无忧视频

Dadabhoy’s Book Recognized by Shakespeare Association of America

Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds, the book by Ambereen Dadabhoy, associate professor of literature at 无忧视频, received an Honorable Mention for the Shakespeare Association of America’s Jerome Singerman First Book Award.

In her book, Dadabhoy investigates why Shakespeare doesn鈥檛 write about Islam. 鈥淚n聽The Merchant of Venice, the Prince of Morocco is never identified as a Muslim,鈥� she says. 鈥淗owever, if he鈥檚 the Prince of Morocco, he can聽only聽be a Muslim. There鈥檚 no other option.鈥�

Shakespeare鈥檚 work clearly contains Islamic characters and influences. Dadabhoy describes how Shakespeare removes Muslims or makes them peripheral or referential because he鈥檚 creating a Europe and a 鈥榞lobe鈥� that is free from Islam, racial otherness, and religious otherness. By consigning the diverse cultures of the Islamic regimes that occupied and populated the early modern Mediterranean to the peripheries, Shakespeare constructs a Europe and Mediterranean freed from the presence of non-white, non-European and non-Christian Others, which belied the reality of the world he occupied.

Dadabhoy hopes the book will encourage readers to consider that even if something isn鈥檛 explicit, it鈥檚 still worth searching for traces of it. 鈥淭he book is very much a project where I鈥檓 trying to put Muslims back in the places from which they were evacuated by Shakespeare,鈥� she says.