Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World [1st ed.] 9783030506797, 9783030506803

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
Introduction: “A Cemetery Inhabited by Highly Vocal Ghosts” (Joyce Green MacDonald)....Pages 1-16
Claiming Wisdom: Re-reading Othello in Gayl Jones’ Mosquito (Joyce Green MacDonald)....Pages 17-45
Uncrossed Lovers: Remembering Race in Romeo and Juliet and Mississippi Masala (Joyce Green MacDonald)....Pages 47-75
Bodies, Race, and Performance in Antony and Cleopatra and Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile: Memory’s Signatures (Joyce Green MacDonald)....Pages 77-107
Echoes of Harlem: Women’s Memories in Othello and Harlem Duet (Joyce Green MacDonald)....Pages 109-133
‘The Right Foundation’: Re-racing Romance from The Taming of the Shrew to Deliver Us from Eva (Joyce Green MacDonald)....Pages 135-165
Afterword: Adapting Shakespeare, Forgetting Race in King Charles III—Future History? (Joyce Green MacDonald)....Pages 167-173
Back Matter ....Pages 175-179

Citation preview

PALGRAVE SHAKESPEARE STUDIES

Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World Joyce Green MacDonald

Palgrave Shakespeare Studies Series Editors Michael Dobson The Shakespeare Institute University of Birmingham Stratford-upon-Avon, UK Dympna Callaghan Syracuse University Syracuse, NY, USA

Palgrave Shakespeare Studies takes Shakespeare as its focus but strives to understand the significance of his oeuvre in relation to his contemporaries, subsequent writers and historical and political contexts. By extending the scope of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Studies the series will open up the field to examinations of previously neglected aspects or sources in the period’s art and thought. Titles in the Palgrave Shakespeare Studies series seek to understand anew both where the literary achievements of the English Renaissance came from and where they have brought us. Co-founded by Gail Kern Paster. Editorial Board Members Margreta de Grazia Peter Holland Michael Neill Lois D. Potter David Jonathan Schalkwyk More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14658

Joyce Green MacDonald

Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World

Joyce Green MacDonald University of Kentucky Lexington, KY, USA

Palgrave Shakespeare Studies ISBN 978-3-030-50679-7    ISBN 978-3-030-50680-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Getty Images: lisapics This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Writing is solitary, but the joy of having written must be shared. I could not have written this book without talking with and listening to and trying to rise to the intellectual examples set by some old Shakespeare partners: Arthur Little, Kim Hall, Lisa Starks, Ayanna Thompson, Jonathan Burton, Jyotsna Singh. Some new partners have also invigorated my thinking by broadening my sense of the borders within which it can take place: Patricia Akhimie, Dennis Britton, Noémie Ndiaye, Ruben Espinosa, David Brown. The names of so many more are sprinkled through my notes, and it gives me such pleasure to remember you all. I must thank the anonymous readers of this manuscript, whose cogent advice I tried my best to follow during revision; any errors or miscalculations that remain are mine alone. As always, I am grateful to my students at the University of Kentucky, whose questions made me think more deeply about the texts I discuss here, and whose skepticism about some of my answers made me think again. I thank the organizers of the scholarly meetings where I tried out early versions of these chapters: the Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature at the University of Alabama (under the leadership of the staunch Sharon O’Dair), the Modern Language Association, and especially the Shakespeare Association of America. An early version of the chapter on Mosquito appeared in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and the first version of the chapter on A Branch of the Blue Nile was published in Theatre Journal.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would have been able to write without the boisterous presence of my large extended family, Greens and MacDonalds alike, but it wouldn’t have been as challenging. Shared meals, shared laughter, shared sorrow, shared hope bind us together and move us on. I am especially grateful for my granddaughter Magnolia, who reminds me every day that there is joy.

