Chapter 5 - Voices from the Margins

Summary

This chapter recovers the voices of marginalised US communities – Native, Jewish, and African Americans – bringing out of oblivion their Tercentenary contributions. It asks whether underprivileged racial and ethnic groups accepted the alleged superiority of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural heritage, and whether, by appropriating Shakespeare, they attempted to become part of that heritage or to challenge its exclusivity. It demonstrates that 1916 America was torn between competing impulses of assimilation and diversity. The white majority held out ostensibly universal cultural standards to which all should aspire, while believing that they were unattainable to some groups. The minorities faced the irreconcilable demands of trying to conform to these standards at the cost of renouncing their distinct identity, while sensing that white supremacists would never accept them as equal no matter what they did. The Tercentenary celebrations registered these tensions and allowed the members of American minorities to produce hybrid Shakespearean appropriations, which accommodated a far-reaching critique of dominant ideology. They helped them to express their distinctive identities, while highlighting the entrenched inequality that they endured.