In the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections, I could sense that the hard news sections of the media must have gotten the word that the George Floyd racial reckoning, having unleashed a historic murder wave, was not playing as well with voters as Democrat strategists had assumed it would, so it was time to memory-hole that obsession of American elites.
Farah Karim-Cooper, the new Shakespeare Folger (Washington D.C.) director, is:
- a 1995 graduate of California State--Fullerton (BA, English);
- a 1996 MA graduate of the University of London, Royal Holloway College (that was...fast); and
- a 2003 PhD graduate of same. All three degrees majoring in English. PhD dissertation: "Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama."
She says she met her husband, Mr. Cooper, during her MA studies in London. By the time she graduated with her MA, she says, they were engaged.
In Aug. 2023, Farah Karim-Cooper published a book titled "The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race." Late May 2024: Shakespeare Folger made official their intention to hire her as new director.
As of the 2010s, Farah Karim-Cooper was NOT overtly pushing "the race angle" (Wokeified Shakespeare), as far as I know. Her output all pretty neutral, not obviously different what a politically-neutral White-male curator of Shakespeareana might come up with. But she may have been a sleeper-agent all along.
In 2013 she commissioned a series of Romeo & Juliet performances, staged that year for a cumulative 16,000 British school-children, which had a very-dark Black-girl 'Juliet' and a White-male 'Romeo.' Adding a Black actress for Juliet was not necessarily overly bold by 2013, in the way it might've been twenty years earlier, even ten years earlier. (In the 1990s, it is said to have been controversial to cast a Subsaharan actor to play Othello, the 'Moor',' a choice which now would seem de rigueur.)
.
Farah Karim-Cooper's public profile leapt up to new heights in mid-2023, when her "GREAT WHITE BARD" book was released. The Guardian's review of that book said this: "Should we consign the pale, male, stale Shakespeare to the scrapheap? Absolutely not, argues Farah Karim-Cooper, who believes a race-conscious reading of his work restores his status as a playwright for all."
(An interesting 'artifact' of the era, that mini-review, and the book's existence itself; measuring everything in terms of the neo-values of Wokeness, and with only Diverse-people allowed to take any sorts of moral stances and defend things.)
Of interest -- The lead paragraph from the preface to Farah Karim-Cooper's first book, "Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama" (2006, 2012), which based on her dissertation. I quote:
"When I received my PhD, my examiners asked how I came up with the idea to write about early modern cosmetics. I blushed because I did not really want to tell them that it came to me in the months before I started my PhD when I was working at a cosmetics counter at Bloomingdales in Newport Beach, California. They laughed though, and said I should mention it in my preface. So here it is. I was amazed at the amount of money that women were spending on cosmetics. Literally thousands of dollars a day were lavished on lipstick, eye shadow and concealer. I found myself judging these women, and had to ask myself why. Why should they be judged for beautifying themselves? Then I remembered Bosola's attack on painted ladies in The Duchess of Malfi, and I thought that there was something profoundly disturbing in the images he uses to describe cosmetic practices; for example, women who flay their skin to obtain a smooth complexion end up looking like 'abortive hedgehogs'. It made me want to grapple with the ideological paradoxes at the heart of Western conceptions of beauty and the processes of beautification that respond to such conceptions. I have spent a lot of years on this and have found too much information; my only hope is that I have brought it together lucidly and coherently and that it invites further discussion and debate."
One minor comment on 'that was...fast': UK universities (mercifully, in my opinion) tend to push grad students through their degrees much faster than US universities do. One-year MAs and three-year PhDs are not uncommon. So in this case a one-year MA at U London is plausible. It doesn't mean she studied anything useful, of course.
In effect, Farah Karim-Cooper was on a much-longer academic 'plan,' when counting from arrival in the UK in 1995 or so, until her PhD in 2003. The one-year MA was the academic- and life-trajectory equivalent to a store's "loss leader" sale-items. It got her in.
(And she remained there many years. In her interview she had a baby in about 2006, and rejoined the workforce by about 2011, doing quite well for herself in her field, in the 2010s.)
Here is the direct quote from her interview a few years ago:
"I came over [to England] for my MA intending to spend a year in the UK. Then I took a year off and I started my PhD. I had fallen in love with the country and the literature and wanted to continue to study. I also met my husband at Royal Holloway, who was on the MBA program and at the end of my MA we got engaged." (Alumni Profile for Dr Farah Karim-Cooper; Royal Holloway, University of London; 2012).