Contents

1 Introduction: “A Cemetery Inhabited by Highly Vocal Ghosts”  1 References  14 2 Claiming Wisdom: Re-reading Othello in Gayl Jones’ Mosquito 17 References  41 3 Uncrossed Lovers: Remembering Race in Romeo and Juliet and Mississippi Masala 47 References  72 4 Bodies, Race, and Performance in Antony and Cleopatra and Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile: Memory’s Signatures 77 References 103 5 Echoes of Harlem: Women’s Memories in Othello and Harlem Duet109 References 131 6 ‘The Right Foundation’: Re-racing Romance from The Taming of the Shrew to Deliver Us from Eva135 References 162 vii

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Contents

7 Afterword: Adapting Shakespeare, Forgetting Race in King Charles III—Future History?167 References 173 Index175

Abbreviations

AAR ALH CompD EHR ELR EMLS JAC JAH JEMCS MFS MLS PALARA PMLA RenQ ShS SQ WSQ YFS

African American Review American Literary History Comparative Drama Economic History Review English Literary Renaissance Early Modern Literary Studies Journal of American Culture Journal of American History Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies Modern Fiction Studies Modern Language Studies Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association Proceedings of the Modern Language Association Renaissance Quarterly Shakespeare Survey Shakespeare Quarterly Women’s Studies Quarterly Yale French Studies

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: “A Cemetery Inhabited by Highly Vocal Ghosts”

This book is about the ways in which black women appear and disappear in Shakespeare. When I first started writing about race in early modern texts, the absence of black female characters in the plays based on Roman history that particularly interested me then both intrigued and annoyed me, especially as I started thinking more about the significance of notions of “fairness” in a Renaissance poetic vocabulary.1 My first hunch was that characters who should historically have been dark-skinned were often instead represented as fair, and that this whitening was a racially motivated choice made near the beginnings of England’s colonial encounters with Africa and the New World. These years later, though, I want to return to that Shakespearean absence itself, and look at what it means. Two factors provoke my discussion of what is physically not there. First, even though black characters are thin on the ground in the plays, they are nonetheless always being talked In the foreword to a reprinted edition of her novel Beloved (New York: Vintage International, 2004), Morrison describes what it was like to make fiction from the life of the escaped slave Margaret Garner, who, in 1856, tried to kill her children—succeeding in the case of her two-year-old daughter—rather than see them captured and returned to slavery: “To invite readers (and myself) into the repellant landscape (hidden, but not completely; deliberately buried, but not forgotten) was to pitch a tent in a cemetery inhabited by highly vocal ghosts” (xvii). © The Author(s) 2020 J. Green MacDonald, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World, Palgrave Shakespeare Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3_1

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about, invoked, referred to.2 Next to Silvia, with whom he is suddenly obsessed, Proteus’ former love Julia is “but a swarthy Ethiope”; accepting his just punishment for having apparently slandered Hero to death, Claudio is determined to marry Leonato’s unseen niece even “were she an Ethiope”; Phebe’s harsh letter to “Ganymede” in As You Like It seethes with “giant-rude invention… / Ethiope words.” In a striking change of mood, for Florizel Perdita’s unadorned yet dazzling beauty is as “soft as dove’s down and as white as it, / Or Ethiopian’s tooth.”3 Such obsessive reference to people who aren’t actually present, and in such a variety of tones—from disgust to Florizel’s awe—indicates that “Ethiopes” occupied significant space in the plays’ imagination. These invisible Ethiopes emerge as necessary props for making the whiteness of the speakers morally and ethically, as well as physically, legible.4 We can see an example of how black people, and black women in particular, are necessary to the productions of notions of white value and virtue—indeed, of value and virtue as white properties5—in The Merchant of Venice. When Lancelot Gobbo absurdly rebukes Lorenzo for driving up the price of bacon by converting Jews like Jessica, Lorenzo retorts that the economic aftereffects of mass conversion would be easier to justify to the commonwealth than the fact that Gobbo has gotten Jessica’s black maidservant pregnant. Although Merchant’s racially articulated romantic comedy of conversion is dedicated to celebrating what love can do, Lorenzo’s non sequitur implicitly admits that there are strict limits to love’s power. Jessica “shall be saved” by Lorenzo, both through his love and through his helping her to convert to Christianity, but the offstage coupling between Gobbo and the nameless “Negro” is not available to the same kind of romantic enchantment (3.5.17, 37). Even though he acknowledges that she is a better woman than he took her for when he first slept with her, she remains “less than an honest woman” (3.5.39): useful for sex only, outside the reach of comic transformation because of who she is, and her incapacity to become anything else.6 (As Patricia Akhimie has persuasively suggested, Gobbo’s class position as a servant clown also racializes him. Illicitly linked to an Ethiop who can’t be morally washed clean—as Lorenzo has “saved” Jessica—he stands with her outside the pale of properly cultivated behavior that was one of the period’s markers of whiteness.7) Characters like the offstage “Negro” maid who helps Merchant clarify what it can and cannot mean by love and transformation play important conceptual roles in delineating the imaginative limits of Shakespearean drama. Shakespeare’s plays emerged at the beginning of a period in which

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black women and their labors—agricultural, domestic, sexual, reproductive—would become central to the slavery-based maintenance of an overseas empire. Yet, as historians like Sowandé Mustakeem, Marisa Fuentes, and Jennifer Morgan have shown, it is difficult to find traces of these women’s lives, or to understand the traces of these lives when we see them, in a colonial archive, given the purposes and interests of those assembling that archive.8 That so many of these black women disappeared—sometimes even beyond the capacity of present-day descendants to recover the lives and stories of ancestors swallowed by the void of the Middle Passage and its works—speaks to the virtual erasure of their standing as human beings, their reduction to mere “flesh,” their flickering survival as only the occasions for stories of their subjection, sedimented over the already ancillary status to which they were reduced in a Renaissance racial imaginary.9 The spectral quality of black women in our Shakespearean archive—physically absent, but socially present, and called on to do various kinds of work in establishing social, sexual, and racial hierarchies— develops within the history of this colonial abjection.10 Nevertheless, this book is dedicated to finding black women in Shakespeare, and participates in the ongoing critical project of analyzing the operations of race in the early modern world. Beginning, perhaps, with Eldred Jones’ 1965 Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama and its documentation of Renaissance playwrights’ fascination with black characters and the idea of blackness, early modern race studies have been committed not only to attesting to the degree that racial identity and difference were pervasive Renaissance concerns11 but also to developing applications of race as a powerful analytic tool for studying the formation of racial identities.12 Scholarship particularly focused on women and race, with its careful attention to how ideas about race and ideas about sexuality worked together to make each other socially legible, has been an engine for much of my own thinking.13 Adding material detail to critical discussions, a more recent analysis has revealed the extent to which African-descended people were physically present in Renaissance England, and what the state made of them.14 But still, even buttressed by a critical method whose variety, breadth, and subtlety continue to reveal themselves, I found myself returning to the repeated indirection, misdirection, and absence surrounding black women—or the idea of black women—in Shakespeare. In The Winter’s Tale, after Florizel rapturously describes the beauty of Perdita’s white hand by comparing it to “dove’s down” or “fanned snow” or the white tooth of an imaginary Ethiopian

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shining against dark skin, he arrives at the Sicilian court and introduces her to her father as the daughter of “the warlike Smalus” (5.1.156), king of Libya. That the blackness of a lyric Ethiopian should have served as foil for Perdita’s white beauty earlier in the play stood out, but didn’t really surprise me the first time I noticed it. But what are we to make of this throwaway fifth-act imposture, after Florizel has made it clear to us that she is nowhere near as dark as the daughter of a Moorish king would be (even though her white beauty depends on blackness for its articulation), and even though she would have been played by a white youth who may have been wearing some kind of face paint to emphasize Perdita’s fairness even further? Knowing this, one modern editor suggests that Florizel’s “racial joke may have brought the house down.”15 That, I could believe. But what was the joke about? In a way, the attempt to figure out what the joke was/is and why the first audience of The Winter’s Tale may have found it funny brings me to this book’s second driving conviction: that studying adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in concert with the Shakespearean text can offer paths into finding and naming what is simultaneously there, and not there. Margaret Kidnie has argued that adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays offers a means of emphasizing their status as the object and locus of dynamic processes of interpretation and reception.16 For her, the “strongly motivated interventions” we see in Shakespearean adaptation themselves work to unfix the notion of the original text’s unchanging political or ideological authority, since “the site of adaptation keeps getting entangled in the work’s ongoing development” (9). This book conceives of the site of Shakespearean adaptation as the place where it can begin to admit black women into onstage presence. Texts in which they are conceptually central—the Libyan king’s fictive daughter who brings Perdita’s beauty, innocence, and nubility into sharper relief—but usually literally absent can offer ways in to making their stories visible in the work that the institution of Shakespeare did for emerging race-based colonial orders, and for the societies that those orders would create. Writing black women’s stories into reworked Shakespeares is a way of writing them into a history that has worked to efface or misvalue them, their works, and their lives. Animated through performance, they escape the “house arrest”17 under which archival information is held for the purposes of state constructions of the past, and emerge into our sight. The reanimated shades of black and white women who do not appear in Othello, or, if they do appear, do not tell us their whole stories there,

