OWEN WILLIAMS: Welcome to the Critical Race
Conversations, a series hosted by the Folger
Institute with the support of the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation as part of the Institute’s
50th anniversary programming.
I am Owen Williams, Associate Director for
Scholarly Programs at the Folger Institute.
We’re delighted to gather so many friends,
old and new, through these conversations.
I’d like to take a moment to introduce the
series and our session leaders for today’s
event.
This series of free online sessions feature
scholars who are offering new insights into
the prehistory of modern racialized thinking
and racism.
OWEN: Our speakers are acknowledging deeper
and more complex roots to enduring social
challenges and conducting more inclusive investigations
of our contested pasts, all with the goal
of creating a more just and more inclusive
society and academy.
The Institute is providing the frame work
and platform.
But, as is our practice, we turn to scholars
across disciplines and career stages to lead
discussions from their own experience and
expertise.
We recognize that we should allow others who
are more knowledgeable about the field of
critical race studies to create the conversations.
We have much to learn.
OWEN: In these critical race conversations,
we’re actively experimenting with new technologies
and new ways to foster dialogue and present
content just as so many of you are in your
own classrooms.
For this session, we are foregoing YouTube’s
live chat feature.
Our speakers welcome live tweeting with the
hashtag #FolgerCRC.
We remind you that this session will be recorded
and posted on the Folger’s YouTube channel
as soon as it is processed with closed caption
enabled and a transcript will be uploaded
next week.
OWEN: Please contact the Folger Institute
with any questions or concerns.
Today our session leaders will offer an important
and timely discussion that merges Shakespeare
and early modern English studies with Black
studies and sound studies to showcase ways
of integrating critical race studies into
the classroom.
They remind us that every humanities professor
already teaches profound lessons about race,
whether or not they intend them or are even
aware that such lessons are happening.
Let me now briefly introduce our two presenters
for the second event this month on how teachers
and college faculty might work to actively
dismantle racism in their classrooms.
OWEN: Dr. David Sterling Brown, a Shakespeare
and pre-modern critical race studies scholar
is assistant professor of English at Binghamton
University.
He is a member of the Race Before Race Conference
series executive board.
Dr. Brown’s a published and forthcoming
scholarship in Radical Teacher, The Sun Dial,
The Hare, Arden’s Hamlet, and Titus Andronicus
State of Play volumes and other venues centers
on Shakespeare, race, gender, and/or pedagogy.
Prior to entering academia, David worked as
the Connecticut recruitment director for a
national nonprofit in the K-12 fight against
educational inequity.
OWEN: Dr. Jennifer Stoever, a scholar of African
American literature and culture, and sound
studies is associate professor of English
at Binghamton University.
She is co-founder and editor in chief of Sounding
Out, the sound studies blog.
And her first book, The Sonic Color-line:
Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening,
was published by NYU Press.
Before entering her PhD in American studies
and ethnicity from the University of Southern
California, Professor Stoever was a high school
English and avid teacher for six years in
Riverside, California.
OWEN: Without further ado, I give you The
Sound of Whiteness, or Teaching Shakespeare’s
“Other ‘Race Plays’” in Five Acts.
DAVID STERLING BROWN: Thank you for that introduction,
Owen, and thanks to the Folger Institute and
The Folger Shakespeare Library, The Mellon
initiative in collaborative research and all
viewers, and to our colleagues, Dr. Nedda
Mehdizadeh, and Ambereen Dadabhoy for offering
the first conversation in this Folger Institute
series.
We also must thank Binghamton University and
our department for letting us teach how we
want to and need to teach, especially given
that our distinct anti-racist research agendas
are inextricably linked to our pedagogical
agendas.
DAVID: And finally, we offer a special thanks
to the K-12 teachers out there for there would
be no higher education without all of you.
Before we get started, we also want to make
two important points and recognize certain
limits pertaining to the hearing impaired.
First, the sonic color-line and the listening
ear, Jennifer’s concepts that we’ll be
relying on today, describe a hearing culture
that is also ablest.
The way listening is limited to the ear for
example in European culture because it is
closest to the mind and reason, even though
we know that we listen through the whole body
as vibrations hit it.
DAVID: The sonic color-line and listening
ear are ideologies that impact our individual
embodied listening which operates on a spectrum
from full body only to fill body and ear.
Secondly, the sonic color-line and listening
ear are very connected to bodily carriage
and proper comportment.
So, it is likely that the impacts of this
can be perceived through visual cues as well.
That is to say people perform listening often
in very exaggerated ways.
Thank you for performing that, Jenny [LAUGH].
JENNIFER STOEVER: I got you.
DAVID: To be clear, racism is also a painful
reality within the deaf community as the National
Deaf Center on post secondary education noted,
in their June 2020 statement on racism and
oppression.
And they added specifically that disparities
in opportunity and outcomes for Black deaf
Americans are incredibly high.
For today, Jennifer and I have incorporated
a lot into this critical race conversation
with the hope that since it is recorded, you
will take advantage of the opportunity to
re-watch it and share it with others.
DAVID: And on that note, we’ll now turn
to our overall objectives for this session.
We have five main goals.
First, we may encourage teachers and challenge
you to think not just about individual plays
but about each act in the five act play structure
as an opportunity to explore race and especially
whiteness in white-centric Shakespeare plays
like Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III,
and Hamlet for example, plays that have not
been essential in Shakespeare and race conversations
as they should and need to be despite important
work in this critical direction by many scholars.
DAVID: For example, and I want to name a few
of them, Arthur Little, who draws on the legal
scholarship of Cheryl I. Harris to reflect
on whiteness as property, Erickson, who among
other things asks in the past, can we talk
about race in Hamlet, Matthew Chapman, who
scrutinized the importance of the Black presence
in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Patricia Parker
who has examined the English Renaissance racialized
preoccupation with the Blackness, soiling,
sullying, and dulling in Hamlet, Scott Newstok
and Ayanna Thompson who offered a robust co-edited
volume, Wayward Macbeth, which features work
on whiteness, and Roman Polanski’s Macbeth
by Francesca Royster.
DAVID: And of course, Kim F. Hall, who in
her first book, Things of Darkness, deployed
Black feminist methodologies, explored the
fetishization of white skin and boldly demanded
that the field takes seriously the critical
interrogation of whiteness.
2020 marks the 25th anniversary of Hall’s
path breaking study.
And so, Jennifer and I will use this session
in part to answer Kim Hall’s 1995 call.
DAVID: For this kind of Shakespeare in pre-Modern
critical race studies scholarship must be
centered more frequently and the centering
of discussions about whiteness must be normalized
by all pedagogues and especially book presses
and journal editorial boards as argued for
in the Race Before Race executive board’s
recent call to end publishing gatekeeping.
Much is at stake with respect to understanding
the invisible workings and history of whiteness,
white supremacy, and to Blackness and racism.
DAVID: As these histories coupled with the
realities of now significantly affect all
students.
Another goal of ours is to showcase how Shakespeare
and critical race theory are complementary
and to suggest concrete methods for how teachers
can consciously, consistently, and conscientiously
offer lessons about race in relationship to
sound.
The latter concept having been explored by
Bruce R. Smith in The Acoustic World of Early
Modern England, Gina Bloom in Voice and Motion,
staging gender, shape, and sound in early
modern England, and in a 2010 special issue
of the journal, Upstart Crow titled Shakespearean
Hearing.
DAVID: That’s volume 29.
Race stands not apart from but as an important
part of the sound and hearing conversation.
I suggest as much in my article, The Sonic
Color-line: Shakespeare and the Canonization
of Sexual Violence Against Black Men, an essay
in The Sun Dial that offers examples of how
to apply Jennifer’s sonic color-line ideology
in the pre-modern context.
As Shakespeare’s plays present us with racialized
soundscapes, that prompt us as Bloom suggests,
to reflect on the materiality of sound.
DAVID: Why does sound matter?
And how is sound matter?
This critical conversation is a program of
action.
JENNIFER: Thank you, David, for starting us
out and for that wonderful introduction.
We have a couple more goals.
We’re gonna work on reinforcing the power
of empowerment with respect to student learning
and racialized authority in the classroom.
One of the things that white professors in
particular should be more self-reflective
about is our unearned authority at the university
and the classroom.
And I say unearned here because I’m not
referring to our educational credentials,
achievements, abilities.
Those are of course varied, but rather the
immediate assumption of belonging and the
quite literal command of the room that is
structurally granted to us simply by inhabiting
our bodies in this space.
JENNIFER: I’m rarely taken for a student,
for example.
While differences in gender, class, and sexuality
temper the force of this unearned ideological
authority, everyone white has some kind of
access to it.
In a society structured by white supremacists
ideology, whiteness comes with the force of
the state behind it and therefore the expectation
of automatically being listened to, whether
or not we are teaching Shakespeare but especially
when we’re teaching Shakespeare.
Why is that?
JENNIFER: What are the unspoken lessons about
race do our bodies teach?
What can Shakespeare teach us about how such
unearned power came to be and how we can dismantle
it?
What possibilities for teaching and learning
open up when we’re aware of our racialized
bodies in the classroom?
And rather than reinforcing the lessons that
they teach, those unspoken ones, how can we
work to empower students and dismantle that
unearned authority?
We’re also gonna reflect on how sound is
very racialized today, how race is both a
visual and aural phenomenon as I note in the
sonic color-line.
JENNIFER: And to think about Shakespeare’s
plays even individual acts and scenes as racialized
soundscapes and we’ll talk about what a
soundscape is, where sounds have invisible
racialized and critical power that kind of
gives us the affect and feeling and making
of race.
You know, that’s what creates white people
in white spaces.
It’s the making and performing of race and
we’re gonna show you that today.
Finally, our final goal is to help teachers
think about pedagogical prep so that you are
ready to hit the ground running with your
students on day one.
JENNIFER: Both David and I have a lot of pedagogical
training and experience at multiple levels,
secondary school, public and private universities.
We know how important it is to start class
with strategies in your pocket to begin this
work.
So, let’s begin to work.
Let’s go.
What do you say, David?
DAVID: I say let’s get to it.
So, right now, you should be seeing our front
slide which has a phrase that was part of
the description of our talk.
Quiet as it’s kept, every teacher already
offers profound lessons about race.
And the question that we want you to think
about and also give you ideas to help you
think about is how do you do it?
JENNIFER: Mm-hmm.
DAVID: And so, among other things, the five
act structure of this critical race conversation
is meant implicitly to call attention to the
notion that race is performative.
As Margo Hendricks suggests in her essay,
Gestures of Performance: Rethinking Race in
Contemporary America, an essay that gestures
toward the sonic color-line.
Our five act structure also acknowledges how
gender is performative as Judith Butler argues
in Gender Trouble.
I, a Black man, and Jennifer, a white woman,
are acutely aware of our racial gender differences.
DAVID: Which we are deliberately relying on
here as educational tools with respect to
our collaborative development of ideas and
how we’ve structured who talks when and
who says what to whom.
We maintain this awareness as well in our
individual classrooms at Binghamton.
Because racialized sound exists in most classrooms
and really wherever you are at any given moment,
we want you who are watching and listening
right now to be acutely aware of our racial
difference and of your responses to our different
racialized identities.
DAVID: And more importantly, our voices, how
they sound, how they make you feel, how you
respond to them as listeners.
You might even consider closing your eyes
for a portion of this session to see what
you learn about you.
Give it a try right now.
Are you resistant to my Black voice which
is not emitting from a white body and therefore
not the norm with respect to Shakespearean
authority?
Are you more willing to give Jennifer that
unearned authority that she just spoke of
because she is white despite the fact that
she is a scholar of African American literature?
DAVID: Does my masculinity complicate your
response to Jennifer’s white female voice
and does our crossing into each other’s
respective fields as we’ll speak later disrupt
the assumption you might have about the scholarly
knowledge we should have?
And to echo sentiments expressed in Eric L.
De Barros’s article, Teacher Trouble: Performing
Race in a Majority White Shakespeare Classroom
is society’s ambivalence about the Black
teacher scholar at work for you right now
or at any point during this presentation.
DAVID: If the answer is yes, it is good that
you have recognized you have a serious problem.
Now, you must think about solutions.
For if you are ambivalent to the Black teacher
scholar, then what are the implications there
for your Black students for example?
To further subvert certain expectations during
the session, Jennifer will speak on Shakespeare
and I will speak on African American literature
at times.
This is all deliberate.
Thus this is an opportunity to consider the
intersections of our various identity markers
and how they resonate with you as you listen.
DAVID: This critical race conversation is
an opportunity for you to slow down and think
about how race happens and to listen to yourself
listening.
This particular act, Act I, of our conversation,
the exposition, is designed to get you thinking
about Shakespeare and race outside of the
usual categories, namely the so-called race
plays as Ayanna Thompson has put it and introduce
you to some other ways of thinking.
JENNIFER: Okay.
Well, we are going to interview each other
a little bit before we move on to let you
kind of into and have some insight into our
practice.
And I want to ask you, David, colleague, in
2013, you first began consistently integrating
Shakespeare and race in your teaching through
a course that you created called early modern
literature, crossing the color-line.
And this course is really cool, I think unique,
and I hope after this talk maybe less so,
combining the study of early modern English
drama in African American literature.
JENNIFER: Why did you create this course?
DAVID: Good question.
So, in 2013 I joined a faculty at Trinity
College in Connecticut as the Ann Plato Predoctoral
fellow in English.
And Trinity’s educational policy committee
made it very clear that they wanted me to
create something that was innovative at least
for the curriculum at Trinity for instance.
And much like I do with my teaching now at
Binghamton, I had a pedagogical latitude at
Trinity.
And I reiterate that point because I know
that teaching what I teach and how I want
to teach it is a privilege of being at the
kind of institution that we are at.
DAVID: However, I’m also not naive to the
fact that there are cases where instructors
have that latitude but choose to perform helplessness
and say that they don’t have the time.
So, having studied at Trinity as an undergrad
and remembering the experience that I had
being the only Black student in my Shakespeare
class, I worked backwards from that great
but uncomfortable undergraduate experience.
And I thought about how I could use my course
description and syllabus structure to attract
a diverse group of students.
DAVID: As I recall that as an undergrad, my
African American literature and Black women
writers classes were much more diverse and
imagine you probably see much more diversity
in your classes than I do in my Shakespeare
class for instance.
How could I duplicate that and preemptively
solve the racial homogeneity problem in my
Trinity classroom as a teacher?
This was a matter of marketing for the student
audience I wanted.
And so, part of the answer was in combining
the study of early modern English drama and
African American literature.
DAVID: And the other part was framing the
course as one whose methodology integrated
the personal critical and experiential pedagogical
choices that led to 50 percent of my students
being students of color.
Beginning with the Du Boisian theory that
could then be used to re-read the early modern
drama, crossing the color-line, as the students
call it for short, allowed the productive
de-centering of Shakespeare and white maleness
through the syllabuses inclusion of Black
authors such as Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James
Baldwin, Adrian Kennedy, Jim Jordan, Harriet
Jacobs, Nella Larsen, and others.
JENNIFER: So, building from that, obviously
whiteness matters in the course built around
Shakespeare.
How did the whiteness factor in for you here?
DAVID: Yeah, so it was a challenge [LAUGH].
I’ll say that.
I knew in 2013 that whiteness, you know, it’s
a race position.
Of course there’s no denying that but my
comfortability with discussing whiteness as
a race position was not all there.
And this took time to develop especially because
leading up to this moment, I really only heard
one untrue message reiterated that is Blackness
equals race which we know that’s simply
not true.
All people are race beings.
DAVID: And so additionally, I sensed that
at the time as Martha R. Mahoney aptly puts
it in her essay, The Social Construction of
Whiteness, in the logic of white privilege,
making whites feel white equals racism.
And now I certainly do not want to be accused
of that.
So, I unfortunately allowed the power of whiteness
to police me and my teaching a little back
then.
While white-centric plays like Hamlet and
Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II were included
in my color syllabus, class conversations
about race in those plays might usually center
on comparative conversations between say Edward
II and Galveston’s intense homo-social bond
and the homosexual relationship between David
and Giovanni in Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
or even the homo-eroticism in Nella Larsen’s
Passing.
DAVID: In other words, the chats oscillated
between race and gender with students not
really wanting to stay in the former category.
And I find that often in a classroom to be
the case that students are much more comfortable
discussing gender and sexuality than, or even
the intersections of those things.
JENNIFER: Yes, me, too.
Me, too.
DAVID: Yet especially because 2013 was the
year that Black Lives Matter movement began,
following the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin,
my students were willing to identify Black
tropes and stereotypes or call out the horrors
of anti-Black racism and that enduring legacy
by focusing mostly on the victims rather than
the perpetrators and in subduing, rendering
whiteness unexamined and under-examined or
even invisible.
So, now on day one, as I think about things
like white privilege and, you know, white
guilt, I make it important that I demonstrate
my comfortability with discussing race and
particularly whiteness.
DAVID: And also I exuded genuine excitement
about it even though, you know, these conversations
are difficult, much like the one that we’re
having right now.
JENNIFER: Okay, so talk to me about this article
here that’s on this slide, the piece in
Radical Teacher called “Crossing the Color-Line.”
Why is it important that this kind of pedagogy
that you talk about in this article be written
about more and taken seriously by journals
in the field?
DAVID: Yeah, so I’ll answer this question
pretty quickly using the lens of cultural
psychology by drawing on the work of Canadian
professor and psychologist, Steven J. Heine,
who uses culture in reference to both information
and groups of individuals.
