Ep. 296 Gatekeeping Around Shakespeare with Farah Karim-Cooper

Written By Cherie Marquez

Author and professor Farah Karim-Cooper joins The Stacks to talk about her book The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking about Race. Farah reveals how she came to be a Shakespeare and race scholar, and how her work has been received thus far. We also discuss her favorite plays by Shakespeare, and the ways in which his legacy doesn’t match up with who he was in his life.

The Stacks Book Club selection for December is Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. We will discuss the book on December 27th with Farah Karim-Cooper.

 
 

Everything we talk about on today’s episode can be found below in the show notes and on Bookshop.org and Amazon

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TRANSCRIPT
*Due to the nature of podcast advertising, these timestamps are not 100% accurate and will vary.

Traci Thomas 0:08
Welcome to The Stacks, a podcast about books and the people who read them. I’m your host Traci Thomas and I am thrilled to finally announce that we are going to talk about William Shakespeare on this podcast. Our guest today is Farah Karim Cooper, a professor of Shakespeare studies at King’s College London and the co-director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe. Her book is The Great White Bard: how to love Shakespeare while talking about race. And the book analyzes Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of race by plumbing his work for a deeper, more complex understanding and modern times. As you all know, I love Shakespeare and I am thrilled to finally give his work some serious consideration on the podcast. Today we talked about why Farrah wanted to dedicate her life’s work to Shakespeare, her favorite and least favorite of his plays, and which one she would assigned to high school students. Barra will return on December 27 for the Stax book club episode where we will discuss Romeo and Juliet, which I’m sure you know is arguably one of Shakespeare’s most well known and beloved plays. Quick reminder, everything we talked about on each episode of the stacks can be found in the link in the show notes. And now it is time for my conversation with Farah Karim-Cooper.

All right, everybody. The way that I am excited for this interview is beyond. I think that anything I could articulate but many of you know I am a lover of Shakespeare. And we are finally going to talk about William Shakespeare on the podcast. I am joined today by Farah Karim-Cooper, who wrote the book The Great White Bard: how to love Shakespeare while talking about race. Farah, welcome to the stacks.

Farah Karim-Cooper 2:41
Thank you so much. And thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Traci Thomas 2:45
I’m you have no idea how excited I am. I like almost cried talking about it yesterday with people in the stacks back. I’ll tell you about my background in a second. But for our listeners, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you come from what you’re into, give us like a little bio, but it doesn’t have to be like your professional bio. It can be like a little more about Farah.

Farah Karim-Cooper 3:08
Okay, well, so I’m from. I’m from a lot of places, actually. So I was born in Pakistan, my family moved to England. And then when I was about seven, we moved to Texas. So I grew up in Texas. And I kind of really identify as sort of Texan. But I moved or actually American. And then I moved to England in 1997, to come here and do my graduate studies. And then I ended up meeting my husband here, my ex husband, I should say, and we had a daughter, and she’s amazing. And she’s studying acting. Right now. She’s 19. And I’ve worked at the Globe. I’m the director of education there. And I was kind of drawn to that job because when I first moved here as a grad student, it just literally was about to open. And I was so excited to think how first of all, an American was responsible for building the globe or the idea behind it. Sam Wanamaker and also, just the idea that we could sort of act in the Playhouse that Shakespeare would have written for, was thrilling. And of course, I’ve been there for 19 years now.

Traci Thomas 4:26
So cool. Yeah, I am like your daughter. I was an actress though I’m not anymore. And that’s how I really came to love Shakespeare was through the theater. So I recently I think toilet 2018 through 2021. I went back and I finally read every single play.

Farah Karim-Cooper 4:48
Oh my god, King John.

Traci Thomas 4:52
Constance, my girl. I actually used to do one of Constance monologues as an audition in college. Oh wow.

Farah Karim-Cooper 4:59
Amazing.

Traci Thomas 5:00
Yeah, I went back. I did them all. in publication order, though, I know that I just picked a list and did it that way. But I hadn’t read them all. And I said, I love Shakespeare. So I said, I do it. But I do love Shakespeare and I, you know, I’m a black woman. And so I’ve contended with a lot of race in the text, but also around the shows. And so when I saw your book, I was like, Oh, we’re gonna have to finally do it on the show. I think you’re friends with Ayana Thompson, right? Yes, she’s my best friend. We’re okay. So she did a bonus episode with us. Right after I finished reading everything. And we talked a little bit about it. So that was really a joyful thing. She’s great. And then it turned out she was the dramaturg on the Macbeth that my friend was like, Assistant directing on Broadway with Craig. So I got to meet her in person at opening night, which was amazing.

Farah Karim-Cooper 5:49
That’s amazing. Yes, it took me to see that show.

Traci Thomas 5:52
Yeah, I thought I thought they did a really good job with it. Anyway. Yeah. Anyways, all that to say is that I come by a love of Shakespeare, from the theater. And I truly, truly love the text. And I And so your book was exciting to me, because I knew that you were going to grapple with the race, but also that it came from a place of love and admiration, as it says in the in the subtitle. So I wanted to know, I guess, way before you wrote this book, you talked about Romeo and Juliet as being sort of your gateway. How did you go from I like Shakespeare to being like, I want to be a Shakespeare scholar, because that’s sort of a leap, right? Like, everybody loves that for Ellie’s Romeo and Juliet. But not everybody dedicates their life to it.

Farah Karim-Cooper 6:32
No, it’s true. I mean, the rest of high school like there was because that was my freshman year in high school when I met that play, and I met that that film, but the rest of high school, Shakespeare was taught in such an uninspiring way that I just never really got excited about Shakespeare again. And I remember I was thinking, Oh, when I graduated high school, I think I’ll try to go to law school, or I’ll do pre law or something like that. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. And then cliche. I saw, I saw the movie because I was old enough now to have seen it in the cinema, a Dead Poets Society. The year I was graduating high school, and I thought, Oh, that would be fun to teach English. And it’s not that I necessarily connected with a group of privileged, white school boys in the east coast. But I just thought it was really inspiring. And there was just so much literature in it. And I thought, well, major and English, that’ll be fun. And I did. And then I met this amazing professor, who, she, I still see her at conferences now, which is amazing. But she taught undergraduate Shakespeare course. And she walked into the first day she walked in, she had this like, amazing hair, and she wore beautiful, like, impeccable suits, and her shoes, and her bag always matched. And then she’d start talking about Shakespeare, and I just like, could listen to her forever, because she was so interesting. And she kind of brought out all the kind of juicy parts of Shakespeare. And it was at that moment that I thought actually, I kind of like to be a professor, you know, I want to know everything there is to know about Shakespeare, and my shoes always match my bag. Really great.

Traci Thomas 8:24
Um, was there another play that sticks out to you like in those early days that really like grabbed you? Or was there something about how she taught Shakespeare that like, really sits with you? Because I just know so many people who hate Shakespeare and think it’s boring? And I always I haven’t I have a theory about that. But I’d love to hear what sticks out to you about that.

Farah Karim-Cooper 8:45
I think she used to talk about Shakespeare as if she was in the room when he was writing the plays. And that’s what I really liked about it was that she had that kind of intimacy with the language. And, and also, she was a, like a raging feminist. And I saw stuff in Shakespeare at that time that I was like, I don’t really think that I don’t think I want to be a woman in that world. But she always had a really interesting take on it. And it was as you like it that I remember her I remember her as you like it lecture. I remember she told us at the time that her thesis title was sex colon as you like it. This is going to be an interesting lecture. I love Yeah, so I guess that was a it was a really interesting play. And I remember at the time, just kind of picking up on some of the racial language in it because Phoebe’s talked about it in in sort of racialized terms. And there’s one point where it refers to her inky brows, as if it’s a bad thing. And of course, I had these big thick black eyebrows in those days, and I was like, What’s wrong with innkeeper out you know? So Oh, I think it was probably her lecture on as you like it.

Traci Thomas 10:03
I love that. Okay, so then you become a Shakespeare scholar kind of fast forwarding a little bit, you work at the Globe? What is it about race and Shakespeare, that is exciting to you? Because of course, there are Shakespeare scholars, like you mentioned your professor who came to it from like a sort of feminist angle, or you could do like sort of a queer angle, and like all the homoerotic references, and Shakespeare, or you could do you know, there’s people who just focus on the language or the time she experienced time. So what was it for you about race? Racism? racialization. That was interesting, exciting. Whatever.

Farah Karim-Cooper 10:41
Yeah. Well, I mean, it really kind of sparked when I was doing my PhD research, because I wrote about cosmetics and beauty practices in Shakespeare’s time, and on the stage. And I remember to do that I had to research what the beauty standard was, and Elizabeth in England, and I was reading all of this poetry beauty tree disease written in Italy, that were translated into English. And the same image was coming, coming up over and over again. And that was pale white skin, kind of glowing complexion, blond hair, rosy cheeks. So this was the sort of ideal, and I was like, Oh, my God, it’s whiteness, like White is what everybody wants to be. And I thought to myself, this, this is about race. So I it wasn’t that there was one text that was about race, it felt like it was a sort of ubiquitous idea, like everybody was kind of racializing and, and, and elevating whiteness to a certain level. And so I talked to my professor about it. And I had just read Tim Hall’s book, things of darkness, race, and gender, economies of race and gender and early modern England, it came out in 1995. This was 1997 when I was doing this research. And my PhD supervisor at the time I had a second one later, was like, no, no, this is a dead end, you don’t want to pursue this race is anachronistic. Nobody, nobody’s gonna be interested in this. You can’t go anywhere with this Shakespeares pre race, right. So of course, as a young graduate student, I got really put off by that and nervous and I didn’t want to do something that my PhD supervisor said would have been a bad idea. So I kind of I did talk about race in my PhD and in my book, which are on the same topic, but I didn’t do enough with it that I would have wanted to. So that’s really when I kind of began to notice that race was a thing. And Chem halls book came out at the same time. And then I just kind of went full on into kind of mainstream sort of white lens, Shakespeare, you know. And, of course, I did write a couple of essays on race and gender. But it wasn’t really like my main focus, I was writing because I was at the globe, I was writing about theatre history, and material culture and special effects and the body and phenomenology and all these really interesting things. But there was something missing from all of my, the conversations that I was having. And then I joined the board of the SAA, which is the Shakespeare Association of America in about 2016 2017. And there was this panel on the color of membership. And it was about how scholars of color are marginalized in the field. And I began to reflect on my own career, particularly in England, where gatekeeping is massive in the academic field of Shakespeare. And I thought, wow, this is my experience, too. And also, what is marginalized is scholars of color who want to talk about race, they get accused of projecting their identities onto texts and, or projecting modern ideas onto the plays. And I really just became passionate about it. Of course, I on a Thompson was my best friend, and we’ve been friends for ages. And I knew her work, and I loved her work. And you know, she and I talked about it. And so I called her up and I said, I want to host a festival at the Globe. Because the globe is this iconic thing, and I and it has a major platform. And I thought how can I make this topic, this idea more public, as well as you know, push it into the academic mainstream? And so Aiyana was like, That’s amazing. Yeah, let’s do it. So I created a Shakespeare and race Festival at the globe and 20 It ended up being in 2018. And Ayana came and she was a keynote speaker and we had an extraordinary time but also there was so much I learned about how far behind England was in these conversations. Actors directors had been, you know, we we had them on stage talking about how difficult it was to be an actor of color in the industry. And, you know, it was everything from acting to teaching was was on the table. And so I just kind of made it my life’s mission to kind of get that story into the mainstream because it’s not a subfield, it’s the field itself. And it had implications for the fact that there are no Shakespeare scholars of color at the time that you were full professors. And then I became a full professor in 2020. And I’m the only Shakespeare scholar of color in England, who is a professor there.

Traci Thomas 15:41
The book and I was literally like, why?

Farah Karim-Cooper 15:44
I actually got it wrong in the book and the book, I said, there’s three of us, but actually two of us are early modern literature scholars, I’m the only one with Shakespeare studies in my title.

Traci Thomas 15:57
Okay, I have so many questions. I’m like, I’m so stressed out, because I have so many questions for you. We don’t have a million hours, which I wish we did. But I want to ask you about the reception to your work because I without ever opening the book. I was like, Ooh, I bet gets it. I was like, Ooh, I bet people do not want this woman of color taught telling them about their favorite white boy. Genius literature author, yeah, writer. But I also have been in like, I used to, I studied Shakespeare, I did Shakespeare shows like I was very into Shakespeare. So I know what’s in the text. And I know what it’s like to want to be in the show. And to be like, well, you can play. Paris pleases Miami. Bleh, the nurse? So I want to know, sort of what your when you set out to do the thing? Did you know people were going to be upset with you. Were you shocked by any pushback? Did you find any of the pushback to be particularly valid or helpful for you moving forward? Like were there things that people were saying about? And I guess I should say this, part of the reason that a lot of people push back is because Shakespeare is quote, unquote, pre race race didn’t exist. And so you talk a lot about race making and how his work sort of helped to create what we understand as race now. But I know that some of the pushback I’ve heard you talk about was about like, leave race out of this. It didn’t exist at the time. So were there things that you were hearing that were helpful or constructive? Or was it all just nonsense?

Farah Karim-Cooper 17:46
Yeah, I mean, that’s such a good question. So before the book came out, I started doing a lot of public facing work at the globe on race. So I did a couple of Shakespeare and race festivals. And then in 2021, I launched a series of anti racist Shakespeare webinars. And

Traci Thomas 18:11
I don’t feel great about this.

Farah Karim-Cooper 18:13
And, you know, the Shakespeare race Festival in 2018, didn’t get any pushback. It just got genuine curiosity and bewilderment, like, what does Shakespeare have to do with race? You know, members of the public just couldn’t understand why we were putting these two things into conversation. So that was fine. I’m, I’m always happy to address genuine curiosity. Like I don’t understand this. But after 2020, after George Floyd’s murder, and Black Lives Matter, and then there was a major demonstration. There were demonstrations across the UK, as there were across the world. But in Bristol, a statue of a slaver, Edward Colston was plucked up by this group of young people and pushed into the river so that it basically made people in England terrified about their national icons and treasures. And so, the work I started that I had been doing was then reframed in the sort of conservative imagination as kind of woke and assaulting Shakespeare and an attempt to cancel Shakespeare or change Shakespeare. And when I launched these webinars, the response was so awful that I had to shut down my Twitter account for about a month, basically, because it was picked up by all of these conservative rags, which then were read by American Conservative rags like Breitbart, and then I was written about by Breitbart, and they said, Oh, she’s been anti Trump. Look at her Twitter posts.

Traci Thomas 19:54
They all know each other. Exactly.

Farah Karim-Cooper 19:58
And it was it was really awful. So that and that’s something that I, I, my organization has been amazing at supporting me with, and they have not stopped doing this work, they haven’t put a stop to this work, we’ve just kind of doubled down, essentially. But people still kind of come after us every time we cast a show, really, you know, progressively or if we are Yeah, doing more Shakespeare and race work. So when the book came out, I expected a certain amount of response. And I was really interested in the UK because it’s a different publisher in the UK and and that and the book cover is very different. Yeah, as well. Yeah. So there’s a picture of Ira Aldrich on the cover. And I don’t know, I think people didn’t like seeing a Shakespeare book with a black man on the cover. I got really weirded out by that response. And while I think for the most part, it’s been well received and England, America received it way better. America was fine with a woman of color who’s American, telling them about Shakespeare. So I have that going against me in the UK to saying, I you know, you think about it, you know, this sort of adage about women of color have to work extra hard to prove themselves. And I’ve been a Shakespeare scholar for almost 25 years, I’ve worked at Shakespeare’s Globe as the head of research and then director of education. I’m also professor of Shakespeare studies at King’s College London, the only professor of Shakespeare studies of color. I’ve written I’ve published seven books, like I did everything to prove my credentials before I did this public facing book. And I still get reviews in this country from mostly white men who, like Oh, it’s okay, but she’s got she’s wrong about Macbeth. She doesn’t really know about Macbeth. She’s taking it she’s overeating race in this play, you know, so they still have something to teach me about Shakespeare.

Traci Thomas 22:05
Fundamentally, that’s why we’re so grateful to have white men to teach us personally that time. was interesting, because I’m sure you read what was that book? Shakespeare in a divided America tomorrow? Yeah, so Shapira, he Yeah, he talked about how Shakespeare is actually like, much bigger in the States than He is in England like that. He’s talked more and like, revered more in a way in the United States. Like, like that. It’s like he’s the gold standard here. And in England, they’re like, we have other talented writers. Have you heard of them? Which I don’t know. But I always that’s always stuck with me after I read that.

Farah Karim-Cooper 22:39
I don’t know if I I think I disagree with you. Yeah, especially this year, when it’s been the 400th anniversary, the folio to see how the English media have just gone gone crazy with it, you know, and how they always want to sort of platform Shakespeare as this sort of icon of of white genius. And that’s how we still portrayed even though my book is out there, and other books are out there that say actually, let’s look at it this way instead. Right? Right. So I would say here he’s an people in government talk about Shakespeare. Interesting. King is obsessed with Shakespeare.

Traci Thomas 23:15
Right? There’s a king now. Yeah, I’m so out of the royalty loop, though. I did read spare. And I want to talk about this. And I think we will talk about this a lot more at the end of the month when we discuss Romeo and Juliet for BookBub. But I want to talk just briefly because you work at a theater and you’re also a professor. So you approach Shakespeare both with the understanding of a performance theatrical lens and also a literature English lens. Yes. I guess the question is, why do people hate Shakespeare? Is it because we teach it badly? Is it because they’re not exposed? My theory is that people hate it because they’re taught to read it as a text and not think about it as a performance. But I also am so biased because all of my greatest experiences with Shakespeare have come from the theater. And all of my closest readings of Shakespeare have come from the theater though I did take classes in college, like academic classes on Shakespeare, and you know, we did it in school. But I’m just curious, like, how you see that since you deal with both sides?

Farah Karim-Cooper 24:17
I mean, I fell in love with Shakespeare on the page. Really. And as a as a undergraduate. Obviously, when I met Shakespeare in high school, it was through film, so that grabbed me as a young, you know, young person, but I found that, you know, as I was saying earlier, my professors spoke so inspiringly about these plays, I remember reading them and seeing things and thinking, Oh, God, because you get so close to the language when you read it. So sometimes I do think it is and actually I’ve seen terrible productions of Shakespeare if it was the first thing that I’d ever seen, I would never have engaged with Shakespeare again, you know, so it does depend on the gateway and your experience with the gateway. And I think I don’t want to say there’s bad teachers out there because teachers are always working so hard. And they are. It’s a thankless job. But I think there’s ineffective techniques and ineffective methods for teaching Shakespeare. And I think there are great organizations like the Folger and the globe and the RSC who the Royal Shakespeare Company who, whose education departments are out there trying to work with teachers and help them find really interesting ways to present these plays. And yeah, it is if students get on their feet a bit, and they they think about them as, as plays on a stage or even in a film or television or on YouTube, then it gets more interesting, and it is more exciting for them. But I think the language is a huge barrier. And so finding really effective ways to to penetrate that language is is the key. And that’s really hard to do.

Traci Thomas 26:00
Yeah, I wonder, you know, before we kind of start talking about your taste in books, generally, I would love to know, sort of how, how you feel. And obviously, this is probably like your life’s work. So you know, you don’t have to give me your full life dissertation. But how do you think we should be interacting with race and racism in these plays? When we read them? If we are teachers, when we teach them if we are producers of productions, or films or actors? Like how, how much should we be putting in to the work of reading these plays? Sort of these ideas of, of race or gender? Or like, how important is that understanding the plays? I guess, is the question.

Farah Karim-Cooper 26:45
Yeah, I mean, it’s an interesting question. I do workshops with teachers and on how to how to present this material in that way. And actually, it is, it is really difficult. But I think the first step is to think about race, for example, not as a topic. But as the context. It’s the context in which Shakespeare was writing these plays in a period in which race making was happening in which racialized a racialization was a reality. And, and he was writing in a increasingly multiracial society, and was in contact with people from different parts of the world, because migration and black president studies, for example, have shown that it was not just a white city, Lincoln. And so that is a reality of the context in which Shakespeare wrote, and since then, we’ve been reading Shakespeare in a context of race and race making. So you think about I spent a lot of time in the book talking about the 18th century and how they sort of for me ruin Shakespeare because they raised him up on this platform, and made him an unassailable God, and he became a sort of embodiment of white English genius and civilization or civility. And this was at the same time that the English were trading Africans, and we’re monopolizing the field of the slave trade. And that has to be reckoned with that Shakespeare is rising at the same time as England’s wealth due to Empire. And that happened in the 18th century, that Shakespeare that Bardic idea of a genius who nobody else is like him, who statutes are all white, he is still with us. Right? And so I feel like what I like to do with teachers and with students Cisco that Shakespeare has nothing to do with the actual Shakespeare he was a jobbing playwright writing getting his hands dirty, in so they’re gonna really scrappy industry, writing for a new theatre industry, which didn’t exist, you know, only 20 years before he arrived. So that sort of isn’t really interesting, accessible entry point to Shakespeare, and then talking about the race, racial language in the play, is to say, you know, the other plays at the time, there’s a there’s way more, you know, sort of racist language and characters and characterizations, but Shakespeare has it too. And so if you really want to get to know Shakespeare, then you’ve got to reckon with some of the the things in his plays that are going to make you uncomfortable. Like there is misogyny people seem to be fine, that The Taming of the Shrew is a really misogynistic play, but they still keep putting it on. And people still keep it’s still out there. Merchant of Venice is full of anti semitic tropes is that Shakespeare’s anti semitism I don’t think so. But, but some people do. Right? So if you you have to kind of look at it and face it, some people say, Well, why don’t you just toss it away? If it’s so racist? Well, because it isn’t all like that. And actually, once you get past it and actually start to think about what Shakespeare is actually saying about multiple identities coming together in a commercialized city, then actually, that’s quite relevant for how we’re dealing with life today. So I think it’s seeing the continuities between the past and present, is Shakespeare is a great workhorse for that.

Traci Thomas 30:33
Yeah, I love that. I think like the idea of like, why don’t you just throw it away? It’s so silly to me, because I’m like, Well, we’re still sexist today. So like, why would we throw this away? This is a great, this is a great mirror for how you’ve been behaving recently. You know, like, I would understand throwing it away if we had cured anti semitism or cured racism or cured sexism, but like, we still sort of need it. Also like that ending in Taming of the Shrew. Or how about the ending a Measure for Measure?

Farah Karim-Cooper 31:00
Yes, really problematic, really problematic. But that gives directors something really interesting to think about, and then they can read it however they want to change it, and Shakespeare’s actors change the plays. So why can’t we?

