Shakespeare / Skin

Contemporary Readings in Skin Studies and Theoretical Discourse

Ruben Espinosa, Lucy Munro, Sonia Massai, Farah Karim Cooper, Gordon McMullan

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781350261600
• eBook ISBN: 9781350261617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

This volume offers a comprehensive array of readings of 'skin' in Shakespeare's works, a term that embraces the human and animal, noun and verb. Shakespeare / Skin departs from previous studies as it deliberately and often explicitly engages with issues of social and racial justice. Each of the chapters interrogates and centres 'skin' in relation to areas of expertise that include performance studies, aesthetics, animal studies, religious studies, queer theory, Indigenous studies, history, food studies, border studies, postcolonial studies, Black feminism, disease studies and pedagogy. By considering contemporary understandings of skin, this volume examines how the literature of the early modern past creates paths to constructing racial hierarchies. With contributors from the USA, UK, South Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Australia, chapters are informed by an array of histories, shedding light on how skin was understood in Shakespeare's time and at key moments during the past 400 years in different media and cultures. Chapters include considerations of plays such as Titus Andronicus, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and work by Borderlands Theater, Los Colochos and Satyajit Ray, among many others. For researchers and instructors, this book will help to shape teaching and inform research through its modelling of antiracist critical practice. Collectively, the chapters in this collection allow us to consider how sustained attention to skin via cross-historical and innovative approaches can reveal to us the various uses of Shakespeare that shed light on the fraught nature of our interrelatedness. They set a path for readers to consider how much skin they have in the game when it comes to challenging structures of racism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Skin deep
• 1 Möbius skin: Dermal history in the early modern age
• 2 ‘My fleece of woolly hair’: Animals and race in Shakespeare’s plays
• 3 ‘You may look pale’: Whiteness and love melancholia in Love’s Labour’s Lost
• 4 Hermione’s wrinkles
• 5 Shakespeare and postcolonial theory: Incidental Shakespeares and everyday life in the films of Satyajit Ray
• 6 From hatred to a utopia: Making the invisible visible on the skin in Miyagi Satoshi’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• 7 Shakespeare and la Herida Abierta: Twin skin, colonial wounds and the cicatrix poetics of borderlands theatre
• 8 The skin of our voices: Mendoza or Shakespeare retold by Los Colochos
• 9 Skin / pedagogy
• 10 Artisans of the skin: Recipe studies and race-making in Shakespearean skincrafts
• 11 Legible bodies, implicated subjects and the call for justice: Reflections on Titus Andronicus
• 12 Caliban’s skin, racial hinges and anti-racist kin
• 13 Shakespeare / skin: Indigenous theoretical response
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright