received a prestigious Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship that facilitated his yearlong residency with New York Times bestselling author Claudia Rankine’s The Racial Imaginary Institute, of which he remains a full-time Curatorial Team member. In Fall 2023, Brown launched a virtual-reality art gallery and exhibition—“Visualizing Race Virtually”—that is an interactive, immersive, direct visual complement to his new book, Shakespeare’s White Others. Currently, Brown is working on a few new research projects, including some shorter essays and his second book titled Hood Pedagogy. To date, he has published numerous essays and given myriad talks on Shakespeare, race, mental health and more.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to Shakespeare’s White Others and reported the following:
Upon turning to page 99 in Shakespeare’s White Others, readers will find themselves right in the middle of my book, in Chapter 3: “On the Other Hand: The White(ned) Woman in Antony and Cleopatra.” While page 99 offers useful insight into my book’s critically engaged concerns—racial whiteness, anti-Blackness, early modern English conduct, “white self-fashioning,” gender dynamics and tension, theatrical devices and intertextual connections, for example—page 99 does not enable readers to see how Chapter 3, and the book as a whole, offers so much more, especially as it pertains to the critical theories, the “white other” and “intraracial color-line,” that I deploy so the broad audience I dreamed of reaching can re(read) Shakespeare and reflect on how racial whiteness operates globally with or without the presence of Blackness.Visit David Sterling Brown's website, and check out the virtual-reality art gallery exhibition that offers visitors an immersive, interactive experience that allows them to see the book’s key concepts in action through art.
In Shakespeare’s White Others, I define the white other as a covert tool for maintaining what bell hooks describes in Black Looks: Race and Representation as “the dominator imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture.” The white other contrasts with idealized hegemonic whiteness; and reinforces popular and evolving stereotypes about racial Blackness. More significantly, the white other indicates how attitudes toward whiteness are mediated through Blackness and black images. Whenever necessary, in order to reinforce the goodness and supremacy of hegemonic whiteness, images of blackness appear as distant from whiteness through the white other construct. Such mediation creates racialized boundaries between white people along lines of superiority/inferiority, ingroup/outgroup—familiar social and psychological dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion that generate racialized harm. Building on sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’ interracial “color-line” theory, the intraracial color-line delineates distinctions among early modern English white people that rely on the devaluing of somatically similar white people, the white others, who violate the dominant culture’s norms.
Through a full exploration of Shakespeare’s White Others, readers will discover how my book makes current the centuries-old lessons embedded in Shakespearean drama. Moreover, readers will sit with an accessible and rich critical-personal-experiential study that is deeply invested in raising awareness about various subjects and socio-political issues that impact us all: trauma, domestic violence, gun violence, gentrification, mental health, sexual violence, intimate partner violence, Black Lives Matter, family dynamics, misogynoir, identity, race(ism), sexism, stereotypes, English Black history, Black feminism, policing (of whiteness, of self, of Blackness), colonialism, colorism, enslavement, anti-Black state violence, child abuse, domesticity, Tupac (“Changes” song), Jewishness, psycho-sexual violence, lynching, art, interracial relationships, pedagogy, PTSD, addiction, borderline personality disorder, “racecraft,” Get Out (Jordan Peele), tragedy, white privilege, white supremacy, Michael Jackson (“Black or White” song), racial profiling and more.
--Marshal Zeringue
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