Shakespeare and Antiblack World-Making

This book is about Shakespeare’s role in sustaining the antiblack paradigm of modernity. This work re-reads both Shakespearean texts and performances from the 16th century to the present to argue that American and English societies have deployed Shakespeare for four hundred years as a mechanism to construct and reinforce paradigmatic antiblackness. Framed within the author’s experiences as a Black scholar, actor, and director of Shakespeare and using both contemporary Critical Race Theory (CRT), as well as Pre-Modern Critical Race Studies (PCRS), this book uses civil society’s engagement with and performance of Shakespeare in various times and places to reveal the continuum of antiblackness that predates chattel slavery in America and contributes to antiblack world-making across oceans and centuries.

Matthieu Chapman is an Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz, USA, and the Literary Director of NY Classical Theatre. He has acted on the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriar’s stage and served as a dramaturg for San Diego Repertory Theatre and worked for the La Jolla Playhouse, as well as dramaturged and directed numerous university productions.

Matthieu’s research focuses on ontological structures of Blackness in the Early Modern World. His memoir, Shattered: Fragments of a Black Life published in 2023. His monograph, AntiBlack Racism in Early Modern English Drama: ＂The Other Other＂ was published in 2016. He is the co-editor along with Anna Wainwright of Teaching Race in the Early Modern World: A Classroom Guide (forthcoming). He has also published articles in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Theatre Topics, TheatreForum, Theatre History Studies and EarlyTheatre, and he has chapters in Race and/as Affect in Early Modern England, and forthcoming in Shakespeare and Atrocity.