He asserts that cultures emerge from the interaction
of various minds of the people that live within
them and cultures then in turn shape the way
those minds operate.
And he also argues that humans have prestige
bias which prompts us to imitate what others
are doing and to be concerned with those who
have the skills that are respected by others.
DAVID: Keeping all this in mind, we can then
think about the journals in Shakespeare’s
studies as information repositories and culture
shapers of the field.
What it values, what it deems most important,
or unimportant, and even whose work is respectable
and should be respected.
So, the accepted authors, too, are culture
shapers.
If pedagogy scholarship is marginalized for
instance, and or not deemed as important as
other kinds of scholarship, particularly in
our flagship journals, this shapes how our
minds treats such work.
DAVID: Moreover, if people do not have access
to pedagogy scholarship through widely respected
channels that could promote and amplify the
work, teachers risk reinventing the wheel
and they lose out on opportunities to build
on or adapt to others’ ideas and time is
wasted.
But it’s not the teachers who lose out the
most here.
It is of course the students.
JENNIFER: Speaking of students, you started
out at Trinity and now you are here at Binghamton,
how has your pedagogy evolved since in that
time?
DAVID: Yeah, it’s definitely involved a
lot, you know, for the first time, as I think
about teaching it soon, the course is going
to be taught online for instance.
We are in the middle of a pandemic.
And so there’s a lot to consider as I think
about how aware now my students are about
racism and systemic oppression and ways that
they were in the past.
Because I think this pandemic has really helped
to put the spotlight on the fact that racism
and these issues are everywhere, under the
rocks we’d never even thought we’d find
it under.
DAVID: And additionally, we’re in a moment
right now where the continued killing of Black
people by white people has extended this anti-Black
racist brutality, this legacy of it that I,
you know, call the attention to in this course.
And so I’m going to bring those things into
the classroom because I know that the students,
it’s on their minds.
And I know that pedagogical evolution keeps
things fresh.
Now a more obvious answer to your question
is that there is not one size fits all model
to teaching.
And so the students of yesterday are not the
same as those of tomorrow.
DAVID: And thus the latter deserve to get,
you know, an education that’s current.
And so that’s what I want to give them.
JENNIFER: Mm-hmm.
So, leaning into Act II, why did you ask me
to join you in this talk?
I’m sure if I asked Professor Stuart at
UC Riverside, my undergrad Shakespeare teacher,
if you imagine me presenting on Shakespeare
years into the future, he’d probably say
no [LAUGH].
So, please tell us.
DAVID: So, my short answer to that question,
actually I would do like a little treasure
hunt here.
It’s in your book.
So, everyone should really consider having
this on your bookshelves.
And it can be found in the Lena Horne epigraph
on page 229, and also in the Racial Gentile
epigraph on page 277.
But on a more serious note, you know, as a
Shakespeare scholar who is heavily influenced
by WEB Du Bois’ work and not just his color-line
theory but also his concept of the veil and
double consciousness, which have applicability
in the Shakespeare canon and beyond it.
DAVID: I invited you because I was inspired
by your work and I know that some of my colleagues
are as well and how it opens up another dimension
for us to think about race particularly through
sound.
And so I’ve applied your work in my own
as I know others have.
And moreover, like other Black thinkers and
artists such as James Baldwin, Suzan-Lori
Parks, Maya Angelou for instance, Du Bois
directly calls attention to Shakespeare and
uses Shakespeare’s pre-modern cultural capital
to bolster his own statements in his text
on global and American racial politics.
DAVID: And so with that in mind, Jennifer,
you know, your work helped me understand that
when I read Du Bois’ words, and when I encounter
so much more in the world, I hear all that
comprises Du Bois’ Blackness, the pain,
the striving, the violence, the struggle,
and even the hope.
And on that note, a positive note of hope,
let’s transition into Act II.
JENNIFER: So, Act II of course presents the
rising action, the intensification of the
matter at hand.
In our Act II offers an aural flipping of
the script.
So, we’re gonna move from the sound of a
white woman’s voice asking questions of
a Black man teaching Shakespeare and race
to the sound of a Black man’s voice asking
questions of a white woman teaching African
American studies and race.
How does this role reversal sound to you?
How might each interview amplify the other?
How do they defy our expectations of these
voices and any automatic authenticity or authority
they signal?
JENNIFER: What also intensifies the action
here is the introduction of a critical race
theory toolkit that you can use to discuss
race in your classroom in conjunction with
Shakespeare and in terms of analyzing the
classroom atmosphere itself.
DAVID: Okay, thank you for that introduction.
So, now I want to kind of dive into thinking
about your work and your book, you know, your
introduction to you, Owen mentioned that you
taught high school for seven years to grad
school.
And what prompted you to become an academic
particularly studying race and sound?
JENNIFER: That’s a long road.
I’m gonna give you quick relevant details.
I taught high school in my hometown.
I taught for six years, fresh out of college.
I am first and a half generation in college.
I’m the first in my mother’s side.
My dad went to community college, army, and
finished up at Cal State Fullerton.
I was really, really young.
I loved teaching high school.
The students, as anyone will tell you, are
the best part of the job.
And the classrooms in Riverside I taught in
were more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity,
religion, home language than any college classroom
I have ever taught in.
JENNIFER: I got an amazing education at UC
Riverside.
One of those educations that, you know, changes
your world.
I graduated the same year.
In fact just a month after, the uprisings
in Los Angeles in 1992, only 60 miles, Riverside’s
only 60 miles from LA.
So, when I went into college like a lot of
young white people right now with questions
about my complicity in the racial system,
how the racial system works, what is the racial
system.
And you know, I started and was able to begin
that work at UC Riverside.
JENNIFER: So, when I went into teaching high
school, I expected to be teaching students
on this material that we had been kind of,
you know, essentially robbed of and lied to
about in a lot of our public education.
But I ended up continuing to learn a whole
lot about structural racism in the classroom.
And, you know, I was also an avid teacher
which meant that I was an advocate for students
underrepresented in college to help them,
you know, complete their requirements.
The high school I taught at, guidance counselors,
600 students to one counselor.
JENNIFER: So, people were falling through
the cracks and especially students of color
who are first gen to go to college.
But in that, becoming an advocate for these
students and helping them with their classes
is also, you know, they’re getting kicked
out of classes for being noisy or loud.
When they come to me, Ms. Stoever, I’m just
working on the work, like what’s happening?
Kennedi Johnson, a PhD student at Bloomington
is doing a lot of work on Black girls in the
secondary classroom right now, great project.
JENNIFER: And so I was seeing that firsthand
and going through that and then I talk about
this a little bit in the acknowledgement to
the book in 1997 of someone close to me, James
Martinez, was shot in the back by the CRASH
gang unit in Home Gardens, California.
And less than a year later, Tyisha Miller,
one of the first students in the high school
class, my very first class I ever taught,
was killed by Riverside Police, shot 12 times
and she was passed out in her car just about
a mile from my parents.
JENNIFER: And those burners were devastating
and upsetting and unsettling on a deep level.
And I felt really powerless as an individual
in the classroom and going to graduate school
particularly studying race and ethnicity at
USC.
Their program was started after the 1992 uprisings.
And that was where I wanted to be.
I wanted to understand.
I wanted to enact change on a deep systemic
level.
So, that’s probably how I ended up, you
know, going to graduate school, actually went
to study representations of students of color
in public school.
JENNIFER: That the example from the reading
Du Bois, when the white girl turns away his
visiting car, that was one of the scenes that
I talked about in my grad school application.
And when I got there and began studying music
as well and popular culture and TA-ing for
a course called Black Popular Culture with
Judith Jackson Fossett, that opened my world
to thinking about this question about sound
in connection with race in this way.
DAVID: So, you mentioned, you know, the word
power and powerlessness.
You seem to absorb a lot of power from Du
Bois.
And so I’m wondering if you could talk about
how his work influenced you and also how you
build on his concept of the color-line in
your book, the sonic color-line.
JENNIFER: Du Bois is one of the foremost intellectuals
of United States’ history.
And reading him, I read him the first time
at UC Riverside and I’ve just read him,
you know, tens of times over and over again.
And what I appreciate about Du Bois was in
laying out the color-line.
He changes that terminology from thinking
about race as what, in the parlance of the
19th century was the “Negro Problem.”
JENNIFER: He puts race both onto whiteness
and white supremacy and ideologies of white
supremacy I should say, and putting it on
the color line that the problem is the designation
itself, the hierarchies, the system.
And so pointing us toward that is very important.
Also the way that he thinks about music and
the way that those bars of music, you know,
which he puts, we wanted to make sure we gave
a link to a version that has those bars of
music there, those are transcriptions into
European notation of what he called the [sour?]
songs of enslaved people’s traditional culture.