***I find it helpful to think about culture as the surface of a pond. When a big disruptive rock like BLM is dropped into it, the ripples take a long time to get to the pond's periphery. I was talking to Mrs C about this, in the context of ESG in business. I had read an article in the UK Telegraph suggesting that ESG had peaked in the UK about three years ago (hmmm; perhaps not a coincidence, that), and that companies are now trying to ditch their ESG commitments as fast as they can. She countered that here in the Hong Kong corporate world, ESG is peaking right now. So there's a ripple from a US/UK 'rock-drop' out to international big business circles. And then there's another, wider ripple out to smaller companies. And then there's another ripple out to university business courses and textbooks, which will have chirpy 'ESG is super!' examples abounding for the next decade at least.
***It's painful to witness the tortured dynamic going on at museums like this in this post, in which one of the core treasures of Western civ is still the main product, but stakeholders are just oozing desperation to 'contextualize', i.e. undermine the quality and importance of, such masterpieces. Here they're doing this undermining literally, i.e. by sending visitors through the underground servants' entrance if they want to catch a glimpse of the Bard.
***My interest was piqued by that line about the NYT reporter following a Shakespeare folio to South Dakota. That immediately struck me as a 'gorillas in the mist' coastal anthropological expedition to observe shit-kicking flyoveristas try to make sense of artefacts from some unimaginably advanced alien civilization. So I googled it. Sure enough:
The article's first two paragraphs do not disappoint:
"Visitors to this town [i.e. Vermillion, SD] of about 11,000 on a bluff near the Missouri River have long been surprised to learn that it’s home to a set of rare Stradivari stringed instruments, which are housed in a museum here along with the world’s oldest playable harpsichord, the oldest surviving cello and some 15,000 other historic instruments."
"But this month, visitors to the National Music Museum on the University of South Dakota campus have also found themselves face to face with another seemingly misplaced cultural treasure: a Shakespeare First Folio."
If only those South Dakotans could evolve opposable thumbs, they'd likely show some interest in the world's oldest playable harpsichord! And what could be more misplaced than a great work of literature on the godforsaken windswept backwater great plains!
The pond-ripple metaphor is useful and valid for how these things work. I wonder where in the 'pond' the Shakespeare Folger Theater in Washington should be placed. It's not a provincial theater or museum in Vermillion, South Dakota. It's within a few stone's throws of the U.S. Capitol building.
The reason that this Shakespeare Folger Theater and Library is in the news again is: they've just re-opened after multi-year renovations. They stopped taking public visitors in January 2020. They were in hibernation, as a public-facing institution, all throughout 'annus horribilis' 2020, and also 2021, 2022, and 2023.
The 'ripple' will have reached this particular institution in 2020, but a time-delay was built in.
They’ll be mobbed this summer! Tourists lining up for sure. What’s more popular these days than Shakespeare + a social justice rant?
A reader comment at the NYT article: “I don't know why modern discussions of Shakespeare center around topics such as gender, race, misogyny, etc. - topics that are only peripheral to the play. Instead, we should focus on the power and beauty of his language and his psychological portrait of his characters.”
I may have already mentioned this at UNZ, but in 1974 or 5, my mother had the bright idea of going to see the new play "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" at the Folger Theater, which is a mini-Globe. My brother and I were 16 and 14 and sat on the front row, because the house was nearly empty, and we soon found out why. The language began a little raw, then Billy and his girlfriend's clothes came off in the second act, then she pranced around in his pants and suspenders and a smile. "Fuck Christ" are all the words I remember and typical of the third act. Interestingly, when I looked up the play last night, it was written by another Subcon from his own novel/poetry. My point is, the Folger was transgressive before everyone had to be.
Afterwards, my dad said, Stick with your mother, boys, and see the world. They'd spent the show debating whether to drag us out. OTOH, they saw "Hair" in LA in 1969 and brought the album home! I don't think my mother knew what half the words meant in the sodomy song.
Shakespeare is the artist most antithetical to the extremely dogmatic, narrow, and ignorant woke doctrine of 2024. If Harold Bloom were alive...
The woke left hates all of social sciences and the humanities except for the segments it has colonized. Much of the American right would gleefully abolish social science and the humanities. I propose that we need much more of both, but by freethinkers. Because when someone like Farah fumbles around for some kind of theory to apply in order to promote her career and maybe even her understanding, all that's available is woke pseudoknowledge.
The Bible, bar talk, and twitter weirdos are weak substitutes for scholarly dedication and its resulting insights.
Farah Karim-Cooper's profile page at King's College London: leads with this:
"My work focuses on Shakespeare and Antiracism, Premodern Critical Race Studies, Theatre and Performance and Early Modern Culture and History."
