Abolish Shakespeare offers an intersectional approach to the study of Shakespearean drama and the formation of Shakespeare studies drawing on abolition theory, critical race studies, and Marxist theory. In doing so, it emphasizes often neglected aspects of intersectional analysis to excavate the many facets and legacies of imagined white supremacy with regard to issues of gender, class, and religion. Imagined white supremacies are intertwined with the development of capitalism during its early formation, creating capitalism as a system not just with class structure at the root of its power, but one that clearly connects its alienation, exploitation, and oppression through these constructs of gender and race. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were products as well as producers of the society and culture in which they lived. One goal of this project is to advocate for the creation of a new knowledge commons and to envision a People’s Shakespeare – one that aligns with Marx’s description of self-clarification. A People’s Shakespeare would be driven by current people’s interests, wants, and needs rather than tied to a market for profit or an ideological system for imagined white supremacies.

My call to abolish Shakespeare studies is rooted in the way Shakespeare’s works have been used to perpetuate both whiteness as a pillar of power within capitalism as well as that imagined white supremacy that still survives to this day. This dissertation begins with an overview of abolition studies and praxis. Chapter One uncovers how Shakespeare's Othello erases the Ottoman Empire's presence in Cyprus to promote European imagined white supremacies within an early colonial capitalist framework. Chapter Two explores Shakespeare's use of "fairness" in As You Like It to reveal the formation of early modern whiteness tied to class distinctions. Chapter Three examines the construction of fairness and the effect it had upon sexual violence directed at both literary women and actual women within the period. Chapter Four introduces Christopher Marlowe's anti-capitalist perspective in Doctor Faustus to illustrate resistance against capitalism's allure and its complex interaction with anti-Blackness. The final chapter explores current modes of abolition taking place in Shakespeare studies.

Unruly Keepers traces the tested ethics of keeping time. Presented throughout the pages of early modern English writing, this crucial component to temporal politics has been largely overlooked in literary studies, until now. By focusing on disruptively monstrous, queer, technological, and magical timescapes, Unruly Keepers uncovers how competing approaches to understanding time's passage stimulate moral comparisons and critiques through a wide range of texts. In poetry, plays, and even popular ephemera, writers call on their readers to confront the influential role time can play in social marginalization and the restriction of alternative forms of life. To “keep time well” is no simple task; instead, timekeeping activates intense uncertainties about how being in time comes to matter—ideologically, materially, morally—within the politically-charged motions of daily life. This project offers new readings of several well-known texts by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Richard Hakluyt, and Isabella Whitney and also surfaces the significance of more obscure works by centering their shared concerns over the ethical ambiguities of time management. This project also brings a more in-depth examination of the material archive and history of science to bear on literary understandings of temporal experience in the period. With its fresh approach, Unruly Keepers ultimately reconceptualizes how and why we study early modern time today by demonstrating the powerful role time-practices play in negotiating ideas of otherness and the politics of difference in early modern England.

Between the 1580s to 1640s, proponents for eastward trade expansion to China, such as Richard Hakluyt and Sir Robert Cecil, created contactless “encounters” between early modern England and Ming China through Chinese objects. Such “contact” zones produce a rich site for exploring early modern English racial thinking and race-making. However, in early modern critical race studies, China remains an unstudied area—China seems invisible. To fill this gap, “Porcelain Bodies: Objects of Race in Early Modern England’s China” examines early modern racial thinking and race-making objects through the absent-present white Other, China. I show how England constructed both its whiteness and white supremacy through an imagined “China” and Chinese objects, both material and immaterial. In England’s self-white-making through “China,” England formulates a sophisticated race-making methodology: a racially fluid “China” with racial affordances that could move along the spectrum of a black and white binary, though never embody either limit of whiteness or blackness. By imbuing China with varying degrees of whiteness through material and immaterial manifestations, England constructs a complex racializing object, an exploitable technology to co-construct and reinforce a racialized black/white binary. This case study limits its historical scope by using the earliest and latest publications of its primary sources. I draw on travel writing, masques, poetry, and prose, by such writers as Richard Hakluyt, Ben Jonson, and Francis Bacon. This dissertation explores English racial ideologies through an “invisible” white Chinese constituted in the early modern English imaginary. Patterns of racial thinking and racialization emerge as part of the material texts related to the representation of China and East Asia. Such patterns establish raced language frequently used in the construction of the “Yellow Peril,” the Model Minority, and the unassimilable Asian/Alien. Inspired by Toni Morrison’s call to reexamine whiteness and its pervasiveness in racial thinking alongside the racialization of blackness, this dissertation explores how early modern Europe “invented East Asia” as a white supremacist technology.