Traci Thomas 31:15
Yeah. Okay, I did not prep you for this. This is our Ask the stock segment. And unfortunately for you, I was not able to tailor this question to Shakespeare at all. So you’re just going to have to do your best someone wrote in for a book recommendation, and we’re going to give them some, you just have to give them one. But you could give them more if you have more. So here’s what they say. Sharda says I was recently asked for a war related nonfiction book. And that is very much not my jam. They want more first hand accounts, but are and are open to narrative nonfiction. They are Lebanese Canadian, and very interested in the US military and that the role that they have played in the Middle East. A couple of books they have read so far as American Sniper, but they did not like that book and lines of Kandahar, which they liked as a first hand account. So that’s that. We can do whatever we want here with this. If something comes to mind, you can go first. If not, I do have some things written down. So up to you.

Farah Karim-Cooper 32:23
Sure. I mean, I’m not really big on military history.

Traci Thomas 32:30
Okay. Okay, here are some of mine. So, as far as first hand accounts, and I struggle with first hand accounts of war, because I think they’re not very well done often. So I have one. But I also don’t like American Sniper, for this reason, but one would be jarhead by Anthony’s Warford, which was turned into a movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal. And that’s a pretty like famous, well known firsthand sort of war memoir. I also love this book called Black hearts by Jim Frederick. It’s not a first hand account. But Jim Frederick, I believe was embedded with this troop. So he’s a he’s a journalist, but he was there with them on the ground, and then reported about what happened to them which there was like a, they believe it was enough Afghanistan and one of the soldiers are group small group of them, they killed a civilian, a woman in a pretty brutal attack. So he kind of digs into that. And then many of you will know, my absolute favorite war book is where where men win glory by Jon Krakauer, which is about Pat Tillman, the NFL player who left the NFL to go and list and then was killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire and the whole cover up and the whole story, but it digs in a lot to like the history of the place. So those would be my recommendations. Did anything come to mind for you?

Farah Karim-Cooper 33:51
No, no, no. I have one book, which, which it constantly it’s around the civil war that actually I wanted to talk to you about. But otherwise, tell us about that one. Oh, God, like it’s a book I just picked up in the spring when I went to a literary festival. I heard the author speak and she is Sarah Churchwell, and she wrote this book called the raft to come, which is about Gone With the Wind,

Traci Thomas 34:20
My favorite, I love-

Farah Karim-Cooper 34:23
Well, you will love it after you read this book, because it’s about how the Civil War race, Jim Crow, all of that constantly, it’s around and she reads this sort of line of contact from from the Civil War all the way to the January 6 insurrection. And she does this with Gone With the Wind as the centerpiece. And no one told me about this book. It’s amazing. It’s amazing. It was one of those books where I was just like, highlighting hundreds and hundreds of passages. And I thought oh my god, I I love that movie growing up and oh my god, she’s right. Yes. Oh my god that was horrendously racist. Yes. When they go off and and fight with these people they were the Ku Klux Klan. We were rooting for the Ku Klux Klan. Yeah. Yeah. It’s incredible. Extraordinary.

Traci Thomas 35:16
Okay, I have to read. Okay. Oh my god, I can’t wait. Thank you for that. So I told me, everyone else. If you want your book recommendation, read on air email, ask the stacks at the stacks. podcast.com. We will do this for you. And now it is time to talk about your favorite book. So we always start here, two books you love one book you hate.

Farah Karim-Cooper 35:35
So one of the books I love is the one that I just mentioned. And another book that I absolutely fell in love with is the secret diaries of Charles Ignacia is Sam tro, which is fiction. And it’s by a black actor named Patterson Joseph who is British. And he’s he’s written books before, but he’s never written a novel. It’s his debut novel. And it’s basically he started this research project about this 18th century, black man who lived in England, and had all these adventures and ended up being really sort of crucial to abolition, the abolition movement. And so he writes a novel about this man, and it’s beautiful. And I’m I cried at the end, and oh, it’s just an amazing, amazing novel.

Traci Thomas 36:24
Okay, what’s the book that you hate? So I hate

Farah Karim-Cooper 36:27
Moby Dick. I’m really sorry.

Traci Thomas 36:31
This, don’t be sorry. We love to hate.

Farah Karim-Cooper 36:34
In college, I took an American Lit course and loved most of it, like most of it, like, I love American literature. And we read Moby Dick. And I just didn’t get it. I just didn’t get it. I mean, went through all of these whaling chapters. I wanted to die. I just hated it. And maybe that’s because I was in my early 20s. And I wasn’t ready for it. So one day, I might pick it up again and give it a try. But you know, rather Yeah, I don’t think I will know I’m, I’m an avid reader, and I couldn’t get through that novel. But I know it’s a favorite. It’s a classic.

Traci Thomas 37:07
People love it. Yeah. Okay. I don’t normally ask people this but you are gonna get these questions because you are shaped Miss Shakespeare Here we go. Favorite Shakespeare play? Least favorite Shakespeare play? Most overrated and most underrated.

Farah Karim-Cooper 37:22
Oh, okay. Favorite Shakespeare play is Titus Andronicus.

Traci Thomas 37:28
I love Tiger Woods.

Farah Karim-Cooper 37:31
So it’s got so much fire in its belly. And people think oh, it’s so violent, so grotesque. And it’s, it’s not it’s more than all of that. You know? I love that play. My least favorite Shakespeare play is probably one of the history plays. I mean, I would say I mean, I do like a lot of the history plays but probably Henry the sixth part one. Something like that’s gonna say Henry the sixth part too. Yeah, not crazy about the hedonistic boasts or Richard’s are fantastic. Fantastic. Yeah, fantastic. Okay, overrated? Underrated? Overrated? Is Henry the Fifth? I like Henry the Fifth. But you know, it’s I think there’s some really great stuff going on there. But I also think it’s been a miss read for centuries as a kind of propaganda for England when actually Shakespeare I think Shakespeare saying let’s interrogate our past but better than we are.

Traci Thomas 38:31
Okay, and underrated.

Farah Karim-Cooper 38:34
Underrated? Well, Titus is really underrated. It’s, you know, some people think that it’s Shakespeare in his early years, you know, as a teenager getting going. And he wasn’t a teenager when he wrote it, but and I actually think it needs more performances and it you know, more film versions. I really love the film version that Anthony Hopkins was in, I just thought it was crazy and interesting. And it’s the first play that Shakespeare does, where he’s exploring black identity and interracial relationships. And there’s a biracial baby on stage in the 1590s. But there’s no race in the 16th century. Definitely not.

Traci Thomas 39:18
Yeah, Aaron just happened to be just there. No big deal. Not nothing to say about. Okay, I’m going to tell you mine because we sort of align so I’m going to save Titus for my most underrated because I do okay. And my most overrated very unpopular opinion. Hamlet. Oh, I think Hamlet is so mediocre. I am so out on him. Yeah, yeah. I think the worst one. One of them. I think my least favorite is Love’s Labour’s Lost. I found that to be incredibly boring, even though I used to do that speech that Rosalind Rosalind speech at the end where she’s like, I can’t remember but I used to do that one. And then my face right this is really hard. I asked I oscillate between Macbeth and Othello Yeah, I just the scene act for scene one of Othello where it’s like Amelia and Desdemona getting ready the willow scene. Every time I read it, I cry. I just think it’s like some of the most beautiful I just the speeches, the the monologues, the soliloquy is throughout I just, I love it. I think it’s just like doing something theatrically, like it’s just really entertaining. You know, like, it’s like a really good plot structure. And then there’s so much in it. And I generally think that the plays that everybody loves are actually just really good. Yeah, I think that’s like people love Romeo and Juliet. Yeah, it was like, really good. And like some of the ones people don’t like, I’m like, because it’s actually not that good. Like, it’s just like, nobody-

Farah Karim-Cooper 40:50
Everybody’s afraid to say people don’t want to say that Shakespeare may have not written a good play. You know, he wrote 37.

Traci Thomas 40:55
Yeah, some of them are just like, not that. But I do. I do love Macbeth. I think Macbeth is just terrific. It’s like such a thriller, and it’s fast paced thriller, as West. Yeah, that’s what I like about Titus. I think you’re both really fast paced and thrilling and exciting. But I do I’ll tell you a funny story about a fellow so the other day I was at my kid, I have twin four year olds, and I was at their little soccer practice. And I heard this dad calling for her son, and I couldn’t quite hear he was saying, and then all of a sudden, I realized his he had he was like, Y’all go, y’all go. I think they had named their child Iago. And I got it. I know, because I always loved the name Casio. And I wanted, I thought about naming our kid Casio. But I was like, I don’t really want to name my kid after this character that sort of gets played. But imagine naming your kid after like, the most pure evil villain on the stage. Like just like, Oh, you are naming your child into being an evil person.

Farah Karim-Cooper 41:55
That’s amazing. Oh, my God. No, I would I would steer clear of that name. But yes, I agree with you about a fellow. I think it’s an incredible story. But it’s also incredibly heartbreaking. It’s so heartbreaking. And when I see it done really well, I just I find it really profoundly moving and sad. It’s just the sad, sad, sad play.

Traci Thomas 42:18
It’s so sad when you talked about in the book of production, where Iago is portrayed by a light skinned black person. And just even hearing about that, really, like I was like, Wow, that sounds incredible. Yes. Because it makes like it opens up possibilities for what is happening in the show in the play in a way that if he’s white, those possibilities aren’t there, even though they are there, but they aren’t there because of like what you’re seeing.

Farah Karim-Cooper 42:46
But it also I think it made me realize that was one of the things that made me realize that maybe just maybe Iago is not really a racist. You know, everyone was like, Oh, he’s the racist in the play. But actually, what’s racist in the play is the play is the structures of this society is the world he lives in. And Iago is just, you know, picking up that scab using racist language to make him feel vulnerable, and to break him down. And also to skew the audience against him.

Traci Thomas 43:19
Right, so I feel like Amelia should be black.

Farah Karim-Cooper 43:21
I mean, cast as black.

Traci Thomas 43:24
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah. I especially that scene where she’s like, tending to her and like, I think it’s our husbands love like that. The willows I just love that scene. I don’t know. I’ve thought about that role as black for so for so long, because I think it makes it’s like such a nice visual, like parallel to the scene that follows. Or like when he enters the chamber anyways. Oh, I love that. I think I’ve done asking you Shakespeare questions for today. But who knows? I might have more. Okay, what is the last like, really great book you read?

Farah Karim-Cooper 43:59
Okay, what was the last? So the last book I read was in the wake by Christina sharp. Have you read that?

Traci Thomas 44:06
No, I just finished ordinary notes, though.

Farah Karim-Cooper 44:09
No, I haven’t read that. She’s just off the charts. And just I had to read it really slowly. Because it’s hard. You know, it’s about its racial theory. But it also brings in kind of like water eco studies. And it kind of uses the idea of the wake of a ship as a parallel to think about, you know, refugees and racism and racist structures and enslavement. And it’s just incredible. Incredible.

Traci Thomas 44:39
I have to read it. I loved I loved ordinary notes. What are you reading right now? So

Farah Karim-Cooper 44:45
I’m reading a book called Why I jump, which is a book about autism and it’s from the perspective of a Japanese autistic man, young man Um, and it’s really, really insightful. My daughter is autistic. And so I’ve since she was diagnosed almost two years ago, I’ve a very late diagnosis because she’s almost 20. I’ve been reading as much as possible about autism, and it’s so enter in what this book is. It’s just you just kind of enter into the mind, and it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful place. The Autistic brain is a really beautiful, beautiful space.

Traci Thomas 45:29
I love are there any books that you’re looking forward to reading? Whether they’re new or things that have just you’ve just been waiting to get to?

Farah Karim-Cooper 45:37
Yeah, so I went to this really cute bookshop in a little village called Farnum, where my daughter is going to university and I found this book called The Davenport’s. Yeah.

Traci Thomas 45:49
What yellow like a yellow.

