“What do we do with Shakespeare?” “Who is Shakespeare for?” “What would it look like to reject Shakespeare?”

These were questions I put at the center of the Pop Culture Shakespeare class I taught in the summer of 2020, and which I’ll return to this fall. Four hundred and sixty years after the Bard’s birth (nearly to the day, we like to imagine), people have answered these questions many times over. But working with my students taught me that one powerful way to understand Shakespeare today is as a transmedia narrative—a story that plays out across many modes of expression, from historical documents, printed plays, and performances to graphic novels and games. We spent the semester framing Shakespeare as an idea we all participate in making.

The class was inspired by a 2019 episode of NPR’s “Code Switch” podcast that discussed Shakespeare and his plays’ racism, sexism, and antisemitism. “We have a narrative in the West that Shakespeare’s like spinach, right? He’s good for you. He’s universally good for you,” said ASU professor, theater practitioner, and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies director Ayanna Thompson. “We have to make that a more complex narrative.”

Thompson and the advocacy of the RaceB4Race community, a conference series and scholarly network galvanizing conversations about Shakespeare’s digestibility, particularly around race, challenged my students and me to build a more nuanced relationship to the Bard. We read plays by Shakespeare alongside adaptations of his work, approaching the materials as more than plots or settings or characters and changes therein—and instead as complex processes of belonging.

We spent part of our first meeting examining our own identities and interrogating the stories past classes and popular media had fed us about Shakespeare and his work. What were the sources—play texts, narratives or rhetoric (from parents, teachers, friends, the news), and media (movie adaptations, performances, YouTube videos, etc.)—that shaped our relationship to Shakespeare? How did we feel about him?

This framing can be deeply meaningful for students, who are navigating multiple spheres of influence: professional aspirations, societal or familial expectations, their own interests and passions. They are also grappling with knowledge—career content knowledge, self-knowledge, communal knowledge—and responsibility. To whom am I responsible? In what ways? Shakespeare and those who adapt his plays offer powerful opportunities for thinking critically about such epistemological and ethical questions.

To prime my students for questioning Shakespeare and their knowledge of him, our first unit didn’t start with a play; instead, we focused on Shakespeare’s biography and historical record. I sent them on a treasure hunt through the amazing resources of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection of archival documents around the Bard’s life. My students got to build out the gaps in history, wrestling with what we don’t know about the life of Shakespeare and his authorial connection to his plays. We then used movies to visualize these holes; we asked if two very different fictional biopics, 1998’s Shakespeare in Love and 2011’s Anonymous, would exist if the historical record had different documents in it.

Framing Shakespeare’s history in part as a narrative that is created and interpreted allowed my students to think more expansively about his literary authorship and cultural power.

Then, throughout the course, we treated each play and adaptation like a helix, where both texts twist recursively back upon each other. But the texts also connect to other authors’ lives and work. We know that Shakespeare relied on numerous source texts for his plays and that he influenced his contemporaries. And adaptations do not solely rely on Shakespeare either—they draw on many literary and cultural connections. We traced textual belonging as well as different types of thematic and material belonging—political, familial, racial, historical, gendered, peer group—across primary documents, play texts, and adaptations in various media forms. Studying adaptions in this way places Shakespeare in a larger world—or rather, worlds—both his own and ours.

Oxford professor Emma Smith attributes our ongoing engagement with Shakespeare to “gappiness,” which she defines as “all the things that we don’t know, the space there is for our creativity.” She says, “These plays are really incomplete, and the thing that they need to complete them is us and our sort of inventiveness, our world, our experience.” In the classroom, attention to “gappiness” gave my students a feeling of agency. With this intellectual space, they could wrestle with whether they hated, loved, felt indifferent to, or were curious about Shakespeare, all at the same time.

