I chose to audit Dr. Corredera’s Shakespeare, Race and Adaptation English class (ENG430) this semester, mostly because my friends were taking it too. I’ve never had a great love for Shakespeare’s plays or poems and didn’t find them particularly entertaining to read in high school, but this class changed that for me. Reading articles that delved deeper into the politics of Shakespeare and what his stories mean to us today was especially interesting when tied to familiar adaptations like “Get Out” and music video references to “Romeo and Juliet,” since these current works show how Shakespeare has clearly retained his relevance in pop culture for years and years past his death. One of the projects that our class was assigned to during our Shakespeare’s sonnets unit was a creative project inspired by the works of Suzanne Coley, a textile artist based in Baltimore. She interprets and speaks back to the works of Shakespeare using a feminist and postcolonial lens with various fabrics and inks to create visual art such as collage books and prints. Our objective for the “collage project” was to similarly explore the themes of gender and race that are present in the Dark Lady sonnets in which Shakespeare writes about a woman that he is in love with. I spoke to some of the students in my class about what their projects were about, their inspirations, and how they felt about doing a creative/visual English project.
Terika Williams (senior, English and Spanish): I thought the project was really cool. Dr Corredera's assignment allowed us to use physical art, things like glue and paint that you don't really get to use since kindergarten. We had the choice to do it digitally and I thought it’d be fun to do a textile project. When we looked at Suzanne Coley’s work I saw that she used a lot of overlapping photos to tell a bigger message, so I thought I'd do the same. I was mainly influenced by Sonnets 18 and 130, which praises Eurocentric ideals of beauty while degrading the “Dark lady” using racist language. I wanted to show that Black women have been stereotyped and burdened with being the “most disrespected and most neglected person in America,” to quote Malcolm X. With my project, I wanted to show that although Black women somewhat exist in this space of stereotypes (angry, too strong, ugly), they are beautiful and can embrace features that have previously been looked down upon.
Izzy Koh (senior, English): I created a multi-media collage based on Sonnet 101 by Shakespeare, which talks about legacies of fairness. I used a lot of nature symbolism and patterns and colors to show mirrored and contrasting notions of lineage and interconnectedness when it comes to race. I really enjoy projects like these because they let my mind think in a different way and I love the tangible aspect of it because I have a physical project that I can interact with as well.
Alexander Hess (senior, English): For my sonnet project I expanded on Suzanne Coley’s sonnet textiles (which uses quilting to reimagine Shakespeare’s sonnets in resistant, artistic ways) but through paintings instead of fabric. With the help of a background editor, I spliced, edited, and reformatted various paintings by Afro-Cuban artist Harmonia Rosales and created a totally new image which celebrates divine, Black femininity. In doing so, I purposefully create dissonance between Shakespeare’s racist characterization of Black femininity and Rosales’s paintings which celebrate Blackness and diasporic Black culture. While this project was a TON of work, I appreciated how it pushed me outside of my comfort zone and helped me play with art in ways that I’d never tried before. Additionally, it helped me expand my interest in considering how visual art can provide meaningful forms of resistance to systems of oppression and bigotry.
Dr. Corredera’s project gave all of us a wonderful way of applying our theoretical texts and class discussions into a visual medium, and I loved seeing all of my classmates’ different methods for creating a textual work of art. Although we all tackled Shakespeare’s sonnets, we chose different imagery and specific themes that were more personal to us, which let me see how students can find multiple layers of meaning in the same set of poems and even in the same lines. I also appreciated the opportunity to use poem analysis and storytelling in a way that I usually don’t get in English classes because intersections of art and writing can be really great in helping us understand works from different time periods, especially in the ways that they still maintain their relevance in our culture today.
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