Whiteness and Witness: Fat Ham ’s Classicism

Abstract: Among the many elements of Hamlet that James Ijames’s Fat Ham gleefully subverts is the tacit connection of blackness to spectacle. Fat Ham ’s refusal to participate in Hamlet ’s process of racialization was thrown into stark relief when, in 2023, it appeared on Broadway, an institution traditionally dominated by white artists and audience members. This essay examines the ensuing dynamic first by surveying foundational works in Premodern Critical Race Studies that have dissected Hamlet ’s demonization of blackness, a process inextricable from its “universal” canonicity, before analyzing key scenes in Hamlet that connect its racecraft to instances of fixing a white gaze. I then turn to read Fat Ham ’s strategies of excavating and arresting Hamlet ’s reification of whiteness, which I suggest arrive from an unlikely source: Aristotelian dramaturgy, a project that denies Hamlet’s modernity (and, by extension, modernity’s whiteness) even as it stems from a philosopher who notoriously espoused a system of natural slavery that would negate Fat Ham ’s humanity and artistry. The essay concludes with a consideration of Fat Ham ’s extraordinary ending, in which whiteness’s demands for spectacle are both met and upended.