“The Direful Spectacle of the Wrack”: Teaching against Colonialism through Shipwrecks and Shakespeare

Authors

Sara A. Rich, Rhode Island School of DesignFollow

Date of this Version

2024

Document Type

Article

Citation

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council (2024) 25(1): 91–121

Abstract

It has become increasingly apparent that anti-colonial and anti-racist pedagogies are necessary in higher education classrooms, and honors education as an experimental zone is an ideal place to test ideas that can be taken into the wider university community. Honors professors epitomize the teacher-scholar model, and this paper presents a six-year trajectory of anti-colonial pedagogy coupled with original interdisciplinary research in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Bringing canonical Shakespeare into conversation with historical shipwrecks and their aftermath, students learn how The Tempest was written at a pivotal point in history, coincidentally situated in the same year as the earliest “golden spike” marking the start of the Anthropocene Epoch. This remarkable overlap of archaeological and literary chronologies suggests a clear starting point for introducing students to the entanglements of exploration, empire, slavery, genocide, misogyny, and environmental degradation that have marked the last five centuries. By reading Shakespeare’s original text alongside Aimé Césaire’s and Marina Warner’s twentieth-century adaptations, students build knowledge on the origins and legacies of colonial and postcolonial thought and learn to situate the artistic efforts that exemplify each into the controversies surrounding ecological and social justice movements today. The paper concludes with a selection of students’ own voices and creative projects to illustrate their approaches to redressing some of their own concerns surrounding neocolonial legacies.