Farah Karim-Cooper 45:53
Yeah, and it’s young adult fiction, which I don’t read very much of, but I know a lot of great fiction is in that category. And I was just really attracted to the covers. So I’m really looking forward to reading it. It’s about a affluent black family and 1910s Chicago. So I thought, wow, that’ll be that’ll be interesting.

Traci Thomas 46:14
I love that. It sounds like you’ve read across a lot of genres and a lot of different types of things. Are there any genres that you like, don’t read or avoid or just aren’t that into probably military history.

Farah Karim-Cooper 46:28
My, my ex husband, his father was really into military history. And I loved him. He was amazing, but I just couldn’t understand why you just always want to read about Napoleon.

Traci Thomas 46:43
That’s funny. What’s a book that you love to recommend to people?

Farah Karim-Cooper 46:47
Well, I love recommending Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, I don’t know if you’ve read it.

Traci Thomas 46:53
I haven’t read it. I’m like scared to read it.

Farah Karim-Cooper 46:57
It’s really beautiful. And recently, there was a play adaptation by an amazing playwright of color named Lolita Chakrabarti, so she adapted it for the Royal Shakespeare Company. And she made the main character which is Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway. She made her a woman of color. And it’s such a beautiful story. It’s incredible. It’s about the death of Shakespeare son Hamnet.

Traci Thomas 47:24
Right, is it? Is it tied? Like to the plays at all? Or is it just sort of like a imagining of what that would have?

Farah Karim-Cooper 47:32
Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s sort of tied more, it’s tied very much to the time period. So she did her research on Elizabethan England and the theaters at the time. I had this suspicion that she read one of my books because there was all this fantasy.

Traci Thomas 47:49
She definitely did.

Farah Karim-Cooper 47:51
And, and of course, the play that comes up and you know, is Hamlet, right? So it was all about fathers and sons. So that’s also

Traci Thomas 48:01
I’m like, maybe I don’t want to read it cuz I don’t like Hamlet.

Farah Karim-Cooper 48:06
You’d like him that I think yeah, because it’s very much the female perspective.

Traci Thomas 48:11
Okay, good. Yeah, Hamlet. No, thanks. What’s up book? What’s the last really good book that someone recommended to you?

Farah Karim-Cooper 48:20
Well, I think that would probably be in the wake because that was recommended to me this summer by Ayana. Thompson.

Traci Thomas 48:29
Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, we take her recommendations. Yeah. Are you serious? Yes. How do you organize your books?

Farah Karim-Cooper 48:35
I was just looking at your bookshelf.

Traci Thomas 48:39
Actually, it was color coded. I liked a lot of shit for doing it by color.

Farah Karim-Cooper 48:44
But I tend to organize my books by genre and time period or geography. So I’ve got like, couple of shelves of all American authors, American Lit, and then I’ve got like English novels. And then I’ve got like, criticism about race and enslavement or Shakespeare criticism about the body, you know, like, it’s just a Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about my bookshelves.

Traci Thomas 49:12
I guess I should ask you this. If you were going to tell someone to read a Shakespeare play. And they are out on Shakespeare. They’re coming to it from like, I read Romeo and Juliet and I hate it. What would you recommend to them? If they were just gonna read it? Yeah, just gonna read it.

Farah Karim-Cooper 49:28
Okay. I will probably tell them to either read Macbeth, because I think Macbeth is probably the most readable of the plays, or as you like it. Yeah, that because some of the other plays have a lot of you know, I’m doing this talkie talkie gesture with my hand. Whereas I think as you like, it takes you from the city into the country and you meet characters from all across the different so This whole spectrum, and I really liked that sort of Shakespeare’s really interested in the intermingling of different worlds. So probably that one.

Traci Thomas 50:08
Okay, that’s good. I don’t know what I would tell someone. I think Macbeth is definitely the one I would say.

Farah Karim-Cooper 50:15
I think it’s really readable, isn’t it?

Traci Thomas 50:17
It’s just really readable. Like, as I was going through reading all of them, you know, just I was just reading them. I wasn’t doing like a ton of textual analysis. I was reading like the pelican. I wasn’t reading art. And yeah, like I was just, it was reading. Yeah. You know, scanning my little lines doing my little iambic pentameter. Do my little thing. But I but that one, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s happening? Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Don’t go in there. Do you have? Do you listen to audiobooks?

Farah Karim-Cooper 50:48
I do. I do. Yeah, have any favorite audiobooks? So I loved when I first moved into my house in 2020. I loved listening to The Color Purple. While I was painting my house, so I was painting. No. My daughter thinks I’m hyper fixated on prints. So it wouldn’t be surprising if I repeated my house. But no, it was just normal, you know, sort of non exciting colors. But I was listening to that novel while I was working on my house, and it just kind of was such a really lovely, lovely thing to do.

Traci Thomas 51:27
Will you see the movie?

Farah Karim-Cooper 51:28
I have seen the movie. Oh, is there a new movie coming out?

Traci Thomas 51:32
There’s a new one. There’s like the there’s like the musical Yeah, turned into a movie. So it’s the Broadway musical. I’ve seen the musical. I’ve seen musical. I’ve seen the other movie, The Spielberg. But I haven’t seen this. This new one I think comes out in December.

Farah Karim-Cooper 51:48
Oh, wow. I’m excited to see that. I’ve loved the Spielberg. I really did love. Yeah.

Traci Thomas 51:52
So what’s the book that made you laugh?

Farah Karim-Cooper 51:58
And, you know, it’s a really good question. But I I guess I don’t read a lot of comedy. So the novel I was telling you about, by Patterson, Joseph, the secret diaries of Charles Ignacio Santro. There were so many moments which delighted me where I felt happy. I felt joy reading it. So that I guess is a kind of close enough answer. Yeah. Don’t remember getting out loud.

Traci Thomas 52:29
But okay, what’s the funniest Shakespeare play to you?

