Humanities

Talk by Professor Arthur L. Little, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles This talk, which begins with Ben Jonson’s reading of Shakespeare in the First Folio and ends with the promotion of the iconic image of Lawrence Olivier as Hamlet in that play’s graveyard scene, focuses in between on the citation of a racialized Blackness circulating throughout Shakespeare’s plays. By “citation,” this talk means the act of gesturing towards a Black presence, for example, the jewel in an Ethiop’s ear in Romeo and Juliet, without the possibility of the Black figure being so conjured having any interlocutory or subjective possibilities. In the...