Shakespeare/Beckett/Transversality

In this seminar we will view and listen to Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett as the transversal beginning and end of the project of sovereignty. We will pay attention to the way film versions of Shakespeare foreground the transversal against the sovereign, and the way contextual staging of Beckett, especially Waiting for Godot do the same.

Attention will be paid to the emerging logics of race in Shakespeare and the ordering of gender and sexuality. In Beckett, we will pick up these logics centuries later. We will consider the African Grove Theatre, a Black-run theatre started in New York in 1821 featuring all Black productions. We will read the work of Ayanna Thompson and Errol Hill, among others.