Romeo and Juliet—a favorite in high school curricula—elicited an interesting range of reactions. Despite initial grumbles about having to re-read a play, my students enjoyed exploring how their own maturation and life experiences shifted their relationship to the story. Juliet tended to rise higher in their estimation than previously, while Romeo fared worse. The students, having now had the experience of choosing a college and leaving home, felt the stakes of Juliet’s decision to defy her parents and make a choice for her own life.

We next read Ronald Wimberly’s 2012 graphic novel Prince of Cats, which focuses on the character of Tybalt and is set in what the author describes as an “alternate universe New York where dueling is part of the [street] culture” that led to the hip-hop of the 1970s and 1980s. The comic has a racially diverse cast and a Black protagonist in Tybalt, and samples an array of influences, of which Shakespeare is just one.

Wimberly speaks about how some audiences consume Black artists’ work through a tokenizing gaze—seeing it as valuable only because it makes them feel that they are being inclusive. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the hot-tempered Tybalt (whom another character calls “the prince of cats”) sets off the violence that ultimately leads to the tragedy of the two lovers. But by focusing on Tybalt and his relationships, Wimberly shifts how we understand death in the story. Where Shakespeare focuses on the “star-crossed lovers” and their tragedy, Wimberly attends to the bonds within families and among community members. He also suggests that Shakespeare himself tokenizes his minor characters in this play—stereotyping them as barriers for his main characters to rebel against but refusing to “get more into the price of violence for all involved.”

Tybalt and Prince of Cats led us to one of our most powerful meta-explorations of how we should engage Shakespeare at the college level. We can treat adaptations as texts that are intricately intersected with Shakespeare, but refuse a hierarchy where their import only comes through that relationship. We can even choose not to discuss Shakespeare when talking about these texts. And throughout, we can interrogate the roles of white supremacy, sexism, ableism, and xenophobia in the plays, and explore our own and others’ agencies as authors of Shakespeare.

Ultimately, these choices give students the power to refuse the deference we are trained to give to this author. Framing “Shakespeare” as a process of belonging—one that we can reject, look askance at, accept wholly or in part—means we all can choose whether we want to eat this particular literary spinach—and in what ways Shakespeare belongs to each of us.

The post Who Is Shakespeare For? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2013, my wife and I rented an apartment in Výtoň, a classic urban neighborhood south of the tourist-packed city center of Prague. This wasn’t my first move to the capital of the Czech Republic. As a historian, I had been coming to Prague for short spells each summer for 10 years running. But, eager to explore, I always chose a different neighborhood to live in. My only fixed points were friends’ homes, a few locally admired pubs, and the archives that justified these trips to one of the world’s most beautiful cities.

Our Výtoň apartment was just a block from the banks of the Vltava River, where a farmer’s market appeared each Saturday morning. Locals promenaded along the quay in the evenings. The best gelato in town was steps away, as was a reliable grocery store and hip café. Up the hill was Vyšehrad, the city’s original fortifications-turned-massive park, which boasted panoramic views of the city.  The neighborhood was a new adventure for me, as was this particular trip to Prague: it was my wife’s and my first time seeing the city from a parent’s-eye view. Before having a family, I had enjoyed the refreshing lonesomeness of being a foreigner. But now, we were seeking to help our kids feel at home as they navigated a different language and culture. Before long, it was Výtoň’s neighborhood playground that transformed the city into a home for all of us.

Kids at Výtoň’s playground. Photo by Milada Anna Vachudova.

Filling half a city block, Výtoň’s playground had soft rubber flooring, a variety of color schemes, and a respectable sand pit. There was a large, spinnable ring whose purpose eluded nearly everyone. Run on it, like a treadmill, and then, inevitably, crash to the ground? Sit and let centrifugal forces fling you off? Knobby, oddly twisted climbing equipment complimented modernist-inspired see-saws and swings. Across the street, the occasional passenger train eased itself along an elevated railroad track. The sight never failed to excite my boys, then 5 and 3, who shouted giddily in Czech: Vlak! Vlak! (Train! Train!)