JENNIFER: And the way that he thinks of sound
as both opening up a form of empowerment,
even as he recognizes that the ways in which
his own voice will be silenced, even as he’s
speaking the truth, was very profound to me.
And this idea that we can be co-workers in
the kingdom of culture, right, that the goal,
this American kind of melting pot that we’re
fed, especially in a lot of our public education,
it doesn’t have to be.
The assimilation is not a one-way street into
kind of white Americanism that we’re still
working out each and every day what America
is, who Americans are was also very powerful
to me.
JENNIFER: I saw sound as a way that that’s
being kind of being worked out.
And so I build from both his notion in The
Souls of Black Folk that sound is important
to us culturally, that we hear things differently.
And in part, that’s because of how race
works on our daily.
And that’s the other thing is that a lot
of white people don’t understand I think
the deep double consciousness and the kind
of way that race works on one’s psyche,
one’s emotions, one’s sense of the world,
one’s sense of safety.
JENNIFER: And, you know, that’s why this
argument like oh, you know, segregation’s
over, that, you know, there’s no legal racism,
right?
And so Du Bois is showing all of these ways
that it still exists and proliferates which
is a question that I very much had going into,
you know, college, teaching grad school, etcetera.
And he changes his mind, you know, that’s
the other thing is he’s so nimble as a thinker
that by 1940, you know, he’s like forget
the veil.
People can’t hear.
We have a plate glass window in front of us.
JENNIFER: That is also I think for me an important
thing to aspire to is constantly learning,
speaking fearlessly, and changing your mind
when, you know, when new evidence arises,
charting a different course and going after
it.
so, he inspires me both, you know, in my way
of being as well as in how I think about sound
and race.
So, yeah, I owe him.
I owe him everything.
DAVID: So, do I. I agree with you in terms
of just how inspiring and I feel like also
to, every time I read The Souls of Black Folk,
it just hits me from a different angle.
So, it’s another one of those works that
moves really well with the times.
And, you know, thinking about the times and
times changing, of course the way that your
ideology adjusts and augments how we think
about the color-line, you have this concept
that you work with, the listening ear, which
we’ve defined on the slide.
DAVID: Maybe you can talk about what is it?
Just, you know, what is it?
How does it work and also how is it connected
to the notion of the soundscape?
JENNIFER: Well, you know, I mentioned Du Bois
having this image in the ‘40s of the color-line
now not as this visual kind of veil, this
visual image where he says, you know, you
can hear me.
You may not be able to see who I really am.
You’ve created this illusion and projected
stereotype and fantasy onto my visuality but
you can hear me.
And by 1940 when World War II starts, he’s
like no, there’s something happening.
You cannot hear me.
You’re not hearing.
He says I’m screaming in a vacuum unheard.
JENNIFER: So, both the image of losing air,
not being able to breathe, and that image
of that glass, and so the listening ear is
like that clear glass.
And part of my job as a teacher and as a person
out in the world is helping people to understand,
to see, and feel, and hear that clear glass
so we can figure out how to break through
it.
So, the listening ear is an ideological filter
that is shaped in relation to the sonic color
line.
It’s that judgmental like oh, this is how
a class should sound.
JENNIFER: It should sound quiet ‘cause that
signals students are working.
That Americans should speak English, it’s
that should, right?
We have all these complex experiences of sound
and how it works and what we think.
But then we narrow it.
And also the notion that, right, certain neighborhoods,
this is where soundscape builds in, right,
that white suburban neighborhoods are quiet,
whereas Black neighborhoods are neighborhoods
of people of color are loud.
JENNIFER: And it’s these binary elements
of race that, you know, after the Civil Rights
Movement became, um, you know, taboo to kind
of, you know... until recently, for white
people to be overtly racist in public, sound
was a code.
And this idea, the listening ear, became a
code.
It’s not that, you know, we don’t hire
Black people here.
It’s that you don’t speak properly on
the telephone at this job.
You don’t sound professional.
And so these terms, oh, you don’t wanna
live in that neighborhood, it’s noisy.
JENNIFER: And so I noticed that sound was
operating in these covert ways.
And John Baugh calls it linguistic profiling.
And also I should say I’m building on the
scholarship of Fred Moten, who was on my committee,
Judith Jackson Fossett who’s also on my
committee, you know, Kristin Moriah, Jonathan
Sterne, Carter Mathes, Eric Porter, like all
of these folks, Priscilla Peña Ovalle, all
these folks that are calling attention to
the social construction of race.
And so it’s not just music.
It’s not just voice.
But it’s also our expectations of how the
world should sound, you know.
JENNIFER: The idea that a white man gets to
tell everyone at the gas station whose music
is too loud and what music should be played
there, you know.
Michael Dunn, you know, shooting and killing
Jordan Davis for that reason, that’s how
listening ear works in the soundscape.
DAVID: And what is the soundscape just for
folks who...
JENNIFER: Oh, so those are the sounds, the
obvious sounds you hear in a particular location.
You know, one of the exercises I do with my
students is I have them list the soundscape
of the classroom on the board and then we
talk about the hierarchies that are in there.
I mean it’s everything from, you know, the
sounds of pencils scratching to the hum of
the air conditioner to the professor’s voice.
And then we rank them in order of importance.
I’m like what’s the sound that’s most
important in this room?
And inevitably, they’ll say the professor’s
voice.
And they have this all the way listed down.
JENNIFER: And so we’re trained to index
sounds, you know, we act like all this comes
at us.
But these filters shape, you know, how we’re
listening.
And inevitably my students never mention their
own voices.
And that’s one thing, by the time students
get to college, they’re trained to not hear
or treat as irrelevant each other’s voices.
And you know, we’re trying to have these
deep conversations but, you know, they’re
already trained to tune that out from each
other.
And so a lot of our work today is gonna be
how to undo that.
JENNIFER: So, that’s how soundscape works.
DAVID: All right, thank you for that.
Yeah, and you know, what you say about voices,
I hadn’t really thought about it in that
way just in terms of how students are trained
in a certain way to think about how they use
their voices in certain spaces and what that
can mean.
And I guess that actually is a nice segue
into Act III where we’re going to talk about
Shakespeare in the racialized sound of masculinity
and authority.
So, for us in this act structure, Act III
is our turning point in this conversation
as we shift to focus directly onto the Shakespeare.
DAVID: And on this slide, we have two very
different images of Shakespeare.
One we might consider a pre-modern reflection
on the left and one on the right that is more
modern.
While both images are powerful in their centering
of whiteness and masculinity, they do so quite
differently.
For me for example, every modern Shakespeare
with his early modern attire evokes a classic
traditional authority whereas the more modern
cool looking tatted up Shakespeare whose pose
mimics and appropriates the B boy stance that
originated with hip hop culture conveys a
sense of authority that is much less intimidating
than the image on the right despite both images
being of the same white man.
DAVID: In either image, authority is gendered
and it is also racialized.
Depending on who you are, you may be more
intimidated by the Shakespeare image on the
right.
Is it his tattoos, his sartorial pre-modern
departure or perhaps it’s his Black racial
signifying that makes him too much like or
unlike whatever your mythical idea of Shakespeare
is?
The very responses that people will have to
the visual power of these two different images
reflects what can also occur in the classroom
with respect to how students respond to and
engage with pedagogical authority figures
who differ in many ways, especially with respect
to race for the purposes of our conversation.
DAVID: And since the classroom is a space
of mutual engagement, it goes without saying
that instructors should be attentive to how
they respond to students’ different racial
backgrounds as well.
For those responses, as we allude to at the
beginning of our talk, lessons are being taught
consciously or unconsciously about race and
power.
And sometimes when one does this without care,
such lessons are harmful and constitute what
might be considered pedagogical malpractice
because they participate in the structuring
of racial inequality.
DAVID: To quote Ruben Espinosa from his article,
“Diversifying Shakespeare,” to foster
a classroom atmosphere where students can
be confident makers of Shakespeare where they
do not see their background, language, or
cultural heritage as an obstacle to understanding
Shakespeare but instead as an asset is essential.
If Othello and The Merchant of Venice are
the only moments and of course when race enters
the conversation, consider who that helps
and harms.
TEACHING SHAKESPEARES OTHER RACE PLAYS [00:46:14]
DAVID: Or as Joyce Green MacDonald puts it,
to produce the non-white alien is thus implicitly
and often explicitly to produce a white early
modern self.
With that in mind, it is misguided to think
that a play alone can teach race.
Othello and Merchant alone cannot teach race.
Teaching is the teacher’s job.
JENNIFER: So, we’re gonna talk a bit here
about power and empowerment, you know, who
has the power in the classroom, who is empowered?
And I mentioned a little bit earlier about
one of the things that Du Bois did was to
change the terms of the debates about race.
And for closed readers out there, Easter egg,
right, he likens the issue of race and America
to Banquo’s ghost from Macbeth, invisible
only because of the suppression of a guilty
conscience.
He says in vain do cry this to our vastest
social problem?
JENNIFER: Take any shape with that and my
firm nerve shall never tremble.
So, to change the terms of the debate, right,
so he says, you know, it’s the color-line.
Black people are not the problem.
The hierarchy is the problem.
He even hyphenated color-line so that color
could never be broken off from line but it’s
never color that’s the problem.
It’s its attachment to this line.
And that's something I fought with my book
press about that hyphen.
I lost as you can tell but I really, you know,
I do that in my own practice.
JENNIFER: Black people's presence is not the
problem, white people's racial hierarchy isn't
the problem, and this holds true in our classrooms
today from K-12 to higher education.
And so how does power in the classroom work,
you know?
And one of the things we didn't talk about
in our Q&A, we didn't get a chance to was
about, you know, my whiteness in the classroom
teaching African American studies and thinking
about, you know, what does it mean for me
to be teaching about race and literature in
that context.
JENNIFER: And one of the things I try or I
always enact as a practice from day one is
calling attention to that unearned authority
and that I don't expect it.
That, you know, and it's easier for me to
say and to perform it but I do several things
with my students including, you know, helping
all of us giving students an opportunity to
set the agenda in my classroom.
I talk to them and I tell them I'm vulnerable
with them.
I allow them to ask me any questions they
have because inevitably Black and white students
and students of color are curious as to how
I came to study what I study, right?
JENNIFER: Because it isn't the norm and also
if I know, you know, if I know what I know.
But I know that, you know, I'm not only open
to those questions, I'm welcoming to them
because I recognize, you know, systemically
what's going on and why this is so.
So, that's one thing that, you know, I even
have them email me, you know, if they do a
formal email as their first assignment I ask
them, hey, is there anything you want to know
about me as a professor.
I make it optional and I always answer those
questions in class fully, completely.
You know, it's important.
JENNIFER: When I work with Judith Jackson
Fossett, she modeled this for me.
She talked to the class about, you know, I'm
a Black professor, I have a white TA, like
what did you all think when you walked into
class?
And one of the students in class, a Black
woman, said, you know, was like, ugh, she's
probably gonna know about hip hop and slavery
but that's it.
And she, you know, pleasantly surprised me
that... and that's what I want like I want
to earn authority through the knowledge that
I offer and I build that knowledge in conjunction
with my students.
JENNIFER: You know, and I always have students
presenting.
I have students at the second half of the
semester opening the class and all of my lectures
are built in response to what the students
are leading with.
I open up our classroom to Black critical
voices.
I'm only one voice in this network and I talk
about my own scholarly lineage, not as a flex
but as, you know, that I learned from Black
and white scholars, you know, in my quest.
JENNIFER: You know, Katherine Kinney, Fred
Moten, Judith Jackson Fossett, Carla Kaplan,
Cynthia Young, you know, and I talk about
that and what they gave me and I bring all
those voices into the classroom and I do a
lot with students.
You know, I make sure those first few days
that I bring student voices into the classroom
as well and I fill it with the sounds of all
of our voices and it's imperfect and but I'm
open to that dialogue every single day of
the semester.
DAVID: I think that's so important, that recognition
of all of the student voices and that's something
that's really important for me too and so
it’s kind of a mission that I make for myself.
You know, by a certain point in a semester,
I don't care if it's a 50-person classroom.
I need every student to say something before...
they need to be involved in the class discussion
and if they're not, I do offer them other
ways for them to do that, you know, online
or having dialogues with me.
But I think it's so important it's not their,
you know, oral voice at the very least I'm
hearing their writer-ly voices.
DAVID: Because they're communicating with
me in that way and I think, you know, it seems
like we have a lot in common and we've talked
about this in terms of our teaching approaches.
Uh, but one of the things that I think is
the biggest commonality and I think it's so
important because it made all the difference
for me as an undergraduate student is just
that approachability aspect, you know.
The professor for me was a scary figure and
depending on the race of the professor, one
might be more scary than the other.
So, it really, you know, makes it important
to break down that barrier.
JENNIFER: I went to office hours in undergrad
exactly one time and only because the professor,
and it was Katherine Kinney, wrote please
see me during office hours on my paper.
I make a habit to do that myself every semester
and write please come see me.
And it wasn't a threat.
It was like come see me to talk about... have
you thought about grad school, it said.
Think about how that small... and I hadn't.
I didn't even know what grad school was and
so for her to do that, I mean is why I'm here.
So, you know...
DAVID: Yeah, you know, small moments can mean
so much.
I think on that note we probably need to transition
into our intermission.
JENNIFER: Yes, it's time to stretch a little
bit.
So, as you continue thinking about race, sound,
gender, authority and all that we've explored
thus far, we're gonna have a brief intermission
to pause our Black and white voices and introduce
some new voices into the conversation.
We're gonna show two video clips, the first
is really short, so you got to like pay attention
right on the jump and the second is about
four minutes.
If the visuals do not appear completely clear
on your end, I'm sorry, we're all familiar
with this Zoom issue.
JENNIFER: It's okay, we actually just want
you to focus on what you hear.
And you should know that our intermission
and Act IV are being shared with you as pedagogical
tools that you can use in your own classrooms
if you like.
So, here we're gonna start with a very short
clip from Boots Riley’s 2018 Sorry to Bother
You.
And it is a whole entire mood this movie.
But I'm gonna say really quickly among the
many things that this film does is trace the
daily life of Cassius Green, a Black man in
his 20's in Oakland played by Lakeith Stanfield
who's also from Riverside.
DAVID: He's also trying to get a job in this
film and get out of his uncle's garage and
he gets a job telemarketing at a company that's
very symbolically named Regal View and he's
had a terrible first few days and here in
this clip, his coworker played by Danny Glover
encourages him to use his white voice on the
phone to become a power caller.
The film delves into whiteness as a performance
for white people.
Not just this kind of imposed sound for people
of color but white people perform whiteness
too and that's exactly what, you know, we're
getting at, an aspirational empowered desirable
sound.
JENNIFER: And it is one that is as much of
a fantasy as white people's imaginings of-of
Black sound.
Regal View is selling encyclopedias so much
as it's selling all of it comes attached to
this white voice.
So, here we go.
LANGSTON: Hey young blood, let me give you
a tip.
Use your white voice.
CASSIUS GREEN: But I ain’t got no white
voice.
LANGSTON: Well, you know what I mean.
You have a white voice in there.
You can use it.
It’s like being pulled over by the police.
CASSIUS: Oh no, I just use my regular voice
when that happens.
I just say, “Back the fuck up off the car
and don’t nobody get hurt.”
LANGSTON: Well, I’m just trying to give
you some game.
You want to make some money here, then read
your script with a white voice.
CASSIUS: Well, people say I talk with a white
voice anyway so why ain’t it helping me
out?
LANGSTON: Well, you don’t talk white enough.
I’m not talking about Will Smith white.
I’m talking about the real deal.
Like this, young blood, “Hey Mr. Kramer,
this is Langston from RegalView I didn’t
catch you at the wrong time, did I?”
DAVID: Thank you for that.
And now we're going to transition into listening
to white sound and the white voice.
So, for part two of this audiovisual intermission,
we're gonna offer a brief clip of a stage
production of Macbeth and this clip corresponds
with much of the language from Act IV scene
three in the drama in case you'd like to take
a look at that language.
By this point in the play, Macbeth has killed
his king, Duncan and has assumed the Scottish
throne.
And Duncan's two sons, Malcolm and Donalbain,
have fled the country for their safety.
DAVID: Upon reuniting in England with Macduff,
a thane who also flees Scotland and regretfully
leaves his wife and children behind, regretfully
because they end up getting murdered.
Malcolm tests Macduff’s loyalty to their
country in order to determine if he can trust
their fellow Scottish man.
Malcolm does this by suggesting he’s full
of vices and is himself not fit to be to be
king and undo evil Macbeth.
As you reflect on the white voice, the performative
white male voice that the Boots Riley film
satirically highlighted, pay attention to
what you notice about the white voice in this
scene and the words that voice speaks as you'll
likely come to some of the same conclusions
that Jennifer and I have about what is going
on with racialized sound.
JENNIFER: Mm-hmm.
MALCOM: More suffer and more sundry ways than
ever, By him that shall succeed.
MACDUFF: What should he be?
MALCOLM: It is myself I mean: in whom I know
all the particulars of vice so grafted That,
when they shall be open'd, black Macbeth will
seem as pure as snow, and the poor state esteem
him as a lamb, being compared with my confineless
harms.
MACDUFF: Not in the legions of horrid hell
can come a devil more damn'd in evils to top
Macbeth.
MALCOLM: I grant him bloody, luxurious, avaricious,
false, deceitful sudden, malicious, smacking
of every sin that has a name: but there's
no bottom, none, in my voluptuousness: your
wives, your daughters, your matrons and your
maids, could not fill up the cistern of my
lust, and my desire: all continent impediments
would o'erbear that did oppose my will: better
Macbeth than such a one to reign.
