Reviews

Reviews of Shakespearean Charity and the Perils of Redemptive Performance (Cambridge UP, 2020)

"Overall, the book offers fascinating glimpses into the uses and abuses of the arts in a capitalist “self-help” culture. " --Molly Clark, Time Literary Supplement

"Part of the challenge of this book is that one is left, on the one hand, wanting to believe that the experience of Shakespeare has potentially changed these students' lives for the better adn on the other, with the sense that the 'gift' of Shakespeare remains fundamentally flawed no matter the good intentions of the giver. Barnes writes powerfully about the emotions of sympathy and empathy which the films produce. He quotes Susan Sontag: 'So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence'. ... Barnes's analysis is particularly astute when it comes to the racial fantasies at play... Although these Shakespeare documentaries appear to take on social issues...they 'unfold in isolated environments, where cultural and social conflicts become displaced onto the individualised, private negotiations'." --Jane Kinsley-Smith, Shakespeare Survey 75

Reviews of my contribution to Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance, edited by Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010:

"Two contributions stand out for their dense, insightful analysis. The first is Douglas Lanier's superb chapter on Duke Ellington's portrayal of Lady Macbeth in his "Lady Mac" .... The second is Todd Landon Barnes's essay about the YouTube video "Revenge of the Ghetto," in which Barnes manages to combine compelling arguments about pedagogy, digital reproduction, and circulation between the "white" cultures of Shakespearean performance and suburban youth and the "black" culture of Hip Hop."
--Robert Ormsby, Modern Drama 54:1

"Todd Landon Barnes considers the phenomenon of hip-hop Macbeths in the context of the culture wars, and, while critical of racially naïve appropriations of Shakespeare by hip-hop and vice versa, sees some hope for 'modes of understanding … that might keep us from jumping Jim Crow while playing the Upstart Crow.'"

--Nicholas Jones, Shakespeare Bulletin 29:1

"Todd Landon Barnes's essay on hip hop appropriations of Shakespeare argues forcefully that erasing the boundary between high and low culture does little to challenge the dynamic by which difference is elided and property rights reasserted in the name of progressivism."

--Jennifer Clement, P arergon 29:2

"Todd Landon Barnes . . . bases his chapter on the large and ever-increasing number of hip hop Macbeths circulating in our globally networked multimedia environment. Focused on a high school English project uploaded onto YouTube, Macbeth Act V: Revenge of the Ghetto, the chapter discusses the conjunction of Macbeth and hip hop culture in film (Gerald Barclay’s 2003 Bloody Streetz and Greg Salman’s 2004 Mad Dawg), on stage (Ayodele Nzinga’s 2006 Mac, a Gangsta’s Tale, Victoria Evans Erville’s NEA-sponsored MacB: The Macbeth Project of 2002 and 2008) and in pedagogical programmes like Flocabulary’s Stephen Greenblatt-endorsed CD Shakespeare is Hip Hop and Tonia Lee’s Macbeth in Urban Slang. Barnes interrogates simplistic conjunctions of Shakespeare and hip hop, arguing that these dehistoricise both, falsely connecting struggles of the past and present. Although the analysis focuses primarily on the problem of the digitised Macbeths in this world of cutting, copying, pasting and rewriting, its critique might be applied to other simplistic analogies between Shakespeare and the present and to simplistic applications of progressive and liberatory pedagogies."
--Denise Newfield, Shakespeare in South Africa

"Like Royster's critically challenging examination of tropes of whiteness, Todd Landon Barnes's reading of hip-hop's integration into literature curriculum at the secondary level offers a unique perspective on Macbeth and race. Barnes argues that when teachers use hip-hop to teach Shakespeare they often overemphasize potential connections between different cultures and media instead of emphasizing differences. Such an approach oversimplifies the cultural contexts of hip-hop while presenting Shakespeare to students as an artistic "universal" (164). Encouraging educators "to focus on performance's ability to register and rehearse historical change and cultural difference," Barnes points out that using hip-hop to explore Shakespeare offers teachers a chance to emphasize historical and cultural differences instead of a "universal" homogeneity that ultimately prioritizes the works of Shakespeare (164). In other words, Barnes argues that hip-hop in the classroom has to be used to give information back to students, to show the conflicts created when Shakespeare and hip-hop collide. A unique approach to "innovative" Shakespeare pedagogy, Barnes's essay reveals both the benefits and limitations of current classroom practices."

--Sonya Freeman Loftis, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 7:2

"Todd Landon Barnes explores a fusion of performance history and up-to-the minute contemporary culture in his essay on the hip-hop inspired intersection of Macbeth, the minstrel tradition, and the digitized classroom."

--Rebecca Dark, Early Modern Studies Journal

"These sections also include surprise examples of whiteness studies in "Riddling Whiteness, Riddling Certainty" (Fracesca Royster), which focuses on Roman Polanski's Macbeth, and "Hip-Hop Macbeths, 'Digitizing Blackness,' and the Millennial Minstrel" (Todd Landon Barnes), where white high school students translate the text into the hip-hoperatic Revenge of the Ghetto."

--John Robert Moss, Theatre Topics