Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds investigates the peculiar absence of Islam and Muslims from Shakespeare’s canon. While many of Shakespeare’s plays were set in the Mediterranean, a geography occupied by Muslim empires and cultures, his work eschews direct engagement with the religion and its people. This erasure is striking given the popularity of this topic in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. By exploring the limited ways in which Shakespeare uses Islamic and Muslim tropes and topoi, Ambereen Dadabhoy argues that Islam and Muslim cultures function as an alternate or shadow text in his works, ranging from his staged Mediterranean plays to his histories and comedies. By consigning the diverse cultures of the Islamic regimes that occupied and populated the early modern Mediterranean, Shakespeare constructs a Europe and Mediterranean freed from the presence of non-white, non-European, and non-Christian Others, which belied the reality of the world in which he lived. Focusing on the Muslims at the margins of Shakespeare’s works, Dadabhoy reveals that Islam and its cultures informed the plots, themes, and intellectual investments of Shakespeare’s plays. She puts Islam and Muslims back into the geographies and stories from which Shakespeare had evacuated them. This innovative book will be of interest to all those working on race, religion, global and cultural exchange within Shakespeare, as well as people working on Islamic, Mediterranean, and Asian studies in literature and the early modern period.

A New Statesman essential non-fiction book of 2021 Featured in Book Riot's 12 best nonfiction books about Black identity and history A Times Higher Education Book of the Week 2022 Finalist for the Prose Awards (Media and Cultural Studies category) Why are there so many examples of public figures, entertainers, and normal, everyday people in blackface? And why aren't there as many examples of people of color in whiteface? This book explains what blackface is, why it occurred, and what its legacies are in the 21st century. There is a filthy and vile thread-sometimes it's tied into a noose-that connects the first performances of Blackness on English stages, the birth of blackface minstrelsy, contemporary performances of Blackness, and anti-Black racism. Blackface examines that history and provides hope for a future with new performance paradigms. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Medieval Arab notions of physical difference can feel singularly arresting for modern audiences. Did you know that blue eyes, baldness, bad breath and boils were all considered bodily 'blights', as were cross eyes, lameness and deafness? What assumptions about bodies influenced this particular vision of physical difference? How did blighted people view their own bodies? Through close analyses of anecdotes, personal letters, (auto)biographies, erotic poetry, non-binding legal opinions, diaristic chronicles and theological tracts, the cultural views and experiences of disability and difference in the medieval Islamic world are brought to life.

In 1570, after plots and assassination attempts against her, Elizabeth I was excommunicated by the Pope. It was the beginning of cultural, economic and political exchanges with the Islamic world of a depth not again experienced until the modern age. England signed treaties with the Ottoman Porte, received ambassadors from Morocco and shipped munitions to Marrakech in the hope of establishing an accord which would keep the common enemy of Catholic Spain at bay. This awareness of the Islamic world found its way into many of the great English cultural productions of the day - especially, of course, Shakespeare's Othello and The Merchant of Venice. This Orient Isle shows that England's relations with the Muslim world were far more extensive, and often more amicable, than we have ever appreciated, and that their influence was felt across the political, commercial and domestic landscape of Elizabethan England.

When a murderous psychopath goes on a killing spree, law enforcement officials and the media never make his religion the central issue—unless he happens to be a Muslim. Then it sets off another frenzied wave of commentary about the inherent evils that lurk within the Muslim faith. From Fox News talking heads, who regularly smear Muslim leaders as secret terrorists, to Bill Maher, who has made Islam a routine target, it has become widely acceptable to libel a religion with a following of over 1.5 billion people—nearly one-quarter of the world’s population. Now popular commentator Arsalan Iftikhar—better known as “The Muslim Guy”—offers a spirited defense of his faith that is certain to win him wide acclaim—and yes, another round of overheated scolding from the usual media quarters. Iftikahr’s spirited defense of his faith is certain to hit a chord during the 2016 campaign season, as politicians and pundits vie to be the toughest on the block when it comes to escalating the hostilities in the Middle East, often demonizing Islam in the process. With his witty and levelheaded demeanor, the author will cut through all the sound and fury as a voice of sanity and reason.

Bernadette Andrea’s groundbreaking study recovers and reinterprets the lives of women from the Islamic world who travelled, with varying degrees of volition, as slaves, captives, or trailing wives to Scotland and England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Andrea’s thorough and insightful analysis of historical documents, visual records, and literary works focuses on five extraordinary women: Elen More and Lucy Negro, both from Islamic West Africa; Ipolita the Tartarian, a girl acquired from Islamic Central Asia; Teresa Sampsonia, a Circassian from the Safavid Empire; and Mariam Khanim, an Armenian from the Mughal Empire. By analysing these women’s lives and their impact on the literary and cultural life of proto-colonial England, Andrea reveals that they are simultaneously significant constituents of the emerging Anglo-centric discourse of empire and cultural agents in their own right. The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture advances a methodology based on microhistory, cross-cultural feminist studies, and postcolonial approaches to the early modern period.

The essays in this book analyze a range of genres and considers geographical areas beyond the Ottoman Empire to deepen our post-Saidian understanding of the complexity of real and imagined "traffic" between England and the "Islamic worlds" it encountered and constructed.

Cover -- Copyright page -- Contents -- Note on Sources -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Can the Subaltern Signify? Tracing the Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in British Literature and Culture, c. 1500-1630 -- Chapter One: The "Presences of Women" from the Islamic World in Late Medieval Scotland and Early Modern England -- Chapter Two: The Islamic World and the Construction of Early Modern Englishwomen's Authorship: Queen Elizabeth I, the Tartar Girl, and the Tartar-Indian Woman -- Chapter Three: The Islamic World and the Construction of Early Modern Englishwomen's Authorship: Lady Mary Wroth, the Tartar-Persian Princess, and the Tartar King -- Chapter Four: Signifying Gender and Islam in Early Shakespeare: The Comedy of Errors (1594) and the Gray's Inn Revels -- Chapter Five: Signifying Gender and Islam in Late Shakespeare: Henry VIII or All is True (1613) and British "Masques of Blackness" -- Chapter Six: The Intersecting Paths of Two Women from the Islamic World: Teresa Sampsonia, Mariam Khanim, and the East India Company -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Shakespeare on the Ecological Surface uses the concept of the ‘surface’ to examine the relationship between contemporary performance and ecocriticism. Each section looks, in turn, at the 'surfaces' of slick, smoke, sky, steam, soil, slime, snail, silk, skin and stage to build connections between ecocriticism, activism, critical theory, Shakespeare and performance. While the word ‘surface’ was never used in Shakespeare’s works, Liz Oakley-Brown shows how thinking about Shakespearean surfaces helps readers explore the politics of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. She also draws surprising parallels with our current political and ecological concerns. The book explores how Shakespeare uses ecological surfaces to help understand other types of surfaces in his plays and poems: characters’ public-facing selves; contact zones between characters and the natural world; surfaces upon which words are written; and physical surfaces upon which plays are staged. This book will be an illuminating read for anyone studying Shakespeare, early modern culture, ecocriticism, performance and activism.

Premodern critical race studies, long intertwined with Shakespeare studies, has broadened our understanding of the definitions and discourse of race and racism to include not only phenotype, but also religious and political identity, regional, national, and linguistic difference, and systems of differentiation based upon culture and custom. Replete with fresh readings of the plays and poems, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race brings together some of the most important scholars thinking about the subject today. The volume offers a thorough overview of the most significant theoretical and methodological paradigms such as critical race theory, feminist, and postcolonial studies; a dynamic look at intersections of race with queer, trans, disability, and indigenous studies; and a vibrant array of new approaches from ecocriticism, to animality, and human rights, from book history, to scholarly editing, and repertory studies; and an exploration of Shakespeare and race in our contemporary moment through discussions of political activism, pedagogy, visual arts, film, and theatre. Woven through the collection are the voices of practicing theatre professionals who have grappled with the challenges of race and racism both in performance and in the profession itself.