Citing Shakespeare

Focusing on Shakespeare and race, this book addresses the status of Othello in our culture. Erickson shows that contemporary writers' revisions of Shakespeare can have a political impact on our vision of America.

'Erickson's Citing Shakespeare examines the complex, sometimes ambivalent and even combustive relationship between artists of the African Diaspora and Shakespeare's language, texts and image. From Rita Dove's poetry to Ishmael Reed's novels to the visual art of Fred Wilson, we see that Shakespearean citation is one of several techniques used by these virtuosos to defamiliarize, defy reader expectation, create culture, reverse the flows of power, and just plain play. Erickson's expanded framework for citation allows for the multiple languages that these artists use to 'speak' to Shakespeare, including word, character, history, bodies, and the light, shadow, gloss and heft of the visual image. Citing Shakespeare is a blueprint for a more expansive and inclusive Shakespeare Studies, one which shows serious political and scholarly commitment to interrogations of race, gender and nationhood, which engages learnedly the insights of multiple disciplines and traditions, and which asks difficult questions about Shakespeare's continuing function as a site of cultural power.' - Francesca Royster, Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, DePaul University

PETER ERICKSON is an independent scholar.