MACDUFF: Boundless intemperance in nature
is a tyranny; it hath been the untimely emptying
of the happy throne and fall of many kings.
Yet, do not fear to take upon you what is
yours: you may convey your pleasures in a
spacious plenty.
We have willing dames enough: there cannot
be that vulture in you, to devour so many
as will to greatness dedicate themselves,
finding it so inclined.
MALCOLM: With this there grows in my most
ill-composed affection such a stanchless avarice
that, were I king,
I should cut off the nobles for their lands,
desire his jewels and this other's house and
my more-having would be as a sauce to make
me hunger more; that I should forge
quarrels unjust against the good and loyal,
destroying them for wealth.
MACDUFF: This avarice sticks deeper, grows
with more pernicious root than summer-seeming
lust, and it hath been
the sword of our slain kings.
Yet, do not fear.
Scotland hath wealth enough to fill up your
will.
All these are portable, with other graces
weigh'd.
MALCOLM: But I have none: the king-becoming
graces, as justice, verity, temperance, stableness,
bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, devotion,
patience, courage, fortitude, I have no relish
of them, but abound in the division of each
several crime, acting it many ways.
Nay, had I power, I should pour the sweet
milk of concord into hell, uproar the universal
peace, confound all unity on earth.
MACDUFF: O Scotland, Scotland!
MALCOLM: If such a one be fit to govern, speak.
I am as I have spoken.
MACDUFF: Fit to govern!
No, not to live.
O nation miserable, with an untitled tyrant
bloody-scepter'd, when shalt thou see thy
wholesome days again, since that the truest
issue of thy throne by his own interdiction
stands accursed.
These evils thou repeat'st upon thyself have
banish'd me from Scotland.
O my breast, thy hope ends here!
MALCOLM: Macduff!
This noble passion, child of integrity, hath
from my soul wiped the black scruples, reconciled
my thoughts…
DAVID: Alright and we'll stop it there with
Black scruples with the point of what's going
on in this scene.
So, for Act IV of our presentation, we turn
explicitly to the falling action in Macbeth
and an excerpt from Act IV scene three.
And at Binghamton graduate course, I had my
students do a critical race scene isolation
that asked them to close read specific all
white scenes like the wooing scene in Richard
III while using our theoretical race studies
tools to examine all that is racialized about
the dialogue.
DAVID: And with some modifications, this is
an easy exercise that could work well at the
undergraduate and even high school levels.
This particular Macbeth scene, Act IV scene
three, which I critique in an essay that will
appear in volume 50 of a forthcoming Shakespeare
Studies forum co-edited by me, Patricia Akhimie,
and Arthur Little uses the negative trope
of Blackness to make a critical racialized
statement about Black Macbeth whose Blackness
is metaphorical or emblematic rather than
somatic.
Black Macbeth appears akin to the barbarian
figure Ian Smith writes about in Race and
Rhetoric in the Renaissance.
DAVID: This figure, he argues, is characterized
as threatening and destructive to good social
institutions, aggressive and politically dangerous
to the survival of the state, corrupt and
thus harmful to the assumed purity of the
body politic and efficient and different and
therefore destined to undermine every cultural
tradition.
Indeed Macbeth lives up to all this symbolic
Blackness he exudes.
And in her incredibly generative 1996 Shakespeare
Quarterly article, “Beauty and the Beast
of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender”,
Kim Hall reminds us that the difference between
textural Blackness and Black people is fundamentally
important.
DAVID: and as a side note for those watching
this before July 31st 2020, Hall’s article
is available for free download until the end
of this month, simply Google it and you'll
be able to download it.
Now, speaking of real Black people, I do want
to direct attention to the image on the screen
of Ira Aldridge, a stage actor who played
Macbeth in the 19th century in Scotland.
In addition to discussing race through the
language of Macbeth, instructors can add positivity
to the play stereotypical Black is bad narrative
by discussing the rich professional history
of an actual Black actor like Aldridge, a
history that is, of course, wedded to race
and racism.
DAVID: In addition to Wayward Macbeth, the
edited collection by Scott Newstok and Ayanna
Thompson we mentioned previously, you can
learn more about Ira Aldridge in Clifford
Mason's more recent Macbeth in Harlem Black
theater an American from the beginning to
A Raisin in the Sun.
JENNIFER: But it isn't just the overt references
to Blackness that David just analyzed for
us, it's also the soundscape and I will talk
briefly here about, you know, testing the
theory of how the solid color-line works and
how race in this time period particularly
ideas European ideas about race particularly
in connection to imperialism, the enslavement
of Africans, um, and, you know, building the
so called new world of the Western Atlantic.
JENNIFER: You know, they're using sound to
work out and build race and Shakespeare uses
sound in this play to evoke ideas about race.
They're not just sound effects as we might
think of them now, especially the thunder,
the thunder in the way that the thunder in
the play is associated with the witches and
that space of the wilderness and it's this
hierarchal border, a solid color-line being
built between white civilization and this
dark and tempting wilderness and wildness.
JENNIFER: Thunders out of the control of humans,
it's louder than any sound at the time human
beings could make.
It's the sound of this wild and unruly space
of the forest and, you know, hurricane comes
into the English lexicon in 1555 in direct
reference to the Caribbean.
So, thunder is quite literally imaged in this
new space and thunder, you'll know also opens
the tempest which is more obviously one of
Shakespeare's race plays and the fact that
Macbeth comes first and kind of Tempest hearkens
back I think is really critical.
JENNIFER: So, the thunder in this play is
uncultivated space, right, the space of the
not Godly that draws Macbeth.
It's race engendered by the witches who are
literally beyond order.
They need to be called in to order and a lot
of some great work by Richard Cullen Rath
is an ethnic studies scholar at the university
of Hawaii wrote a great book called How Early
America Sounded and is greatly informing our
reading here and essentially it's how England
interpreted sound and what kind of gets pulled
white England and what gets pulled into and
kind of takes route here in the, you know,
early America.
JENNIFER: So, bells are actually kind of the
sounds of order.
And we see bells here throughout the play,
alarm bells, bells are associated with Lady
Macbeth who is usurping power.
She hears the bells as an owl’s shriek or
a hideous trumpet.
So, she's hearing these bells, you know, and
she can't kind of assume the power of the
bells, she can't even hear them that way.
They had real official power.
Bells were the sign of a godly community.
Set as the opposite of thunder.
So opposite that many church bells at this
point were still engraved with Latin phrases
like fulgura flango, “I subdue the thunderbolt.”
JENNIFER: So, ringing the bells was thought
to stop thunder and the damage that thunder
was thought to cause and the bell extends
the power of rulers beyond the human voice.
You know, and again when Lady Macbeth, she
tries to usurp that power, she calls that
bell the knell that summons Duncan to heaven
or to hell and so that's really critical that
in her play between the bell and the thunder
in this play and the way that the thunder
is also bringing in the other and the temptation,
the danger of the other and really comparing
it to and kind of hierarchizing it below the
sounds of the order of the court and this
whole play is about the restoration of the
order of the court, right.
DAVID: Yes, and along with that too, you know,
the animal sounds are signs of nature reflecting
Scotland sociopolitical chaos and disorder
and also the racial chaos as well.
Macbeth fails to be an ideal white man and
that he's not good and also because his manliness
is deficient as Lady Macbeth's rhetorical
critiques of her husband's manhood confirmed
Macbeth cannot white the Black scruples from
his damaged soul like Malcolm can and quickly
does in Act IV scene three.
JENNIFER: And the power of whiteness that
Macbeth lacks is imbedded in the trumpets
and drums initially used around the presence
of King Duncan as sound markers of class,
royalty, and also race, his kingly whiteness
and thus they are linked to the play's racial
politics.
And the battle sounds towards the plays end
are representative of the right between good
and evil or more locally between Macduff and
Black Macbeth representing a common racialized
early modern trope of Blackness, the kinds
that Kim Hall calls attention to in things
of darkness, Macbeth is depicted as devilish
a treasonous enemy who must be purged in Act
V in order for Scotland’s restoration to
be possible under its new king, Malcolm, whom
you saw go through his own quick transformation
in the clip we showed for the recorded Folger
performance.
JENNIFER: Yeah, it's really amazing that one
second, he's like I'm terrible, I'm trash,
I'm actually worse than Macbeth to the point
of where there was like laughter in that clip,
you know, everyone was laughing at his description
of himself as voluptuous, right.
So, it's race and gender, the intersection
there.
Yes.
But then all of a sudden he's like, you know,
we need you and then Malcolm suddenly like
kind of inhabits, right, that white voice
that we saw in the clip.
He ascends to good through this conversion
experience and the last out of the play is
that flourishing of the trumpet.