And yet she's a more or less Caucasian from Pakistan with do discernible sub-Saharan ancestry.
"African American" like Elon Musk.
She looks like some of my relatives. I guess even the racial grifters are becoming more diverse.
Farah Karim-Cooper, the new Shakespeare Folger (Washington D.C.) director, is:
- a 1995 graduate of California State--Fullerton (BA, English);
- a 1996 MA graduate of the University of London, Royal Holloway College (that was...fast); and
- a 2003 PhD graduate of same. All three degrees majoring in English. PhD dissertation: "Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama."
She says she met her husband, Mr. Cooper, during her MA studies in London. By the time she graduated with her MA, she says, they were engaged.
In Aug. 2023, Farah Karim-Cooper published a book titled "The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race." Late May 2024: Shakespeare Folger made official their intention to hire her as new director.
As of the 2010s, Farah Karim-Cooper was NOT overtly pushing "the race angle" (Wokeified Shakespeare), as far as I know. Her output all pretty neutral, not obviously different what a politically-neutral White-male curator of Shakespeareana might come up with. But she may have been a sleeper-agent all along.
In 2013 she commissioned a series of Romeo & Juliet performances, staged that year for a cumulative 16,000 British school-children, which had a very-dark Black-girl 'Juliet' and a White-male 'Romeo.' Adding a Black actress for Juliet was not necessarily overly bold by 2013, in the way it might've been twenty years earlier, even ten years earlier. (In the 1990s, it is said to have been controversial to cast a Subsaharan actor to play Othello, the 'Moor',' a choice which now would seem de rigueur.)
.
Farah Karim-Cooper's public profile leapt up to new heights in mid-2023, when her "GREAT WHITE BARD" book was released. The Guardian's review of that book said this: "Should we consign the pale, male, stale Shakespeare to the scrapheap? Absolutely not, argues Farah Karim-Cooper, who believes a race-conscious reading of his work restores his status as a playwright for all."
(An interesting 'artifact' of the era, that mini-review, and the book's existence itself; measuring everything in terms of the neo-values of Wokeness, and with only Diverse-people allowed to take any sorts of moral stances and defend things.)
Of interest -- The lead paragraph from the preface to Farah Karim-Cooper's first book, "Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama" (2006, 2012), which based on her dissertation. I quote:
"When I received my PhD, my examiners asked how I came up with the idea to write about early modern cosmetics. I blushed because I did not really want to tell them that it came to me in the months before I started my PhD when I was working at a cosmetics counter at Bloomingdales in Newport Beach, California. They laughed though, and said I should mention it in my preface. So here it is. I was amazed at the amount of money that women were spending on cosmetics. Literally thousands of dollars a day were lavished on lipstick, eye shadow and concealer. I found myself judging these women, and had to ask myself why. Why should they be judged for beautifying themselves? Then I remembered Bosola's attack on painted ladies in The Duchess of Malfi, and I thought that there was something profoundly disturbing in the images he uses to describe cosmetic practices; for example, women who flay their skin to obtain a smooth complexion end up looking like 'abortive hedgehogs'. It made me want to grapple with the ideological paradoxes at the heart of Western conceptions of beauty and the processes of beautification that respond to such conceptions. I have spent a lot of years on this and have found too much information; my only hope is that I have brought it together lucidly and coherently and that it invites further discussion and debate."
One minor comment on 'that was...fast': UK universities (mercifully, in my opinion) tend to push grad students through their degrees much faster than US universities do. One-year MAs and three-year PhDs are not uncommon. So in this case a one-year MA at U London is plausible. It doesn't mean she studied anything useful, of course.
In effect, Farah Karim-Cooper was on a much-longer academic 'plan,' when counting from arrival in the UK in 1995 or so, until her PhD in 2003. The one-year MA was the academic- and life-trajectory equivalent to a store's "loss leader" sale-items. It got her in.
(And she remained there many years. In her interview she had a baby in about 2006, and rejoined the workforce by about 2011, doing quite well for herself in her field, in the 2010s.)
Here is the direct quote from her interview a few years ago:
"I came over [to England] for my MA intending to spend a year in the UK. Then I took a year off and I started my PhD. I had fallen in love with the country and the literature and wanted to continue to study. I also met my husband at Royal Holloway, who was on the MBA program and at the end of my MA we got engaged." (Alumni Profile for Dr Farah Karim-Cooper; Royal Holloway, University of London; 2012).
This is why it's better to leave one's inheritance to spend on lottery tickets in the Midwest.
