Could Shakespeare Have Known

I find myself in a dilemma-the peculiar dilemma of the Black scholar who must explain and legitimize his interest in investigating the Black side of the question. The role is clear in the fields of history, sociology and psychology. We admit to Black Art, Black Music, Afro-American Literature and even highbrows are tolerant of the concept of Black Economics. But in the area of English literature the field is clouded with snobbery. The authors here are inviolate, untouchable, uncorrupted by the evil eye of bigotry and racial prejudice. The art of the British moves serenely on the larger reflection of man, truth to nature, a slice of life, the imitation of human action, thought and feeling. The British are untainted with any undue pre-occupation with the Black situation. Man is man in general in British literature, and his color and culture mere accidents, not worth scholarship in light of the greater question of his universality. Norman Verrle McCullough warns us in his suspiciously erudite book, The Negro in English Literature,1 that probing into the race concept in English Literature is often symptomatic of the disease of Negrophobia. In his chapter, and the Man of Colour, he tells us authoritatively that the idea of race though probably only incidental to Shakespeare and the Elizabethan, has been magnified to major proportions; but this reaction is doubtless the result of modern-day Negrophobia.2 But my predicament is real. I am Black. I am preparing to write a Ph.D. dissertation in an area of English literature which I appreciate, admire and love. Yet, I am paralysed to devote two hundred pages of research to fields that do not intimately concern my world, my obsession-and I admit it is an obsession-with securing and containing my Black identity

Mathematics education · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · South Asian Cinema and Culture