Race B4 Race 2025, Seminar 2: What We’re Reading and Why

See previous installments in this series here.

The RaceB4Race Mentorship Network began its work in 2022, intended to ‘offer new scholars support as they develop the research that will drive the academic conversation forward’. This Mellon-funded initiative spearheaded by Director of the Folger Institute Dr. Patricia Akhimie not only includes individual mentorship opportunities, but also ‘a semester-long virtual reading/research group, meeting monthly to connect participants with a larger network of premodern critical race scholars.’

What are we reading?

For our second seminar meeting of the 2025-2026 year, we read Shakespeare in the ‘Post’Colonies: Legacies, Cultures, and Social Justice, edited by Amrita Dhar and Amrita Sen (Bloomsbury, 2025), a collection of nine full-length essays and three shorter reflections that is itself part of Shakespeare in the ‘Post’Colonies: Postcolonial Shakespeareans at Work, a ‘collaboration between authors, theatre practitioners, academics, and artists working in a variety of modes’ created by Dr Dhar, Dr Sen, and Dr. Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́, and maintained by The Ohio State University. This open-access archive features detailed interviews with creatives across the world whose works grapple with both Shakespeare and the ‘ever-evolving relationships that all people have with colonialism and empire’. The interviews have also been released as a podcast series, and in addition to the book we read for today, work from this project has appeared as a special issue of the open-access journal Borrowers and Lenders, 16.1 (2024): Shakespeare in Undivided Bengal.

Amrita Dhar is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California San Diego, where her research focuses on early modern literature, disability studies, migration studies, environmental humanities, critical race, and postcolonial studies. She has published a wide range of articles and book chapters, as well as critical and creative pieces related to her other area of expertise: mountaineering. She is currently working on her first monograph, Milton’s Blind Language and Disability Poetics, which focuses on the impact of John Milton’s partial and complete loss of sight on his poetic language.

Amrita Sen is Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the UGC-Human Resources Development Centre at the University of Calcutta, and teaches in the Department of English. Her research has focused not only on early modern drama and Shakespeare, but also on the early activities of the East India Company, early modern ethnography, and Shakespeare in Bollywood. She has published widely and edited or co-edited a range of other volumes, including Digital Shakespeares from the Global South (Palgrave, 2022), Early Modern Performance Beyond the Public Stage (Bloomsbury, 2025, with Jennifer Linhart Wood) and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge, 2020, with J. Caitlin Finlayson), as well as a special issue of the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 17.3 (2017): Alternative Histories of the East India Company, with Julia Schleck. Her current book project focuses on representations of the East Indies on the English stage.

Why are we reading this?

Well, for starters, this is a blog run by the Folger Shakespeare Library, so Shakespeare is bound to turn up sooner or later. But the intervention made by this particular collection, and the larger project of which it is part, is to open up some of the conversations we have been attempting to have not just about Shakespeare and race, but about Shakespeare and colonialism, and even the relationship between literary studies and (post)colonial legacies more generally. As the editors make clear in the introduction, ‘we are committed to using our scholarship and our expertise in one of the greatest currencies of empire, Shakespeare, towards a resistance to empire in all its forms.’ (7).

This project emerged from early meetings of the RaceB4Race Institute, as well as a virtual seminar during the 2021 Shakespeare Association of America meeting, but also from a particular positionality shared by editors Amrita Dhar and Amrita Sen, as early modernists born and raised in West Bengal. As we learned during our discussion, the place of William Shakespeare in Bengali culture is very different—where he, along with other Western canonical authors such as John Milton, is seen as a repository of characters, tropes, and stylistic elements that Bengali writers and artists then freely transform to suit their own goals. As a fan studies scholar, I might refer to this as a fascinating example of archontic production, and it is certainly a far cry from the reverence and caution with which Shakespeare is largely treated in the west.

The book’s nine chapters cover different parts of the world, and, just as importantly, are written by scholars from all over the world. Too often we in Europe and North America will claim our work is global when it actually isn’t, so it is truly a joy to be able to read such a great selection of scholarship from across the Global South, addressing issues that don’t always get the attention they deserve. Chapters explore, among other things, the ambiguous deployment of The Tempest in Latin American independence movements; how The Taming of the Shrew in the Philippines and Titus Andronicus in Japan are both harnessed to critique American imperialism; the complex place of Shakespeare’s language within the context of the Indian caste system; and the multivalence of a play like Othello for a range of critical postcolonial readings. The first and last chapters focus on the challenges of Indigenous representation, in Australia and North America respectively, when dealing with both early modern texts and contemporary theatrical culture. Finally, forewords and afterwords from Jyotsna Singh, Poonam Trivedi, and Alexa Alice Joubin bookend the collection, offering short critical reflections on Shakespeare and postcolonialism—where we are, and where we could go.

This massive undertaking represents the kinds of expansive work that is possible in premodern critical race studies, and I very much encourage our readers to check out the Shakespeare in the PostColonies archive, as well as the excellent podcast series. Both editors also sang the praises of film director Vishal Bhardwaj (interviewed here), particularly Omkara, his 2006 adaptation of Othello, although all three of his Shakespeare-inspired films—Maqbool, Omkara, and Haider, adapted respectively from Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet—are fantastic.

One thing the editors made clear during our discussion is that there are significant risks involved in doing this kind of work in certain regions of the Global South. Both called attention to collaborators in Bangladesh, for instance, who have come under threat for their work. But they made equally clear the continued commitment to decolonizing Shakespeare and other parts of the Western canon that can be found in former colonies all over the world. Even as we in the west debate whether or not Shakespeare should even be taught in schools anymore, it is worth remembering that, however one feels about it, his works have in many ways become a lingua franca of the postcolonial world, a way of making individual struggles legible across geographic, linguistic, and cultural borders. Perhaps we might all do well to follow the people of Bengal and treat Shakespeare as a collective archive open for transformation, to trust in what Mohawk scholar Scott Manning Stevens calls the ‘wisdom of stories’.

Further reading

While I will not be going into the particulars of the discussion, in order to preserve the seminar space as a safe and private one, below is a list of scholarship that came up at different points during the discussion.

Madhusudan’s Miltonic Epic, the Meghnādbadh kābya’, in Milton Across Borders and Media, ed. Islam Issa and Angelica Duran (Oxford, 2023), 143-60.

Borrowers and Lenders, 16.1 (2024): Shakespeare in Undivided Bengal, edited by Amrita Dhar and Amrita Sen.

Omkara, dir. Vishal Bhardwaj. 2006.