Humanities Book Club: Farah Karim-Cooper

Canceled

The Hall Center will provide a limited number of free copies of The Great White Bard to be read prior to the event by those who wish to attend and participate in the discussion. Interested participants should stop by the Hall Center or email pkenn@lplks.org while supplies last. An interdisciplinary panel of speakers will lead the discussion.

As monuments of white Western history fall, many are asking: how is Shakespeare still relevant? In The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race, Farah Karim-Cooper acknowledges how the playwright has come to occupy such an elevated place in the Western canon, and what is lost when he is treated as representative of only one tradition or one group.

Karim-Cooper examines race in Shakespeare’s plays through close readings of works such as Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest, alongside a reappraisal of Elizabethan London and its social world. She argues that Shakespeare should neither be idealized nor discarded, but read with attention to the discomforts in his language and theatrical culture. As The New York Times writes, “The Great White Bard contributes to an essential discussion on Shakespeare and race.” By opening the plays to new perspectives, the book makes space for debate and reInterpretation, and for a Shakespeare who can still speak to the present.

Farah Karim-Cooper is the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. and a leading scholar of race and performance in early modern drama. The Great White Bard: Shakespeare, Race and the Future was named one of the best books of the year by Time, NPR, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly.