Then wokeness came for Shakespeare Dan Hannan
“Shakespeare’s works,” the
School Library Journal tells us, “are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir.” There follows a litany of complaints from school teachers who have dropped the world’s greatest writer because, being white, he supposedly has nothing to say to black students.
It is in the nature of Shakespeare that we each bring our own experiences to him. If you take a certain satisfaction in finding misogyny and racism everywhere, you will find them in Shakespeare.
To be honest, I struggled a bit with “misogynoir,” or a dislike of black women. As far as I can make out, there are no black women in Shakespeare’s plays. There is a Dark Lady in his sonnets (her skin is said to be dun and her hair black), but she gets pretty good press. I can think of three black
Then wokeness came for Shakespeare
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Darien Library welcomes author Kate Russo to discuss her novel Super Host with Director Kiera Parrott on March 4!
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The first YA book to deal with HIV/AIDS was M. E. Kerr’s
Night Kites. Published in 1986, the novel features a teenage protagonist whose older brother is sick with AIDS-related illnesses. As Christine Jenkins and Michael Cart point out, this novel did not inspire a trend: HIV/AIDS “would receive major thematic or topical treatment in only three other YA novels in the eighties.”
In addition to the four novels published in the 1980s, only thirteen texts “that included any character who was HIV positive or had AIDS appeared in the nineties.” Moreover, just one of the affected characters in these thirteen books is a young person; the rest are adults, “usually uncles or teachers.” Lydia Kokkola concludes that, during this time period, HIV/AIDS functions mostly as a “punishment” for sexually active and/or queer characters.