Bridging the Shakespeare-Latinx Divide Cross-Institutional Research Working Group considers how Latino/a/x studies can diversify, enhance, and intensify Shakespeare studies. While critical race studies that scrutinize assumptions about race and racism both in and through Shakespeare have been produced, critical investigations of the intersections between Shakespeare and Latino/a/x studies are relatively underrepresented.

Employing critical race, ethnic, and Latino/a/x studies as the guiding foci for conversations, workshops, research, and public events, this group is vividly attuned to the changing demographics of the U.S. student population. A unique set of historical, methodological, and theoretical questions emerge when one examines Shakespeare’s plays, poems, and cultural capital through the lens of Latino/a/x studies. From Teatro Campesino to Cantinflas, from local adaptations in la frontera to major productions at The Public Theater in New York, from the fiction of Emma Perez to that of Arturo Islas—and this Working Group, in part, interrogates how these Latino/a/x intersections with Shakespeare open doors to reimagine not only Shakespeare’s cultural capital, but also the relevance of Latino/a/x studies to humanistic inquiry more broadly. How are literary, historical, and cultural analyses of Shakespeare transformed when examined through a specifically Latino/a/x studies lens?

Goals

• Engender research focused on Latino/a/x perspectives of Shakespeare

• Strategize how best to bridge the divide between Latino/a/x students/audiences and
  Shakespeare.

• Uncover novel strategies of resistance through Latino/a/x perspectives, which have too often been rendered invisible within Shakespeare studies