, Jews were often described as black in the early modern period. And so therefore, Shylock is making a significant point where he says, okay, you've called me black. All right, so what we need to do then is make it very clear that your white flesh is going to be the price of the loan. That's going to be the cost. And so what he's doing is he's calling attention to the racial conflict of the play. And again, I know that this play is often read in terms of religious conflict, but I think that we limit the reading of the play too narrowly if we refuse to see and listen to Shylock's ongoing discussions about race and blackness and whiteness in the play, especially where he sees himself implicated. And that's very much there for us to see in other parts that we haven't spoken about at all just now. And so it's a very dramatic demand where Shalik is highlighting sort of contrast between A and B. What strikes me as really interesting is that Jews were not allowed to own land in the period. And so, in a way, too, Shylock is making a very strident remark here by saying, well, I can't own land, but I'm going to own the thing that you value so much more than anything else. I'm going to own whiteness. And so therefore, that's what you're going to have to pay me if you fail. So it's very striking to me, at any rate, that Shylock is making a strong social response to the kind of thing that we've seen Antonio boast about and his friends boast about. And I think for too long we have missed that dimension of the play. And I think it is really more than time for us to reintroduce that. Let us not forget that in Act 1, Scene 2, when Morocco enters the play, Morocco, who has just arrived in Venice, he makes it very clear that he knows that this is a city in which his blackness is a problem, Right? He says, don't dislike me because I'm a black man. Here's a man who's come to Venice from afar. So as I like to say, word has spread right beyond Italy and that people know what the sort of Venetian tone, tenor and culture is all about. And so like Morocco, who knows this? Shalak who lives there, is also cast in this drama of blackness and whiteness as well.
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John Yargo
I find that a completely persuasive reading of the Merchant of Venice and a fresh, a fresh perspective on Shylock's persistence. Turning to Hamlet, which is a play you identify as being concerned about race, you're particularly interested in the black peerest reference in, in Act 2, Scene 2. How does the protagonist of that play carry forward and co opt black subjectivity?
- [42:04]
Ian Smith
Yes, my thinking about blackness in Hamlet, which I'm really excited about, I mean I am excited about Merchant for a whole set of other reasons, I really am. But for Hamlet because it is a play that has, I think has proven very difficult and resistant for people to write about race in, in Hamlet, you know, and, and some people, and there were a few essays on that have tried to do this, but it's, it's not sort of your regular go to play to talk about race at all. So. But I'm excited because Hamlet for me, I never felt settled about the Hamlet that I heard people talk about or at some point I'm sure I was taught about myself. So I, you know, Merchant, I can live with what I was taught was still, is still fine, you know, still good. I'm only sort of adding to it. Handler just never seemed right to me. So I'm particularly excited about that one. And so we'll see what the response to that might be like. And yes, so one of the first thing pieces I talked about was the Paris passage where you know, we talk about this play being a play about plays. Right. The sort of metatheatricality of Hamlet and you know, the play that has so many references to the word stage and this kind of thing. And of course that's true. So I think all those things are true and they're important for a reason. That is to say, a play that is really about a play about plays and directing and stagecraft, etc. Then deserves to be placed within a theatrical tradition itself. Right. And if we do that, I think we can see the play very differently. So even though we start. You've asked me to start with Act 2, Scene 2, which is what. That's where I actually, when I started thinking about this play, I started there. So you're quite right to ask me to think about that. I actually want to just Say, to share with you in this conversation, John, that in a way, as I said, if we follow the evidence, so to speak, and think about Hamlet as a play that is about theater, then we may want to think about Hamlet as a play that is about, in fact, a certain kind of. That fits in a certain kind of timeline. So when the actors come and they talk about the black Peeress performance, which is Hamlet speaking, Hamlet says, hey, you know, I've heard this thing that you did. Recite this for me. And he gives the whole black Peeress thing. It's important to recognize that the Paris thing there is not just about heraldry, as people often want to say. Especially when we think about heraldry really is a way, a code for family lineage, genealogy and so on, which of course the early modern period is that we are talking about race as well. So it's not as if to say heraldry immediately nullifies any other racial reading. Heraldry, in fact, confirms a racial reading. One could argue. Okay, what's interesting for me then would be the following. But beyond the reading of heraldry in the play, we need to locate Hamlet within a sort of theatrical timeline, as I think the play's own sort of metatheatrical style and self reflection might encourage us to do. So we think of from the late 80s all the way through to Hamlet. There's several, what we may call race plays, right from the Battle of Alcazar in 89, through Shakespeare's own Taos, Andronicus, 1592, 1594, depending on how early or late you wanted to do that. There's Love's Labour's Lost as well by Shakespeare. There is the Blind Beggar of Alexandra, there's a Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare again, and then you have 1600 Hamlet and then Othello afterwards, and there's more to come. And then there's Lust's dominion, let's say 1599. So in that period, Shakespeare himself has contributed several plays to what I'm calling this sort of black or racial theater. And I've just gestured to a few others as well during that time. Now, in a way, this is the innovation that Hamlet references, not the innovation of the boy actors in the city. No, I'm serious, because, you know, and there's been a lot of good work done on that passage. But what's important is Hamlet raises the business of the children's theaters versus the adult theaters as something happening in the city. But what we do see on stage at the Castle is not about that. What we do see at the Castle, and we hear is a drama about race and theater. So what Shakespeare does is he raises a prospect of thinking about theater. And innovation sets that conversation, that dialogue going. He says, eventually, effectively, that's happening over there. Now I want you to talk about what's happening over here. And so I think we've been looking at the wrong innovation for too long. So in a way, this play is about the degree to which the idea of thinking about a kind of racial theater is, in fact, critical and relevant to Shakespeare and his time. And so the other passage I would look at is the obvious one, which is in Act 3, Scene 4, if I'm not mistaken, the closet scene, right, where Hamlet goes to his mother and he does this sort of other performative thing, which is, say, here are the two portraits, right, of Claudius and his father. And he talks about the fair mountain, which is his father. And then he talks about the More, which is Claudius. And I think editors have done us a disservice by not calling sufficient attention to the significance of the word more. Because the first folio and the second quarto go so far as to capitalize the N in more. So that we have an inkling that there's more than just your everyday common landscaping, sort of, you know, environmental more that's being referred to. And I think that is important because for a host of reasons, I think. But students can see and understand the contrast between fair mountain and more, which then has a double function of speaking about contrast to mountain, but also contrast to fair. And so by that technique, Shakespeare calls even more attention to the word more by having it have this sort of double function or this dual function. Why does that matter? Because in revenge tragedy, which is the other genre that everybody tells us this play is related to, we have all heard that revenge tragedy and Hamlet, right? Well, in revenge tragedy, when of the big problems is you fear becoming the thing that you dislike. You fear becoming the revenger, fears becoming the original perpetrator. And when Hamlet describes Claudius as a Moor, one can argue that the thing Hamlet then is describing is that murder and violence and betrayal and usurpation, these are all ideas that have become associated with the notion of being a Moor, which the plagues from 1589 through to 1599 show us that is true. And then there's more. But, you know, this is a short interview, so we can't go on too much longer. But those are the reasons why I'm excited about thee. Because there's just so much there to read and think about. And for so Long we've been denied. I have anyway, been denied that sort of reading. And it's like, why didn't, why, why haven't we bothered to talk this through?
- [51:09]
John Yargo
Yeah, I think that's going to be an important contribution to our understanding of. Of that play. Let's turn to Othello. Would you read a passage from your book around page 157?
- [51:23]
Ian Smith
I return to Othello to confront specifically the realization this audience is not simply a historically removed entity. This audience is also the modern spectator and reader for whom the legacy of centuries of reckoning with racialized blackness has come full circle. Othello asks, in addition, therefore, how can today's reader tell the story of a black man putting us directly in Hamlet's position of having to wrestle with our perceptions of blackness? Othello, the noble Moor, is often regarded as the exception to the violent black man type. Yet the full unfolding of the story produces a complicated human picture to which the audience is expressly set up to respond. This is a challenge Shakespeare poses in Othello, and it represents a profound ethical self inquiry that far surpasses mere scholarly production, dutiful analysis or skillful performance as we navigate the modern worldly equivalence of racial distortion and delegitimating of black life represented in Hamlet. In the process, I am engaging further in a dialogue about making Shakespeare not just relevant, but immediate and accessible for our time and using Shakespeare's own work to generate the terms of that investigation.
- [52:58]
John Yargo
Thank you for that. I find it. It's a real pleasure to hear you read your prose. I wonder, do you. When you're composing academic writing, do you read your sentences out loud? Do you read your prose out loud? Is that one of your techniques for revision?
- [53:18]
Ian Smith
Not out loud, but I do write with a sense of rhythm in my head, for sure. And so I'm not sure if it. If it works, but that's what I try to do. I always have the sense of a rhythm, and a rhythm guides how the words fall, for sure. Yes.
- [53:37]
John Yargo
Okay. Yeah. I think your prose is a pleasure to read. Really. Are there other writing techniques that you. You found reliable? Do you have a reading group? Do you have techniques for revision? For taking up your writing and maybe breaking it apart or reassembling it?
- [54:04]
Ian Smith
No to all of those questions. Which, which. Which makes me think perhaps I'm not a. Not a good writer?
