Hot Topics Presents Time Sensitive: Shakespearean Comedy and Chronoviolence

How does time work in comedy? For whom? And on whose side is time? Presented by the Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism program at the David Geffen School of Drama, this talk by Dr. Noémie Ndiaye brings Shakespeare Time studies and Premodern Critical Race studies together based on the realization that pursuing the old project of understanding the human experience of time in Shakespeare’s and in our own time periods demands that we consider how racial formations have affected the temporal regimes through which we have come to know ourselves. Focusing specifically on The Merchant of Venice (but keeping the larger repertoire of Shakespearean comedies in mind), Dr. Ndiaye will show that the genre-specific Shakespearean time scheme that scholars have collectively identified over time for comedy simply do not hold when considered from the perspective of the non-white characters inhabiting Shakespeare’s plays, and she will read Merchant for its particularly acute employment of what she calls racial chronoviolence.

Noémie Ndiaye is an Associate professor of English and French Literature at the University of Chicago. She works on early modern English, French, and Spanish theater with a critical focus on race. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (Penn Press 2022) and the co-editor, with Lia Markey, of the award-winning Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World (ACMRS Press 2023, open access). She has published articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Early Theatre, English Literary Renaissance, Literature Compass, Thaêtre, Bulletin of the Comediantes, and in various edited collections. Her new monograph, The Whiteness Between Us: Early Modern Playbooks of Racial Triangulation was just published by the University of Chicago Press. She is currently at work on the Shakespeare Wells lectures that she will deliver at Oxford University in Spring 2027.