Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Colloquia Series “The Dark Side of Fairness: Risk, Reward, and Racial Justice in The Merchant of Venice after #BlackLivesMatter” With Vimala C. Pasupathi (Associate Dean, Honors College, Hofstra University) Wednesday, February 24, 2021 | 1:00 p.m. – 2:25 p.m. (No RSVP Necessary) Go to events.hofstra.edu for the Zoom Link
“The Dark Side of Fairness: Risk, Reward, and Racial Justice in The Merchant of Venice after #BlackLivesMatter” examines race and early modern legal and economic institutions in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596). The essay’s title hinges on the respective (and distinct) 16th century and 21st century valences of the operative term “fair,” including the early modern use to mean attractive, valuable, and virtuous, as well as the primary modern sense of equitable dealing, as well as the trans-historically common use of the term to mean lightskinned. Many scholars have pointed out the degree to which the word “fair” is gendered, racialized, and inflected by religion and socio-economic status; my reading of the play focuses on fairness and risk to interrogate the privileges afforded to whiteness, if not also or simultaneously “white” people, and to show how Shakespeare’s portrayal of these privileges in Merchant resonates with events crucial to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in recent American history. In particular, I attend to the play’s depiction of the “fairness” of Venetian characters and justice in light of Grand Jury decisions regarding police officers for the lethal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and choking of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York.