- [54:11]
John Yargo
No, no, no, not at all. Everyone has a different sort of approach and technique.
- [54:15]
Ian Smith
Of course, I'm a solitary writer, I guess, if that, but. Solitary, but not alone. But it's solitary in that I do need to. And I also write very slowly. So it means that when I'm. And I craft and revise as I go along. So I. I will craft a sentence and it. And it will take. You know, I'll take whatever time it needs to do that. And there are times then with a burst of energy, I can write a few sentences quickly just because the ideas are just coming and I know what I want to say. And then I'll pause, and then I have to go slowly and carefully and take my time so that when I'm done writing, you know, I set myself a goal of X number of words a day to write. And, you know, and it's not a whole lot. And so by the time I'm done with the draft, it's typically 85, 90% done, and the rest is just going through again and rereading and catching some final things and doing some final edits. But when I'm done with the draft, it's typically in pretty finished shape already because I revise as I go along. I don't write in the. Because that would be too much. I can't. I don't know if I could do that.
- [55:38]
John Yargo
And you mentioned rhythm. Are you a musician? I know you're a fan of opera, Is that right? Of the. The soprano Leotine Price. Right.
- [55:50]
Ian Smith
Among others.
- [55:52]
John Yargo
So does. Does music sort of influence your sense of rhythm or certain pro styles?
- [55:59]
Ian Smith
Yeah, sorry, I don't know if. I don't know if it's music so much, but. But it's. It's a sort of poetic rhythm without being poetry, because I can't write poetry. I mean, I don't write poetry, so I don't know what that's about. But there's a lot of rhythm, which. Which also means that I. But it's also a sort of rhetorical rhythm. In other words, right now you asked me to read something. Nobody has ever asked me to do that. So that was quite interesting when you asked me to read something. And I think what it is, and I'm not sure if this came across at all, but I think what I'm doing is I'm writing the way I would read something out loud. And for me, that rhythm is what's important. Where does my voice land? Where would I. Would it rise or fall? And there are times when I. And of course, that's individual to me as well, because of the way I actually speak. And so there are times when I know that, well, this sentence isn't finished because it needs another Two beats to be right, that kind of thing. And so I mean by I need the rhythm has to be there. And all along, when I'm writing, that's what I'm hearing in my head. The sort of rise and fall of the words and how they. They build towards something and then they close and start again and open up. So it is musical in the sort of most distant cousin way, but it's rhetorical, certainly in the way I would sort of speak it way.
- [57:32]
John Yargo
Yeah, that's. That's really interesting and a wonderful way of talking about academic writing. I think you've said in other interviews that you are less interested in how scholars or critics respond to your arguments. Instead, the classroom for you is a laboratory space where you test out your hypothesis, seeing if the students take it up as credible or insightful. How do you build that kind of classroom environment? What does that classroom look like?
- [58:02]
Ian Smith
Right. No, obviously, I'm not dismissing my interest in other scholars. That's not what I'm saying. But because for so many years, I taught at an undergrad institution and enjoyed that tremendously. I do pay attention to. I hope I pay attention to how this kind of work lands with undergraduates. And what I mean by that also is if undergraduates get it, then it means that readers beyond their levels can get it also. So the challenge is always to how do I convey something that might be more complex than undergrads might have intended to hear? But. But they're welcome. But they welcome it anyway because I've tried to manage to give it to them, present it to them in a way that is accessible and hopefully sufficiently engaging for them. So that's a laboratory part of it. That is because I'm saying to them, look, here is. I said, look, we're here to have intellectual fun, so let's play. And so it's presented as something that is, you know, open, something that they can have fun doing. And there are times I will. I remember teaching Hamlet one year recently and saying to them, okay, we've gotten to. We're done. We've finished it enough Hamlet. I said, there's more that we could do. But, you know. And I hadn't talked about the racial dimension of the play at all. I just, you know, did some other stuff with Hamlet and stopped there. I said, well, if, you know, we could do more. But I said, we don't really have to. This class is not for that. And I said, no, we want more. And I was really genuinely surprised. I thought, are you sure? And they said, yeah, we want More. And they ate up the race thing. Once I started introducing to them, they just absolutely loved it. That, to me was a real surprise, a delightful surprise. But that's when you give them the choice as well and say, do you want more or not?
- [60:15]
John Yargo
Do you find it challenging with a writer like Shakespeare that there might be too much reverence or not enough reverence for his writing? I remember talking with other Desai a few months ago and he sort of articulated it that way. Do you see that in undergraduate classrooms? Perhaps?