Farah Karim-Cooper 52:33
Oh gosh, probably 12th night might be the one that makes me laugh out loud. Yeah. Especially if you’ve seen a great production I saw really, the globe did an amazing production. And 2012 with Mark Rylance, this lady Olivia and Stephen Fry is Malvolio. Yeah, and I remember that it went to Broadway as well. And it just was, I made me insane with laughter.

Traci Thomas 52:56
Yeah, that if done well, you have a good Malvolio? Yeah, it’s just I mean, a bag can save the whole production. What’s the last book that made you angry?

Farah Karim-Cooper 53:07
Oh, gosh. What made me angry? Yeah, no, maybe search virtuals. But no, no, it was the queen slave trader by Nick Hazelwood, which is a book I picked up because I was doing like all of this reading on all this beef in England. And this is about John Hawkins, who was an Elizabethan nobleman who was a slave trader. So the slave trade actually started in Elizabeth in England, in England, so they had a few, they had a few attempts, and he was one of them, who really tried to push for this. And so this book is all about that. And what made me angry about it was that nobody ever learned this in school. They think that the 18th century is when it all began, but actually, it was during Queen Elizabeth’s time when Shakespeare was alive. And that is a huge thing for me. So it made me angry that this I have to read this in a book that I happen to pick up in a bookshelf rather than just know it because it’s taught in school.

Traci Thomas 54:17
Speaking of teaching in school, if you are going to teach a Shakespeare play in school to high school students, yeah, what’s the one you would teach?

Farah Karim-Cooper 54:29
So I’ve, I used to be a high school teacher and I taught Hamlet. I, I know it sounds extreme, but I, I would either teach a fellow or I would teach Titus Andronicus I never got a chance to present that play to teenagers. And I would love to have done that, because I think it’s a play that would have made would have been really interesting for them.

Traci Thomas 54:59
Yeah, so yeah, I think if I was going to teach one, I think it’d be really hard to do. But I think I would want to teach measure or merchant. Oh, that’s interesting. I think they’re just so juicy. There’s just so just I also think that merchant has really good female characters. And I think so much in Shakespeare that’s taught in school, or like the male heavy plays, and I always felt kind of left out of like, Oh, now I have to read like, Benvolio. Right? Like, I’m like, no, like, there’s only a nurse. Really? Yeah. But I feel like Porsche has so much text. Yeah, that there’s a lot like that. You could, you know, because it’s like, oh, stand up and read aloud. And it’s like, there’s enough text from her that the like that with girls students would also feel included in the action of the play.

Farah Karim-Cooper 55:42
Yeah, As you like. It’s another one actually, where it’s female voice.

Traci Thomas 55:47
But I think I also just think like, unpacking some of that, like anti semitism, and like some of the ideas of like, justice, I think you could do really interesting things about, like, abolition and justice with a play like that. Because I always liked when it’s taught when it’s tied to whatever’s going on in the world that I was living in. Yeah. You know, like when teachers would try to like extrapolate. You know, we’re talking about punishment, and like, how do we talk about punishment? Not like, so I think there’s like a lot in that play. To bring to the moment. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Okay, last one for you. I stole this from the New York Times. But if you could require the current president of the United States, or I guess, excuse me, if you could require the current prime minister of Kingdom to read one book, what would it be?

Farah Karim-Cooper 56:34
I don’t like him. So if it was the president, I like maybe the same thing, but I actually think, and I know, this might sound arrogant, but I want them to read my book.

Traci Thomas 56:49
I don’t disagree with that at all.

Farah Karim-Cooper 56:53
Yeah. And I think it’s because and this is why I wrote it because I why I wrote it for a general readership is because I want us to stop talking about Shakespeare as if he’s this unassailable genius, because it’s locking out so many people, including me, you know, because if it I think there’s a lot of gatekeeping that happens around Shakespeare. And I think that governments like the UK Government, they’re really invested in Shakespeare, you know, there’s a all party parliamentary group set up by one of the cabinet ministers on Shakespeare. They came is talking about Shakespeare, he celebrated the 400th anniversary at Windsor Castle of the folio. So I would love them to get their hands on a book that says Hang on a second, let’s break this down a little bit and interrogate the way we’ve been reading Shakespeare.

Traci Thomas 57:52
I love that. All right, everybody, Farah, we’ll be back on Wednesday, December 27th to discuss Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, you guessed it. If you haven’t read the book, or the play or whatever, you should read it. If you’ve read it before, I encourage you to read it again. But also, if you haven’t read it, or if you have read it and you don’t want to read it again, that’s fine, too. We’re going to talk about it, we’re going to spoil it. I have a feeling you probably know what happened in the end. But I won’t tell you now. And you can get Farah’s book, The Great White Bard wherever you get your books, I read parts of it and I listened to parts of it and you read the audiobook fantastically. So if you’re an audiobook person, I do recommend the audiobook. Farah, thank you so much for being here.

Farah Karim-Cooper 58:36
Thank you so much for having me. It was so much fun talking to you.

Traci Thomas 58:40
Yay. And everyone else we will see you in the stacks.

Alright, y’all, that does it for us today. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you to Farah Karim-Cooper for joining the show. And I’d like to say thank you to Julia Rickard for helping to make this conversation possible. Remember to listen to our book club episode when Pharaoh returns on December 27, about Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. If you love the show and want insight access to it, head to patreon.com/thestacks and join the stacks pack. Also, make sure you’re subscribed to the stacks wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you’re listening through Apple podcasts or Spotify, leave us a rating and a review. For more from the stacks follow us on social media at the stacks pod on Instagram threads and tick tock and at the stacks pod underscore on Twitter. And you can check out our website the stacks podcast.com This episode of the stacks was edited by Christian Duenas with production assistance from Lauren Tyree. Our graphic designer is Robin MacWrite. The Stacks is created and produced by me Traci Thomas.

Cherie Marquez https://www.cmediacollective.com/
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