On their co-edited book Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance
Cover Interview of December 26, 2010
Lastly
Macbeth’s insistent language of blood and staining seeps into American racial rhetoric. Macbeth focuses on the indelible quality of blood, that smelling substance that Lady Macbeth can’t fully wash from her hands.
This unnervingly coincides with early American debates about the nature—the essence—of race. On the one hand (excuse the pun), the proponents of slavery (and later segregation) insist that the blood is the thing: the essential, internal substance that marks races, even down to a single drop. On the other hand, many opponents of slavery (and later segregation) quote passages about blood from Macbeth in their protest speeches: the external mark that stains America’s formation and history.
We feel that the very weyward qualities—in all of their myriad complexities—of Shakespeare’s playtext, its performance history, and the critical scholarship must be brought into focus so that our desires for progressive acts are not disabled before they even begin. A conscious remembering, revisioning, and restaging is the true first step to change and progress.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
Lastly
Macbeth’s insistent language of blood and staining seeps into American racial rhetoric. Macbeth focuses on the indelible quality of blood, that smelling substance that Lady Macbeth can’t fully wash from her hands.
This unnervingly coincides with early American debates about the nature—the essence—of race. On the one hand (excuse the pun), the proponents of slavery (and later segregation) insist that the blood is the thing: the essential, internal substance that marks races, even down to a single drop. On the other hand, many opponents of slavery (and later segregation) quote passages about blood from Macbeth in their protest speeches: the external mark that stains America’s formation and history.
We feel that the very weyward qualities—in all of their myriad complexities—of Shakespeare’s playtext, its performance history, and the critical scholarship must be brought into focus so that our desires for progressive acts are not disabled before they even begin. A conscious remembering, revisioning, and restaging is the true first step to change and progress.
© 2010 Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson