ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an approach to teaching a canonical dramatic literature-based theatre history class while also teaching students to question and resist the canon’s ideological traps. The author models the use of French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s concept of the emancipated spectator and American educational theorist Joyce E. King’s concept of dysconscious racism as methods of historical and literary analysis in the theatre history classroom. Examining canonical scripts and historical artefacts through notions of dysconscious racism and the emancipated spectator encourages undergraduate students to critique historical structures of inequity and to examine their own ideological constructions.
