Migrant Shakespeares & The 21st-Century Border

This course places issues of migration and legacies of imperialism and settler colonialism in conversation with Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptations, appropriations, confrontations, and allusive riffs in the present day. By looking at both early modern and 21st-century texts and cultural products that engage with patterns of mobility and migration (and the securitized nation-state) from the U.S/Mexico borderlands to the Mediterranean, as well as the many afterlives of Shakespeare in the present, we will explore the possibilities and risks of an activist literature of migration that draws from early modern dramatic precedent.