The Color of Professionalism: A Response to Dennis Britton

Abstract

Responding to Britton’s address, Miles Grier argues that the most effective way to shift the standpoint of the implied white male figure of the Shakespeare scholar is to train our critical attention on the temporal boundaries that permit specialization in a period called “early modernity.” Rather than entertaining accusations that scholars of color conduct parochial or otherwise distorted work, he considers how scholars invested in whiteness might feel when race studies poses a disorienting relocation of period markers. He concludes that an engagement with the social analyses bequeathed by non-Europeans may cause us to revise the names and durations of eras—as well as the shape of time’s movement.