Columbia Shakespeare Seminar: Melissa Sanchez

Abstract: This paper examines the conceptual intersections of a secularized view of faith, on the one hand, and a racialization of sincerity, on the other, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Feminist and queer of color critique has long censured the association of sexual respectability with whiteness and social privilege, but this work generally dates the advent of that association to the establishment of modern slavery and colonialism. In Shakespeare’s Sonnets, however, we have a premodern instance of what Sharon Holland calls “the erotic life of racism,” in which fantasies of essential difference reveal the entanglement of personal and political desire. The Sonnets register the development of a fiction of somatic, heritable whiteness as a correlate of normative sexuality. Yet in their depiction of a three-way affair between the poet, the young man, and the dark lady, these poems dissolve the series of oppositions they should embody, along with the racial taxonomies onto which these oppositions are frequently mapped: agency and passivity, mastery and submission, fidelity and promiscuity, purity and pollution. It is in this dissolution, I argue, that the Sonnets are truest to a Protestant understanding of the ineradicable promiscuity of faith.

The event will be held in Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive. As always social hour will be from 5-6, dinner 6-7, and the talk 7-8:30. Please email Alexander Lash to request a copy of the Evite. The cost for dinner, payable by check only, is now $30. When you RSVP please indicate whether or not you plan to come to dinner (by Tuesday April 11).