- [60:41]
Ian Smith
Yes, but I think, I think that there's a reverence for everything that they're taught in high school. It's not just so it's a kind of a reverence for, I mean, high school students who have enjoyed the high school experience. If they get to the colleges that say we teach at, it means that they've been very successful at what they have done. So the success that they have is connected to a certain kind of learning experience that they've also had. So they think that that learning experience is the sort of path forward forever. And I think it takes them some time, a little time to understand that, well, that was one kind of experience. Now we have to, we're raising the stakes a little further in terms of method questions, dialogue, learning, etc. So I, I think that might be true, but that's true for everything that they've learned in high school at that point.
- [61:48]
John Yargo
Right, because it's what they know. Yeah, sure, sure. Congratulations on becoming president of the Shakespeare association of America. Some of our listeners are early career graduate students who are navigating these large professional organizations for the first time in a range of different roles. Presenters, panel organizers, admin positions, audiences. Others of our listeners might have long experience at SAA or similar conferences. What do you see the role of SAA being in the future in the next few years? And what kind of work do you want SAA to shift to?
- [62:28]
Ian Smith
Well, I think the two questions for the two questions you've asked are really the same response for me, I think, at the saa. First of all, let me say it's been a delight to be part of the SAA leadership. I discovered there a group of terrifically talented people, but they're also very committed and hard working people. People were willing to say yes when, you know, I'm sure they have so many other things on their desks to do and they still say yes to more service. It is quite astonishing but, you know, inspiring in so many ways. So I want to just say that. And so it's a Joy to be around those people who have given so much of their time and talent to serve in leadership of one kind or another and to serve in committees and so on. What do I want to see the SAA do? Well, I think it has done some of that which is at one end. The saa, I think, has been for a long time very welcoming and open to new approaches to doing certain kinds of work, certainly. So when we started our conversation, we started talking about resistance and avoidance. I say that for a long time now the SAA has been a place of openness and acceptance to a range of works and in particular the kind of work that I do in pre modern critical race studies. So if that weren't the case, I don't know if I would have been able to find a certain kind of sort of supportive home in the SAA if that weren't. That weren't so. But it's not just that. I think it's true for work in environmental studies, for example, certainly the work in gender and sexuality studies. So there is a, you know, there's a lot that the SA has done over the years to, to enact its own commitment to its membership in making sure that it is responsive to those developments and those growth, to those growth that happen in the field as well, and to ensure finding a space for that. I think I'd love to see that continue. And I have no doubt at this point that that will continue. And so I continue to be hopeful and very proud of the organization for that.
- [65:20]
John Yargo
For those reasons, in my experience, that's very much true. The freshness of the scholarship, the openness to new approaches and something else. As someone who finished graduate school school pretty recently, it's a pretty egalitarian conference, or that's been my experience, a place where scholars at every level are kind of interacting without sort of status, kind of pressure or different institutional jockeying perhaps. It's a pretty inviting place. So I highly recommend all early career scholars consider participating. Now that this book is out in the world, what are you turning your attention to? Is there a book, an article, a hobby, a class?
- [66:13]
Ian Smith
Well, yes. Well, as you noted that I've just moved to a new school. And so part of what I'm doing is getting settled in this new institution that I am and try my best to, to find my way there and to engage my students there as well. Beyond that, it is a new project I'm working on. I use the word new advisedly because it's new insofar as it's the next project it's not new because it's the first time working on it. It's something I started years ago, stopped in order to write black Shakespeare, and now I'm coming back to it. So it's work on early modern blackface, and so that's what I'm working on at the moment. I will just say that there have been a couple books on early modern blackface or blackface that have come out recently, and so mine is not going to retread some of those beautifully done pages already. I'm going to try to look at different eras that I think that are really quite interesting once again that we have not paid attention to and a little bit of an oversight, but ask questions about what difference it might make in looking at blackface from a slightly different perspective. So that's what I'm working on.
- [67:50]
John Yargo
And I completely understand if it's too early to say, but which text do you think you'll be taking up with that book?
- [67:59]
Ian Smith
I think. Well, I think I'm going to Love's Labor's Last, I think is going to make an appearance. I've never published in Love's Neighbor's Last before, so I'm pushing myself there. Merchant is the ideal text for what I want to do, so I might have to return to Merchant. I hope nobody is going to be tired of me writing about Merchant, but it's a completely different approach. It won't have anything to do with what I said in this book. So those are a couple of texts that I'm thinking of at the moment, and there are others that still yet to be determined from my notes. Yeah.
- [68:42]
John Yargo
Okay. Very exciting. We'll keep our eyes out for those projects. Thank you for coming on the podcast, Ian.
- [68:49]
Ian Smith
Well, thank you for the again, thanks for the invitation and I enjoyed speaking with you. It was a lot of fun.