Afterword: Reckoning with Relevance—Collaboration, Community, Context

Carla Mazzio’s closing chapter stresses the fundamentally relational dimensions of relevance as a concept in theory and practice in order to then demonstrate how practices of collaboration, contextualization, and the making of community inform theories of relevance in Shakespeare and the Poetics and Politics of Relevance. In doing so, it argues for the significance of the collection not only for Shakespeare studies but also for thinking about the relevance of the discipline of literary and cultural studies today. The chapter, moreover, highlights aspects of the volume that call for a resistance to socio-capitalistic forces of individualism, institutionally defined economies of value and evaluation, and provincial models of approaching what “matters” in Shakespeare studies: to whom, when, where, why, and for how long. It addresses difficult questions about conceptions of scale, agency, impact, value and, above all, relationships, involved in pondering the relevance of teaching and research. Finally, by demonstrating how the volume models ways to connect across cultural and ideological divides, it closes with attention to the volume’s importance to field-wide conversations about the relationship between literature and social justice.