This panel builds upon premodern critical race studies scholarship that has attuned us to the development of race in the early modern period, and to more recent work by Peter Erikson, Kim F. Hall and Patricia Cahil, Carolivia Herron, Ayanna Thompson, Reginal A. Wilburn, and others that has drawn our attention to the presence of Shakespeare and Milton in works by Black Americans. This panel extends this work by showing what is gained by pursuing connections between Black American and white English Renaissance authors, examining how and why Black writers engage with well-worn racist tropes, and attending to the politics of allusion.
Dennis Britton’s paper will describe how seeing Twelve Years a Slave and teaching The Tempest in the same semester facilitated his perception of how Shakespeare has shaped feelings about enslavement. Northrop’s slave narrative, like other abolitionist literature, implores white readers to pity the enslaved. Northrop also laments the loss of his books while observing that enslaved people are not permitted to read. Perhaps coincidentally, The Tempest is invested in who is and is not worthy of pity, as well as in books as a source of enslavers’ power. Whether or not these connections are coincidental, Britton argues that Northrop writes within the context of a literary history about slavery and feeling that is significantly shaped by Shakespeare, and that reading slave narratives compels us to see exactly what is at stake in Shakespeare’s configurations of race, slavery, and feeling.
Arthur Little will draw comparisons between Morrison’s Sula and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Little will show that Morrison’s novel is very much in conversation with Shakespeare’s play and explicate how the novel confronts the Shakespeare by challenging and outing the white, masculine, romanticized (post)war aesthetics and ideation that undergird it. Morrison does so most directly by resituating characters from MSND, but more important is Morrison’s pushback against the canonical scripting of white women that erases and traumatizes Black women. Operating here, too, for Morrison in the early 1970s is the “fodder” to which Black literature was all too often consigned, which guaranteed the invisibility of her aesthetic and rhetorical choices. Morrison’s novel insists on laying claim not only to Black women’s agency but authorship/authorial power.
Explicating a direct reference to Milton in Chestnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars, Reginald A. Wilburn will demonstrate that Milton hides in plain sight from the earliest stages of the novel’s exposition. Chesnutt appropriates and allusively incorporates rhetorical taglines suggestive of Paradise Lost and the Edenic bower where Adam and Eve enjoy connubial bliss. Chesnutt’s allusion to Milton’s bower provides a unique storytelling device for preaching a gospel of black revolt that emphasizes the perils and travails endured by tragic mulattas like his Eve-like protagonist, Rena Walden. Milton’s (in)visibility in Chestnutt’s novel is itself a kind of racial passing, and Chesnutt’s complex engagement with racial passing is advanced by how he choses to reveal and conceal Milton in the novel.
Each panelist will speak for 15 minutes, leaving 25 minutes for Q&A.
All three panelists are cis Black men. We acknowledge that this could be considered a “manel,” though that term invokes the image of a panel of all white male “experts.” A panel of Black men in the context of MLA, however, does something different. Black scholars’ expertise about white authors of the Renaissance has often been called into question, especially when Black scholars talk about race. The panel aims to redress this. Each panelist draws heavily from the scholarship of Black women, and Britton will acknowledge the debt to Black women scholars and draw attention to the panel’s gender composition before he gives his paper.