A few comments on this one:
***I find it helpful to think about culture as the surface of a pond. When a big disruptive rock like BLM is dropped into it, the ripples take a long time to get to the pond's periphery. I was talking to Mrs C about this, in the context of ESG in business. I had read an article in the UK Telegraph suggesting that ESG had peaked in the UK about three years ago (hmmm; perhaps not a coincidence, that), and that companies are now trying to ditch their ESG commitments as fast as they can. She countered that here in the Hong Kong corporate world, ESG is peaking right now. So there's a ripple from a US/UK 'rock-drop' out to international big business circles. And then there's another, wider ripple out to smaller companies. And then there's another ripple out to university business courses and textbooks, which will have chirpy 'ESG is super!' examples abounding for the next decade at least.
***It's painful to witness the tortured dynamic going on at museums like this in this post, in which one of the core treasures of Western civ is still the main product, but stakeholders are just oozing desperation to 'contextualize', i.e. undermine the quality and importance of, such masterpieces. Here they're doing this undermining literally, i.e. by sending visitors through the underground servants' entrance if they want to catch a glimpse of the Bard.
***My interest was piqued by that line about the NYT reporter following a Shakespeare folio to South Dakota. That immediately struck me as a 'gorillas in the mist' coastal anthropological expedition to observe shit-kicking flyoveristas try to make sense of artefacts from some unimaginably advanced alien civilization. So I googled it. Sure enough:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/theater/shakespeare-the-book-tour.html
The article's first two paragraphs do not disappoint:
"Visitors to this town [i.e. Vermillion, SD] of about 11,000 on a bluff near the Missouri River have long been surprised to learn that it’s home to a set of rare Stradivari stringed instruments, which are housed in a museum here along with the world’s oldest playable harpsichord, the oldest surviving cello and some 15,000 other historic instruments."
"But this month, visitors to the National Music Museum on the University of South Dakota campus have also found themselves face to face with another seemingly misplaced cultural treasure: a Shakespeare First Folio."
If only those South Dakotans could evolve opposable thumbs, they'd likely show some interest in the world's oldest playable harpsichord! And what could be more misplaced than a great work of literature on the godforsaken windswept backwater great plains!
The pond-ripple metaphor is useful and valid for how these things work. I wonder where in the 'pond' the Shakespeare Folger Theater in Washington should be placed. It's not a provincial theater or museum in Vermillion, South Dakota. It's within a few stone's throws of the U.S. Capitol building.
The reason that this Shakespeare Folger Theater and Library is in the news again is: they've just re-opened after multi-year renovations. They stopped taking public visitors in January 2020. They were in hibernation, as a public-facing institution, all throughout 'annus horribilis' 2020, and also 2021, 2022, and 2023.
The 'ripple' will have reached this particular institution in 2020, but a time-delay was built in.
They’ll be mobbed this summer! Tourists lining up for sure. What’s more popular these days than Shakespeare + a social justice rant?
A reader comment at the NYT article: “I don't know why modern discussions of Shakespeare center around topics such as gender, race, misogyny, etc. - topics that are only peripheral to the play. Instead, we should focus on the power and beauty of his language and his psychological portrait of his characters.”
They're looking for new angles. Shakespeare's been overworked, and there are many times more "scholars" than in previous centuries.
I suspect ol' Bill would have said, "My work belongs to anyone who buys it from me."
I may have already mentioned this at UNZ, but in 1974 or 5, my mother had the bright idea of going to see the new play "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" at the Folger Theater, which is a mini-Globe. My brother and I were 16 and 14 and sat on the front row, because the house was nearly empty, and we soon found out why. The language began a little raw, then Billy and his girlfriend's clothes came off in the second act, then she pranced around in his pants and suspenders and a smile. "Fuck Christ" are all the words I remember and typical of the third act. Interestingly, when I looked up the play last night, it was written by another Subcon from his own novel/poetry. My point is, the Folger was transgressive before everyone had to be.
Afterwards, my dad said, Stick with your mother, boys, and see the world. They'd spent the show debating whether to drag us out. OTOH, they saw "Hair" in LA in 1969 and brought the album home! I don't think my mother knew what half the words meant in the sodomy song.
Shakespeare is the artist most antithetical to the extremely dogmatic, narrow, and ignorant woke doctrine of 2024. If Harold Bloom were alive...
The woke left hates all of social sciences and the humanities except for the segments it has colonized. Much of the American right would gleefully abolish social science and the humanities. I propose that we need much more of both, but by freethinkers. Because when someone like Farah fumbles around for some kind of theory to apply in order to promote her career and maybe even her understanding, all that's available is woke pseudoknowledge.
The Bible, bar talk, and twitter weirdos are weak substitutes for scholarly dedication and its resulting insights.