“Multicultural Resonances in and with Early Modern England” interrogates the anxieties that cross-cultural connections elicit and the potential opportunities that they enable. Three of the papers engage with English texts from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century while the fourth paper considers multicultural resonances in a contemporary non-Anglophone Shakespeare adaptation. All four papers align with the MLA presidential theme of visibility by considering the connections across cultures, races, religions, and histories that have been obscured, denied, and or effaced but that nonetheless persist and were felt in the early modern past as they continue today. Given the location of New Orleans, the conference participants feel that a topic on multicultural resonances is particularly fitting. Despite the shared focus on cross-cultural connections that build on existing premodern critical race and gender/sexuality scholarship, the papers cover a variety of approaches including racecraft, gender and performance, early modern theater, recipes, the domestic household, sensibilities/affect studies, and crafting history.

Nayoung Seo’s “Transcending Gender Norms: The Multicultural Exploration of Hamlet in The King and the Clown” focuses on Wang-ui Namja (dir. Lee Joon-ik, 2005), a period drama film inspired by Hamlet, as well as the Korean historical figure King Yeonsan (1476-1506) in the Joseon Era. Exhibiting many parallels with Hamlet, the film features Joseon Era’s namsadang performers in an all-male vagabond clown troupe. Similar to the theatrical practice involving boy actors in Shakespeare’s times, this vagabond troupe also includes actors who take on cross-gender roles. The film portrays one of the vagabond members, Gong-gil, who becomes an Ophelia-like figure to King Yeonsan. This paper aims to analyze how the kkonminam (flower boy) culture in South Korea contributed to the South Korean audience’s understanding of Gong-gil’s gender fluidity without challenging their gender transition. This paper demonstrates how The King and the Clown broadens the horizon for understanding Hamlet through a multicultural and multilingual lens.

Kirsten Mendoza’s “Crafting Difference: The Meanings of Violence and Justice in Rowley's All's Lost by Lust" considers the practice of shaping history and perceived identities through the early modern theater. In particular, it examines the ways that the English depicted atrocities on the stage to make visible the connections between three groups (the Goths, Moors, Spanish and English) only to disavow and render them distinct from one another. Through an examination of early modern histories and William Rowley’s All’s Lost by Lust, this paper argues that visibility on English stages were paradoxically used to obscure the similarities between racialized groups.

In Roya Biggie’s “Sympathetic Magic’s Egyptian Roots: Occult Cunning in Antony and Cleopatra,” Biggie examines the early modern paradigm of sympathy as a multicultural epistemology by turning to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Beliefs in nature’s occult forces guided English quotidian life, evidenced in discourses as wide ranging as Thomas Eliot’s The Castel of Helth (1539) and Gervase Markhan’s The English Housewife (1615). Cleopatra may have provoked audiences’ fears of acculturation while inciting uneasy cross-cultural identifications. If English racial identity cohered at least partially around shared domestic practices, Shakespeare troubles this particular form of race-making by demonstrating that Europeans, from the continental philosopher to the English housewife, contemplated their worlds with a similar strain of wisdom that guides Egypt’s cunning queen.

Jennifer Park’s “Making (In)Visible: The Racial Anxieties of Shakespearean Skincrafts” examines what she calls Shakespearean skincrafts – practices of crafting with and upon the skin – as sites of early modern race-making and racial anxiety. Building on the groundbreaking work on cosmetics, beauty, and race by Farah Karim-Cooper, Kim F. Hall, Andrea Stevens, Edith Snook, and Kimberly Poitevin, she suggests that reading the prominence of cosmetics in early modern recipe culture reveals how the skin and its craftability came to inhabit the space of racialized threat. Park proposes the effects of covering, preserving, transmitting, and transforming in her analysis of Shakespearean skincrafting to explore how intimately skincrafting becomes a means of racecrafting and a catalyst for racist thought precisely because it trades in the anxieties that racial permanence and impermanence are never states that can be maintained.

The session organizer will communicate to the participants that papers must be kept to 12-15 minutes per talk. The speakers will be informed that the presider will interrupt talks that reach 15 minutes. This will leave 15 minutes of unstructured discussion.

This panel incorporates a diversity of voices including mid and early-career scholars from the UK and the US and scholars of color. We have a graduate student, a lecturer based in the UK, and two tenured/tenure-track US-based faculty.