Malcolm is heralded as the new and rightful
and just king of Scotland.
Bruce Smith talks about this as Shakespeare's
bid for unison, that's there's some kind of
resolving sound at the end.
So, you know, this is the... this is an acoustic
closure here.
It's the sound of that good version of white
European masculinity taking control.
It opened in thunder but now we have that
royal flourish at the end.
Especially... yeah, they make it through the
wilderness in this play.
DAVID: And they get rid of Blackness which
is also one of their goals.
So, moving on to our final act, Act V, we
concluding by putting more of the uncomfortable
on the table, and that is the reality that
we are living in unprecedented times right
now and that the teaching season for many
is fast approaching.
We begin our act right now with a quotation
from Macbeth when Macbeth becomes pale with
fear, he becomes blanched with fear when he
sees the ghost of the murdered Banquo, a ghost
that none of his present guest or his wife
can see.
DAVID: As Jennifer suggested earlier when
she acknowledged Du Bois’ reference to this
scene, race and racism in particular share
commonalities with the ghost of Banquo in
a figurative sense.
They can be uncomfortable to confront but
they have to be confronted.
As such, we've included at the bottom of this
slide and image that contains some helpful
popular books on race, racism, and antiracism
and so you either jot them down or come back
to them.
And as we close out this session, we want
you to know that incorporating critical race
theory into the classroom does not have to
be scary or intimidating.
]
DAVID: But it does need to happen and it must
be done with care.
So, now what we'd like to do as we close out
before we get to the questions that we received
is help you by offering some day one strategies
that we use.
So, this is yet another tool that you can
come back to and reference.
But as you prepare for the start of your semester
or the start of your school year whether it's
elementary, middle school, or high school,
these are some things that we hope will help
you.
JENNIFER: First, make sure you see critical
race studies engagement as an exciting opportunity
and not a burden and you communicate that
to students.
I think one of the things that, you know,
the students can tell I'm enthusiastic and
passionate about African American literature,
about the conversations we're having in class
and that actually is often what helps them
open up the most is when they see and feel
my own investment and-and desire and to have
these conversations and to kind of have a
space where these conversations can happen.
JENNIFER: So, make sure that that is part
of how you approach it.
Make sure you define your terms, race, racism,
anti-racism, biased, prejudice, like these
things you... work them out what they may
colloquially what, you know, with Ruth Wilson
Gilmore has some great work and writing on
defining racism like find those things, bring
them into your class, talk about those terms.
Know your students.
I think the other thing I do to communicate
that I come to class, you know, humble and
aware of this kind of both lack of authenticity
in a racialized world.
JENNIFER: But also this unearned power is
by listening and talking about... and presenting
myself as a listener and that listening is
the most important thing I'm gonna do in that
room that semester.
You know, make sure you learn students' names
and actually one thing I do to get everyone
talking that first day is I have students
go around the room and pronounce their names
and I reply to them and pronounce it and I
say don't stop until I get your name correctly
how you want to be called, who you answer
to and I go through the process of literally
pronouncing their names, getting names right
is so important.
JENNIFER: So, I bring that into the classroom
as well and they know that I want to work
‘til I get it right and I perform that for
them, too.
It's important, that's who you are.
Maintain awareness about how race matters
with respect to face to face versus distance
learning, digital racism, things like trolling.
We've all unfortunately experienced it and
it can be very, very traumatic.
And also thinking about, you know, there's
a lot out there and we can share some resources
on how this may change when you're not physically
in the room.
JENNIFER: Also avoiding performative helplessness,
not going ah, I can't talk about this.
White people know a lot about race, right?
I talk about that in my book.
We've been listening to white people talk
our whole lives.
We've been watching and hearing white people.
That's how we learn that white voice is by
watching and learning.
And so, so don't, you know, everyone performs
race, everyone here is race.
From a very different perspective and teasing
out those different perspectives is key.
You also want to avoid performative wokeness
and turning...
I tell the students a little about myself
but not so it becomes about so... the class
becomes about me and my kind of, you know,
my experience in centralizing that.
JENNIFER: It's again, to show them where I'm
coming from but, you know, like our colleagues
expressed so well last week from bell hooks’
work, don't expect a cookie for doing this.
This is just good teaching, you know, this
is just good humanness and performative ally-ship.
You know, I always...
I say what I mean, I, you know, my word is
my bond and that's how I walk it like I talk
it and that's really the things that students
hear, I think.
So, make sure that you're on point and kind
of constantly asking yourself questions and
reflecting on yourself all the time.
DAVID: Yeah.
I think that's so apt because students, they
sense everything.
JENNIFER: Oh, yeah.
DAVID: They sense our fear, but they can also
sense when we're not sincere, when we're being
disingenuous and so we really need to take
seriously the roles that we have in their
lives.
And there's other things that Jennifer mentioned,
you know.
Can't stress this enough, some of you who
follow me on Twitter, you've probably seen
me tweeting about this incessantly but we
are dealing with a public health disaster
at the moment with unprecedented challenges
due to COVID-19 and because of that, you know,
mixed with the conflation of the protests
that are happening, we're seeing increases,
as if it wasn't enough already, in instances
of racism and anti-Semitism and just general
unrest and also sexism and the list goes on.
DAVID: And so between now and whenever it
is that you're going to start teaching, anticipate
and just sit down and think about what this
all is going to mean for you in terms of what
your students, in addition to you, are gonna
be dealing with and what you're going to bring
and what they are going to bring in the classroom
and how can you make that work for you rather
than you having to work against it because
it is this kind of oppositional force.
That's something I really try to do in my
teaching is make the world around me work
for me because it's there and students are
only spending 85 minutes in my classroom.
DAVID: So, they're going back out into that
world that is doing far more work than I'm
doing for them in 85 minutes.
I also wanna stress, Jennifer and I, practicing
patience and humility with yourself and your
students, you know, people are people and
especially right now because times are so
trying, people may get sick, people may not
understand certain concepts, people may have
general fears with respect to discussing race
in the classroom.
I think it's also important to consider that
as much as students might have fears and typically
I find that with my white students, students
also have trauma.
DAVID: And even I as a Black male professor
living in this moment have trauma that I have
to manage and deal with and so as much as
you can put yourself in your students' shoes
and be sensitive to those things, that can
really go a long way, particularly from day
one.
If you make your students aware that this
is how you operate, and this is who you are,
and this is how you're presenting your pedagogy
and also how you're defining your professional
relationship with them.
DAVID: Now, since we had the previous quotation
up from Macbeth blanched with fear, we're
switching over now to The Tempest here and
thinking about Caliban's language of “be
not afeared.”
You know, this work, as we keep reiterating,
it's hard, it's not something that can be
done overnight and even while even if you
find our critical recession useful or any
of the others that you're going to watch,
you're not necessarily gonna get it just by
having this moment and so in addition to practicing
patience and humility with yourself, recognize
that as you do this work, particularly if
you're not accustomed to doing this work.
DAVID: And even if you are, mistakes will
and can happen and an important thing to do
is acknowledge those mistakes when they happen,
you know, don't get flustered.
And use them as teaching moments and teaching
opportunities, that's what I try to do in
my classroom is make everything, even the
stuff that, you know, comes down to maybe
dealing with classroom management issues.
Try to turn it into a teaching opportunity
and if there's a way for me to connect it
to literature, I do that as well.
DAVID: Second to last, you know, improvisation,
Jennifer and I talk about performativity for
both of us.
You know, teaching when we're in our classrooms,
it's pretty performative.
I think by nature, I would consider myself
somewhat of an introvert and so when I get
in the classroom, I come alive and that excitement
that I have about this work, I really try
to exude that for my students but sometimes
it's hard, you know.
Again, we've got the pandemic that we're dealing
with right now.
At times we've had to deal with student deaths
in our department.
DAVID: And two, you know, within a very short
period of time and that really changed the
ethos of the campus and so there was some
course correcting that I needed to do because
I couldn't work with my students in the way
that I was before their morning set in.
There was also an instance near our campus
in this town of Binghamton, you know, where
someone had painted swastikas on the streets
and that.
We have a significant Jewish student population
at Binghamton...
So, I recognized that.
DAVID: And I came to class not prepared that
day to talk about the Merchant of Venice or
use Shylock’s language as beautiful speech
that is an empowering speech to have my class
discussion but I felt like I at least needed
to start there even though that wasn't on
my agenda.
So, know that it's okay to improvise and that
you can course correct, too.
If the term doesn't seem to be going so well
with the race work that you've chosen to put
together with your Shakespeare plays or, you
know, you can course correct.
You can change course and try something different
and I think in that sense too, taking advantage
of different networks and getting advice from
people is also important.
DAVID: And the last thing that Jennifer and
I wanna stress, which is really the whole
point of these first two instances in the
Critical Race Conversation series that the
Folger has is stay student centered with your
pedagogy, you know, which can and should have
centered you with the personal critical and
experiential.