Playgrounds first emerged in the late 19th century, as part of a progressive effort to provide children in poorer neighborhoods with a dignified place to play. Other proponents argued that playgrounds kept kids out of trouble, providing a safe space from the evils and temptations of the big city. The precursors to the modern playground consisted solely of large sand pits where younger children sat and played with toys. By the turn of the century, swings and parallel bars, as well as space to sew or play games like baseball, were added in order to attract older kids to what became known as a “playground.”

Since then, safety concerns have partially driven further innovations in playground design, such as the move from concrete and steel to plastic and rubber. Gone are teeter ladders and high-in-the-air trapeze structures; instead, new, colorful structures that can be climbed, spun, and rocked mingle with old favorites, like sandpits and swings.  These designs have been influenced by an emerging scholarly and political consensus that playgrounds, just like play, are crucial to childhood development. They foster language development and social skills. They move bodies and help with coordination. They allow children to enjoy the feeling of being temporarily free of overbearing rules and supervision.

Playgrounds are for parents, too. Whoever designed the Výtoň playground clearly had adults in mind, as the benches are numerous and comfortable. Taking a seat and keeping watch on my boys out of the corner of my eye, I treasured rare moments of peace as the Czech language of childhood—with its peculiar diminutives and sing-songy tones—filled the playground.  Over time, I began to recognize other regulars who frequented the park. But we rarely spoke, unless we were forced to share the same bench—or if someone felt obliged to point out that my kid really should be wearing a winter hat in February. I was grateful for this ability to co-exist in silence, which gave my mind time to wander. Playgrounds, I learned, encourage imagination—and not just among children.

Often, as I sat on one of the playground’s plastic park benches, my daydreams fixated on the former customs house located just a few steps away. The name “Výtoň,” I soon learned, most likely emerged from the verb “to take a cut” (vytínat), referring to the duty levied upon goods traveling by boat to the city. Before the 20th century, Výtoň was one of Prague’s poorest neighborhoods. Many of its inhabitants earned a meager living pulling from the river timber that floated toward Prague from the south Bohemian forests. In the winter, many of these same inhabitants chopped ice from the river for the city’s pubs. They had children, too, yet we know almost nothing about these parents’ lives, or where their kids played.

Though I don’t know the exact date in which the Výtoň playground was built, looking at historical maps of the neighborhood, a green space first appears on the site of today’s playground in 1950. This tracks with the transformations that took place in Prague before Communists seized power: During the first half of the 20th century, grand, middle-class apartment buildings; state government offices; and houses that remain some of the city’s premier examples of cubist architecture replaced the neighborhood’s rickety structures and local prison.

Výtoň and other playgrounds that emerged as part of these urban renewal efforts speak to the progressive impulse to provide all children with a place to play. They are reminders that well-planned public spaces can create a sense of community and respite. Their absence, and decay, point to the ways that urban geographies magnify privilege and inequalities.

For my family and me, the most important effect of these plans and designs was the way that they created a sense of belonging. The playground became a place in which I could imagine myself playing a minor role in my story of its—our— neighborhood, a story told through brief neighborly encounters and soothing moments of solitude accompanied by the soundtrack of the city. It was there, daydreaming on a plastic green park bench and watching my kids play with their peers, that my foreignness faded and Prague started to become a home. In a way that no other place could, Výtoň’s playground welcomed us into the life of the city.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> The Playground That Helped Make Prague Feel Like Home appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Franco-American, as in canned spaghetti?” some ask.

I roll my eyes and sigh. “No connection whatsoever.”

Geographically, Franco-Americans resemble Mexican Americans in the Southwest because we also live near our cultural homeland. But unlike Mexican Americans, we’re unknown outside our region. Quite accurately, Maine journalist Dyke Hendrickson titled his 1980 book about Franco-Americans Quiet Presence. The source of this inconspicuous group identity lies in our ethnically and religiously mixed relationship to the United States, Québec, and even pre-revolutionary France, which has given Franco-Americans a highly varied and personal sense of what our identity means.

