Overview

Shakespeare in Tongues interrogates the popular conflation of “the language of Shakespeare” with English by examining the role Shakespeare’s works have played in overlapping histories of colonialism, slavery, and migration that continue to shape the linguistic cultures of the United States. Opening up urgent and overdue conversations about linguistic oppression, racism, and resistance within the settler colonial nation-state, Kathryn Vomero Santos draws our attention to artists, activists, and educators who have conjured, embraced, remade, and rejected Shakespeare in service of multilingual counternarratives that push back against dominant perspectives, refuse assimilation, and strive for more polyglot and polyvocal futures. As they shine a bright light on the legacies of the federal Indian boarding school system, Indigenous language revitalization efforts, the militarization of the U.S.–Mexico border, and battles over ethnic studies in classrooms, these critical and creative engagements with Shakespeare offer powerful examples of how his works might be used to facilitate a more truthful understanding of the past and to identify restorative paths forward. Shakespeare in Tongues issues an imperative to redirect the material and intellectual resources that have been devoted to Shakespeare and his language toward truth, justice, and healing. This is essential reading for anyone studying or researching Shakespeare, race, translation, adaptation, and comparative literatures.

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9781032274508

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Reviews

Shakespeare in Tongues is a sharp, ingenious, and urgent exploration of the reach and limits of Shakespeare’s linguistic legacy. With impressive breadth and deftness, this book shows us how issues of race, land, and language are deeply intertwined, and how they influence imaginings of Shakespeare’s purchase today. —Ruben Espinosa, Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Arizona State University A must-read for those interested in how Indigenous and Latine artists repurpose Shakespeare’s works to resist the colonial and racist ideologies underpinning U.S. education. Rather than equating Shakespeare with English, Shakespeare in Tongues opens up space for more multicultural, polylingual, and liberating engagements with his works. —Carla Mazzio, author of The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence

Author Information

Kathryn Vomero Santos is Associate Professor of English at Trinity University, USA. She is a co-founder of the award-winning Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva and the co-editor of several books, including The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera (with Katherine Gillen and Adrianna M. Santos).

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