And on that note, we are going to turn quickly
to questions that we've received and we'll
try to get through as many of them as we can
before we turn it over to Owen.
JENNIFER: There we go.
Okay, which one do you want to talk about
first?
DAVID: I'll take the first one.
So, we're received a question...
JENNIFER: by the way.
DAVID: Sorry?
JENNIFER: Oh, I was just thanking everyone
for the questions.
DAVID: Oh, yes, definitely, thank you.
These questions are great.
Do you think that the study of the sonic color-line
in Shakespeare has anything to say to the
work of Ian Smith on Barbara's “African
Tongues,” Patricia Parker on English dialects
in the history plays or even the work of Bruce
Smith on sound in the theater and so to that
I'll just say, you know, we certainly do,
we leaned on or referenced Ian Smith earlier
in this talk and also Bruce Smith engaged
with his work.
DAVID: So, read all of this work and you should
read other work as well and make that work
together in the classroom.
And, you know, since Ian Smith's book was
mentioned, which also, another one that you
should think about having, let me just take
this opportunity to say that the field and
even responses to the complexity of this field
have yet to really fully appreciate the complexity
of race scholars work, which often gets reduced
to race.
DAVID: Even though important interventions
that they make rely on intersections with
other matters like rhetoric, for instance
in Ian's case or religion and romance in the
case of Dennis Britton in his book Becoming
Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern
English Romance and so it's important that
those other aspects of these books be valued.
So, I just wanted to add that to my response
to that question.
JENNIFER: Okay, I'm gonna build on that and
kind of combine some of the sound questions
into one.
We got three questions about sound, one about
the question of hearing as racialized and
how that might help us speak back to critics
of by POC performers of Shakespeare.
We got a question about the special insights
that sound and performance provides us versus
the visual or written representations and
then we got a question about, again, about
racialized sound and it says that, you know,
one of the things that was striking in the
introduction to my book is deconstructing
the scream as a universal sound.
JENNIFER: and I actually look at and think
about the ways that Black women's and white
women’s screams and how they're heard and
processed in the media and politically etc.
that there is no universal reactions to these
gendered and race screams.
And this person asked about kind of... he
says there's a well-known essay about Hamlet
that focuses on the pure utterance beyond
language at his death.
“Oh, oh, oh,” for instance.
How do we get from the early playtext to these
interpretive range of possibilities to vocalizations
and plays?
Are there other examples we could-we could
look to?
JENNIFER: So, three really good questions
and for hearing as racialized and some great
work on thinking about Shakespearean accents
and the, you know, in Ocampo-Guzman’s work
that was in the Colorblind Shakespeare volume
which is also great, he talks a lot about
this and his own experience.
He's Latin American and this great essay about
speaking Shakespeare with an accent and that
for him, you know, embodying Shakespeare and
Shakespeare as a creative force means that
we all approach him and kind of use him in
a way that isn't our most, you know, confident
self.
JENNIFER: And however that sounds, that it
isn't about this, you know, kind of false
sense of authenticity in the work.
And so, I really recommend that his reading
of that and his questioning of that accent.
In terms of other works, I am sure... and
we tried to demonstrate how this sonic analysis
might work, especially in terms of, again,
soundscape and the work that that does, the
world making.
In video games, they call that wording how
these sounds create the world, who's listening
to them?
JENNIFER: Does class make a difference does,
you know, even right now, as we pointed out,
we're not all hearing the same things and
the more that you can, you know, ask, what
are some other interpretations to this, how
my other characters in the play have heard
this depending on their social position.
That might be a way to play with that.
DAVID: Yeah and I guess I'll take the last
two questions, I'll try to truncate my responses
to them.
So, someone asked another good question, you
know, do boys identify education as one of
the qualified successes of the freed man’s
bureau in the reconstruction period?
Can you discuss the pros and cons of using
Shakespeare as a way to extend this project
and potentially bridge the high school college
divide?
And so Du Bois deploys Shakespeare as cultural
capital tool which I mentioned and Jennifer
has mentioned as well, but, for me, he also
weaponizes Shakespeare in his work for his
majority white audience.
DAVID: but really he's weaponizing that the
weapon that he's using for himself against
whiteness is Shakespeare.
So, in the line, I sit with Shakespeare and
he winces not, Du Bois have the agency, it's
not Shakespeare sitting with him.
He is sitting with Shakespeare.
And so I take from his work that understanding
that he has power and that I can also be empowered
by reading his work moreover by funding public
education, you know, the Freedman’s bureau
sought to educate and increase literacy through
writing and reading.
And so Du Bois’ attention to Shakespeare
reinforces the value of that education that
is not without challenges, of course, for
the Black reader or the Black audience, you
know.
DAVID: We think of what it means for a student
to sit through Othello and just hear the disparaging
language and the, you know, the thick lips
and all of that stuff.
It's harmful.
It is harmful but Du Bois, I think, gets us
to think differently about that because, you
know, he notes that the south considered an
educated negro to be a dangerous negro and
that point for me is really profound.
JENNIFER: and it actually is something that
tells me, I need to try to acquire as much
education as I can and that includes Shakespeare
so that I can be as dangerous as I can be,
metaphorically speaking, of course.
And this is what I want for all students regardless
of their education levels.
I want them to feel that empowerment and the
last question here before I turn it over to
Owen, how would you apply this type of sonic
analysis to some of Shakespeare's other works?
In other genres, his lyric, in amateuric verse,
his long narrative poetry, his sonnets.
Felt this is a really fabulous question and
the answer is bigger than Shakespeare.
JENNIFER: And so I'm going to come at this
broadly.
First, let me recommend that folks read chapter
two in Kim Hall’s Things of Darkness, to
get a sense of how she breaks down the poetics
of color with respect to the Renaissance lyric
and the language of darkness and fairness.
I think that will help you in reading that.
You can relate it to then Jennifer’s solid
color-line theory and really think about how
racialized sound is working outside of the
dramatic genre.
And even when they engage Blackness, these
non-dramatic works center on whiteness.
DAVID: So, the sonic color-line becomes useful
then when reflecting on the voice of the white
male speaker or especially when the poem might
include the woman's voice as Spenser does
in Amoretti.
In such moments, we are prompted to think
specifically about the white man and the white
woman and then we can move out from there
to think about the how the power of whiteness
is functioning and on that note, I think we
got through all of the questions.
So, we will turn it over to Owen.
OWEN: Well, thank you both so much.
That was an amazing conversation and presentation.
It's gonna give lots of food for thought to
teachers at all levels in terms of how they
might cultivate an anti-racist and inclusive
classroom and what pedagogies they might employ.
We all, of course, would also like to send
a special thanks to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
for support of this series and to our audience
and the very lively Twitter feed that they
contributed during this.
We hope that many of you will be able to join
us in September.
We expect to resume with the session on race
and empire that Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson
of Johns Hopkins has organized.
OWEN: The team of scholars that she has assembled
has expertise on the Americas, Europe, and
the African continent and includes Robin Mitchell
at Cal State Channel Islands, and Cécile
Fromont of Yale University.
Further details and the full site of critical
race conversations will appear on the Folger
Institute’s webpage soon.
We at the Folger Shakespeare Library thank
you for your continuing support of our work
and so many audiences from K-12 educators
and their students who are served by the Folger
education division to fellowships and advanced
programming for graduate students and faculty
run by the Folger Institute to the award winning
productions of the Folger Theater.
OWEN: If you're in a position to contribute,
we will be grateful.
Our institution was founded on philanthropy
and your philanthropy will help us continue
to support groundbreaking research and to
share it with wider and more inclusive audiences
just as we did today.
Now, as their final thought, Jennifer and
David will sound off and sign off with a few
lines from Keith Hamilton Cobb’s groundbreaking
play, American Moor, which uses Shakespeare's
character Othello to explore the experience,
frustration, and perspective of Black men,
perhaps as a compliment to or substitute for
Othello.
OWEN: David highly recommends instructors
consider teaching this play which contains
an introduction by Professor Kim F. Hall.
And now I turn things back over to Jennifer
and David who will play the roles of the white
director and the Black male actor respectively
from American Moor:
JENNIFER: Something else.
DAVID: Leap and the net will appear.
JENNIFER: Pardon me?
DAVID: Yeah, Jennifer, before I jump into
this speech again, may I...
It is my sense that Othello has been this
essential commodity to the Venetians for some
time.
And well, frankly, he is the only large Black
entity in the room.
He is aware that he comes at a premium to
these men of the senate and that he is unique,
which is to say I suspect that if he whispered
his speech, the room would listen.
DAVID: And ending on that note, viewers, Jennifer
and I thank you so much, tremendously really,
for watching this Critical Race Conversation
and lending us your ears.
We hope that you enjoyed the show.
JENNIFER: Mm-hmm.