From the earliest French expedition to the Carolinas in 1524, to the founding of Québec City in 1608, New France eventually extended across North America from the Appalachians to the Rockies, and south to the Gulf of Mexico. But over time, through conquests, treaties, and land sales, French North American colonies became part of the British Empire, or of the United States. The only exceptions were islands near Newfoundland and in the Caribbean, plus an independent Haiti.

For socioeconomic and political reasons, as second-class citizens under British rule in the very country they had founded, roughly 900,000 French Canadians left Québec between the 1840s and the Great Depression. Many settled in New England and eastern New York state. The earliest migrants, mostly farmers, engaged in agriculture or logging in rural areas, or in the manufacture of textiles, shoes, paper, and other goods in urban areas. After the Civil War, when migration increased drastically, members of Québec’s business and professional classes settled among their compatriots. Today, Franco-American descendants of the original French Canadian immigrants total more than three million.

Among the region’s mill towns, there emerged four with Franco-American populations significant enough to vie for the unofficial title of French-speaking capital: Lewiston, Maine; Manchester, New Hampshire; Lowell, Massachusetts; and Woonsocket, Rhode Island. These cities and others had Franco-American neighborhoods called Petit Canada (Little Canada), comprised of residences, churches, schools, businesses, social organizations, newspapers, and other institutions designed to preserve the French language and Franco-American culture. There, one could be born, educated, work, shop, pray, play, die, and be buried almost entirely in French. Streets with names such as Notre Dame, Cartier, and Dubuque were lined with multi-family houses in whose yards there might be a shrine to the Sainte Vierge Marie, the Sacré-Coeur de Jésus or to one’s favorite saint. From those homes came the aroma of tourtière (pork pie), tarte au sucre (maple sugar pie), and other delights.

Unlike other groups who’ve become well known, most Franco-Americans tend to live and practice their culture in intimate, unassuming, and conservative ways. In my opinion, the root of this unobtrusiveness lies in our history.

The 1789 French Revolution didn’t merely topple the king and replace the monarchy with a republic, it also attacked the Roman Catholic Church and made freethinkers of the French masses. Having left France a century earlier, our ancestors missed that Revolution.

Bird’s-eye view of Manchester looking from downtown toward the mills of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company and beyond to the Franco-American West Side. Photo by Ulric Bourgeois, 1925

Fast-forward to Québec’s Révolution Tranquille (Quiet Revolution) of the 1960s, which had somewhat the same effects on the previously Catholic-clergy-dominated Québécois as did the French Revolution on the French people. But by the time of that revolution, Franco-Americans were already living in the United States.

Yet even though the Franco half of our collective psyche missed both revolutions and remained in the past, the American half of our dual identity experienced the future-focused sociocultural revolution of the 1960s in the United States. This phenomenon applies mainly to baby boomers, whose Franco identity was already on the wane by the 1960s, while their American identity was susceptible to influences of the times, as is evidenced by the subsequent rise in outright secularism or, in adherents of cafeteria Catholicism, the rise in divorce, cohabitation, contraception, and other practices considered taboo by the Catholic Church.

In fact, each family—and each person, really—has a slightly different sense of what being Franco-American is. Consider my hometown, Manchester, New Hampshire, where the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company (1831-1936) attracted immigrants from Québec and Europe from the mid-19th through the early-20th centuries. With Manchester’s total population at 78,384 (1920 U.S. Census), Amoskeag’s work force peaked at 17,000, some 40 percent of whom were Franco-Americans. At its highest, Manchester’s Franco-American population reached nearly 50% of the city’s total. To serve their needs, they created their own institutions—for example, eight parishes, all of which included a church and a grammar school, and in some cases, a high school. The social services sector comprised orphanages, hospices for the aged and the indigent, and a hospital.

