Hi everyone! My name's Ian Wang, I'm a second-year English student here at Cambridge, and I'm the first of a series of students who are taking over the Library's social media this term to talk about decolonising the curriculum.
Since it's Shakespeare term at the moment, I thought I'd talk about postcolonial approaches to Shakespeare. When I went through Shakespeare term last year, one of the things that frustrated me was the near-total absence of postcolonial approaches in the teaching material.
Aside from a cursory nod in a reading list or a lecture, hardly anyone in the faculty, students and academics alike, seemed to want to engage with Shakespeare's presentation of race and otherness, even in plays like Othello or The Tempest where those issues loom large.
With that in mind, here are some secondary texts that which I found helpful in exploring those issues in my own time. Hopefully they'll be useful to anyone who's looking for a way discussing Shakespeare in a postcolonial context, but don't know quite where to start.
For a good general introduction, check out Shakespeare and Race (eds. Alexander and Wells), which has a variety of essays on the subject, including one by Nobel Literature Prize-winning Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka. 
One of the foremost postcolonial critics of Shakespeare is Ania Loomba. She's written a book on Shakespeare, Race & Colonialism as one of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics, as well as this essay on 'Shakespeare and Cultural Difference' in Alternative Shakespeares Vol. 2.
Anthony Gerard Barthelemy's Black Face, Maligned Race examines the presentation of Black characters in Shakespeare's plays, as well as several other works of Renaissance drama (so useful if you're revising the Renaissance paper as well).
Jyotsna Singh's essay in Women, "Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period (eds. Hendricks and Parker) gives you some ways of applying the work of postcolonial theorists like Frantz Fanon and Homi K. Bhabha to Shakespeare's writing.
Karen Newman's essay in her book Essaying Shakespeare discusses the concept of 'monstrosity' as it relates to Othello, and the ways that the portrayal of race in the play intersects with gender and eroticism.
That's all from me, but if you'd like more suggestions, here's a full list of the books I've found useful in my studies - happy reading!
We'll have a different student doing one of these takeovers every Wednesday for the rest of the term - look out for the hashtag #EFLdecolonise!
