Who Shot Romeo? And How Can We Stop the Bleeding?: Urban Shakespeare, White People, and Education Beyond the Neoliberal Nightmare

In Jason Zeldes’s Romeo Is Bleeding, a 2015 documentary about an urban adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, the two questions of my primary title are the governing, largely unspoken ones driving the narrative. Trapped within and traumatized by the drug-related gun violence plaguing Richmond, CA, Donté Clark, a co-founder of an after-school creative arts program, comes to see in Romeo and Juliet the possibility of an expressive way out. As both the play-adaptation (entitled Té’s Harmony) and the film capture, Clark and his student collaborators engage in a hopeful process of adapting Romeo and Juliet into a lifesaving vehicle for