I was born in 1951 and, unlike many Franco-Americans, my family lived across the Merrimack River from Manchester’s Petit Canada, where we were the French family among Scottish, Irish, Polish, Greek, Swedish, and other ethnicities. Although my father’s relatives spoke French, they favored English. Other than belonging to St. George, one of Manchester’s eight French-language parishes, they weren’t members of any Franco-American institutions. By contrast, my mother’s relatives spoke French exclusively and were heavily involved in various aspects of Franco-American culture. Out of respect for my maternal grandparents, French was the chosen language in our home when I was a young child.

My awareness of the difference between our family and others increased when I started school. Nearly every neighborhood kid attended either the public school around the corner from our house or an English-language parochial school somewhat farther away. Meanwhile, I attended St. George, which was Franco-American. There, French and English were taught to us on an equal level, each during its half of the school day. We had to be fluent in both languages upon entering first grade.

Our most important subject was catéchisme, almost as if French were the official language of heaven. Surprisingly, l’histoire du Canada wasn’t taught, nor was Franco-American history. In fact, I don’t recall the term Franco-American having ever been pronounced in class. And as for Acadians, a separate branch of French North Americans, I learned of their existence and that of their Cajun cousins only through my research as an adult!

These terms themselves show how difficult it is to describe the multi-faceted identity of being Franco-American. That term in French—Franco-Américain—is something my maternal grandfather, uncles, and aunts all used. My mother always said we were Canadiens, despite our having been born in the United States. Anglophone kids called us French, and some adults called us French Canadians and still do. Franco-American seems to be a term used mainly by community activists.

Nowadays, much of the daily culture that Franco-Americans once lived by is practiced outside the home during festivities such as the feast of the French Canadian patron saint, la Saint-Jean-Baptiste on June 24. In Manchester, one can eat some of the aforementioned traditional foods in a few restaurants, including the popular Chez Vachon, a must-stop for candidates during New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary. There, the specialty is poutine (French fries and cheese curds in gravy), a late-20th-century Québécois invention some call a heart attack on a plate.

Franco-American identity manifests itself more strongly through organizations such as the Franco-American Centre/Centre Franco-Américain, which offers French classes, films, lectures, and other events, and the American Canadian Genealogical Society, where Franco-Americans from all over the United States come to Manchester to trace their ancestral roots.

With every generation, most Franco-Americans have put a bit more American water in their French wine. Many today don’t speak French and know little about their ethnic heritage. In the United States, pressure from proponents of the English language and American culture has accelerated this evolution. Whereas people once spoke French on the street, in stores, in restaurants, and elsewhere, and whereas Manchester almost always had a Franco-American mayor, such phenomena are now things of the past.

Though many Franco-Americans are such in name only now, our family is an exception. My wife is the first woman I ever dated who introduced me to her mother in French. We raised our son in French. He and his wife, a former student of mine, are doing likewise, the seventh generation of French-speaking Perreaults living on U.S. soil.

To us and to a minority of Franco-American families in our region, the French language and our Franco-American culture are gifts we lovingly pass on from generation to generation.

The post Why We French Canadians Are Neither French nor Canadian appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Patriotism may be defined as a belief in the greatness, if not superiority, of one’s country relative to others. Depending on how one defines the term exactly, somewhere between 85 to 90% of America’s poor are “patriotic.” They would rather be citizens of their country, for instance, than of any other country on Earth, and they think America is a better place than most other places in the world.

This is striking for at least three reasons. First, those are very high figures in absolute terms. Secondly, the corresponding figures for working class, middle class, and upper class Americans are generally lower. And, thirdly, the worst-off in most other advanced nations are also less patriotic than America’s—even in countries where people receive better social benefits from their government, work fewer hours, and have better chances of upward intergenerational mobility than their counterparts in the United States.

Why are America’s poor so patriotic? The short answer is: We don’t know for sure. And we should, because so much depends on the patriotism of poor Americans. Their love of country contributes to social stability, informs and supports America’s understanding of itself as a special place, and is essential for military recruitment. It is also a force that can be tapped into by politicians eager to rally a large contingent of voters.

