Yasser Khan reminds us that race, simply put, is made. It is the consequence of painstaking and deliberate work, whether in the meticulous anthropological taxonomies offered by Kant and Blumenbach, or in the line of poetry, or, as Khan argues, in the representation of racial differences on the Romantic-era stage. Drawing on the notion of “racecraft,” which “foregrounds racism as a reality that produces ‘race’ to rationalize the dispossession of wealth, power, and rights,” Khan shows how stagecraft in John Fawcett’s Obi; or Three-Finger’d Jack (1800) establishes the terms by which racialized subjects come to be understood as fundamentally exploitable.

This chapter offers an approach to the discourses of race and ethnicity in ancient Greek epic, specifically Homer’s Iliad and Apollonius’ Argonautica. The chapter begins by defining, theorising and applying a transhistorical concept of race and ethnicity which makes it possible to analyse the literary representations of ancient manifestations of ethnic and racialised oppression. Murray argues that epic poetry transmitted to its receiving society, whether ancient or modern, a mythical social order that placed the heroes, the demi-gods, at the top of the human hierarchy, and non-heroes, the people who are oppressed and exploited by the heroes, at the bottom. She also examines the specific construct of the epic hero, who can only really exist where non-heroes can be and are dehumanised by him. Murray analyses examples of this hierarchical structure and argues that this mythic social order, so integral to the society of Greek epic, was racial.

This chapter explains how and why The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race would have been nearly impossible to create thirty years ago. It traces how the volume requires scholars who know not only Shakespeare’s works, the historical and cultural milieu of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in England and Europe, and the archives that hold the historical documents from these time periods, but also the history of imperialism, alternative archives that reveal more about the various lives of people of color in the early modern world, and the history of Shakespeare’s employment in various theatrical, educational, and political moments in history – from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century. Post-colonial studies, African American studies, critical race studies, and queer studies allow scholars to apply new methodologies to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

One in every hundred Romani youth enters higher education in Europe. To justify this educational dearth, policymakers, scholars and practitioners have often reproduced the same racecraft about Roma: they form part of an inferior culture that does not value education. This racist ideology has not only fed a false moral justification but also buried any potential sense of concern and urgency among policymakers regarding the dramatic underrepresentation of Roma in higher education. In this chapter, we argue that public education has historically been an institution designed for gadje (non-Roma) (although less so for gadjo girls and the poor), while Romani children and youth, seen as ‘inferior and nomadic others’, have had no functional option for quality education and even less for higher education. We explore patterns of exclusion, fear, racism and racialised poverty. We show that schools and universities today remain highly unwelcoming for Romani children and youth, failing in large measure to address pervasive structural racism or to advance inclusion and equity. We conclude that education reform needs to start by dismantling the racecraft of ‘inferiority’ from ideology, policies and practice.