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From Shakespeare to Obama discusses language, slavery, and place from the Portuguese enslavement of African people, through slavery in Shakespeare´s plays, to President Obama´s 2012 speech on "modern slavery." Balancing close reading with context, this expansive book offers new insight into questions of otherness, rhetoric, and stereotyping.

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1. Introduction 2. Slavery 3. Shakespeare´s Sonnets 4. Shakespeare´s Dramatic Time 5. Ralegh, England, America and the World 6. Vision 7. Theory 8. Eco, Story and History 9. Vassanji, Africa and America 10. Obama, America and Africa 11. Obama and Slavery 12. Conclusion

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"From Shakespeare to Obama is a writerly, inventive, idiosyncratic series of meditations on language, slavery, rhetoric, and the public and the private, reaching into past and future, forging a new and exciting model for comparative scholarship as engaged story-telling." - Page duBois, Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, University of California, San Diego, USA

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Jonathan Hart is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada. He has published ten books with Palgrave Macmillan, most recently, Textual Imitation (2012), Literature, Theory, History (2011); Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2011); and Shakespeare: Poetry, History and Culture (2009). He is also a poet and his most recent works are Dreamwork (2010) and Musing (2011), a book of sonnets. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Toronto, Harvard University, University of Cambridge, Princeton University, and the Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris III).

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