To understand this patriotism, I spent parts of 2015 and 2016 in Alabama and Montana—two distinctly different states that are both ‘hotbeds’ of patriotism among the poor. I hung out in laundromats, bus stations, homeless shelters, public libraries, senior citizen centers, used-clothing stores, run-down neighborhoods, and other venues. And I interviewed 63 poor Americans of different ages, genders, religious and political orientations, races, and histories of military service.

I came away with three overarching insights.

First, many view the United States as the “last hope”—for themselves and the world. Their strong sense is that the country offers its people a sense of dignity, a closeness to God, and answers to most of humanity’s problems. Deprive us of our country, the people I met told me, and you deprive us of the only thing that is left for us to hang on to.

This feeling of ownership is national and personal. Consider the words of Shirley (all names here are pseudonyms, per my research rules), a 46-year-old unemployed black woman in Birmingham with plans to become a chef: “For me to give up hope on the country in which I live in is almost to give up hope for self. So I gotta keep the light burning for me and for my country or I’m gonna be in the dark.”

That comment connected to a second insight. America appeals to the poor because it is rich. “The land of milk and honey” was a phrase I heard often. The poor see it as a place where those who work hard have a chance to succeed. In my interviews, people separated the country’s possibilities from their own frustrations; many took full responsibility for their own troubles in life. “People make their own life, make their own money the way that they wanna make it and however much they wanna make it,” said Jeff, a white man in a bus station in Billings, Montana.

Many saw this as an American virtue. Here, at least, your failures belong to you. Your chances aren’t taken away by others. “If you fail,” said Harley, a vet now on food stamps, “gotta be bad choices.” This sentiment was articulated with particular frequency by African American interviewees in Alabama—something that particularly struck me, given the legacies of slavery and segregation in that part of the country.

For the same reason, many were confident that the future was about to bring them better things. Several felt that they had just turned a corner—perhaps with God on their side. Rich Americans, they told me, deserve what they have. Besides, they added, look at the rest of the world: They keep trying to come to America. This must be the place to be.

That related to a third source of pride in the nation: America is the freest country on earth. Many of the people I met spoke of feeling very free to come and go from different places, and to think as they wish. America allows people to be as they want, with few preconceived notions about what the good life should look like. Such a narrative took on libertarian tones in Montana.

For some, this included the freedom to be homeless, if they choose. As Marshall, a young, white homeless man, told me in Billings, “it’s a very free country. I mean, I’m actually, I live on the streets, I’m kinda choosing to do that … sabbatical. Nobody bothers me for it; I’m not bothering anybody. I got my own little nook. There are other places in the world where I’d be forced into some place to shelter up or, you know, herded off or … jailed.”

When conversations turned to freedom, guns were often mentioned. Guns give one security and make hunting possible—enabling one to feed one’s self and family. I was accordingly often reminded that Americans rebelled against the English by making guns. Guns equal freedom. And America, thankfully, ensures gun ownership.

Taken together, these conversations helped me understand that the patriotism of the poor is rooted in a widespread belief that America belongs to its people. There is a bottom-up, instinctive, protective, and intense identification with the country. This is a people’s country.

Of course, some of this patriotism is clearly grounded in misconceptions about other countries. One person told me that there are only two democracies in the world: Israel and the United States. Another told me that Japan is a communist country. Yet another that in Germany one’s tongue can get cut off for a minor crime. Many also assumed that other countries are poorer than they really are. But these were almost tangential reflections that further justified—rather than drive—their commitment to the country. They seldom came up on their own unless I asked about the limitations of other countries.

As I completed my interviews and reflected on what I heard from these patriots, I realized that their beliefs about America are not a puzzle to be solved. In America, there is no contradiction between one’s difficult life trajectories and one’s love of country. If anything, those in difficulty have more reasons than most of us to believe in the promise of America.

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