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occupy much of Toni Morrison’s script for the extraordinary theatre piece Desdemona, which reimagines Shakespeare’s heroine as she tells her own story from the afterlife. We meet both Desdemona’s mother and Othello’s mother in a “dark place,” bound by grief for their dead children.18 After her first shock, Signora Brabantio invites Soun, Othello’s mother, to kneel with her at their children’s graves, but Soun demurs: among her people, “we obey nature and look to it for the language of the gods.” Instead of praying for mercy and the ability to withstand grief, Soun will instead “build an altar to the spirits who are waiting to console us” (27): consolation will come when her broken heart is ready to be healed, and not before. Inventing characters who might logically be thought to be a part of Othello and Desdemona’s story although they don’t appear in Shakespeare, Morrison goes farther to allude to the existence of a completely different kind of relationship to the divine than the one Desdemona’s mother knows, filling in some of the kind of background—who and what is missing from these stories?—that might be partially hidden or forgotten in Shakespeare’s play. Desdemona even more powerfully engages with the question of what has been absent or exiled from its Shakespearean original with its onstage introduction of Barbary, Desdemona’s mother’s maid. As I will be arguing later in this book, Barbary is part of a nexus of absent African women in Othello who have deeply shaped the Moor and informed the play’s sense of the tragic potential built into romantic love. By bringing her onstage, Morrison animates a crucial element of the play’s backstory in a way that allows us to understand what is at stake when it so resolutely pushes Barbary, Othello’s mother, the Egyptian “charmer,” and the 200-year-old sibyl who embroidered the strawberries on the handkerchief to the edges of its memory. In Morrison’s text, Barbary joins Desdemona in the afterworld, and her mistress is glad to see her again: “We shared so much.” But Barbary responds, “We shared nothing.” Barbary, as it turns out, wasn’t even her real name. She is actually called Sa’ran, and the name Barbary was imposed on her in an act of domination: “Barbary is what you call Africa. Barbary is the geography of the foreigner, the savage. Barbary? Barbary equals the sly, vicious enemy who must be put down at any price; held down at any cost for the conquerors’ pleasure” (45). She was only Desdemona’s servant, even a slave, in Brabantio’s household. When Desdemona tries to argue that she and Sa’ran did hold their subordinated place as women in Venice in common despite their racial difference, Sa’ran admits that at least Desdemona was never cruel to

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her, “never hurt or abused” her. After a moment, Desdemona asks, “Who did?” Sa’ran answers, “You know who did” (48). We in the audience can only guess. Was it Othello himself, who tells us that he and Iago were bound by the rapes and depredations they committed while soldiering together? Was it Signora Brabantio, whose “maid” (4.3.25) Othello tells us “Barbary” was? Or was it Brabantio, who failed to control his daughter, but would have had much less trouble holding down a slave for his own pleasure? We cannot be sure. The only thing that is sure, Sa’ran tells us, is that in the afterworld, she is free to sing something else besides the “Willow Song” of permanent heartbreak and loss. Now, finally, she will be comforted: Someone leans near And sees the salt my eyes have shed. I wait, longing to hear Words of reason, love or play To lash or lull me toward the hollow day. … Then on my skin a sudden breath caresses The salt my eyes have shed. And I hear a call—clear, so clear: ‘You will never die again.’ (49)

We can take Morrison’s Sa’ran—one of the “highly vocal ghosts” haunting Othello—as an emblem of what we can learn when we listen to the stories that Shakespeare’s plays allude to but do not tell, when we try to body forth what is not there. The adaptations I discuss here do not so much “write back” to Shakespeare, seeking to erase his formulations of hierarchy, identity, and relationship, as they seek to imagine a world in which they can engage in recreative dialogue with him.19 My texts want to say what has been omitted or ignored in his name and in the name of the British and white authority for which he was understood to stand. They imagine local worlds as they may have developed without the aftereffects left on the development of these societies after the power he helped to make material had been overthrown, and they engage in critical analysis of the lingering potency of those aftereffects as they seek to free themselves from them. Adaptation’s freedom and multiplicity of address may thus have at least the potential to dislocate the power of the Shakespearean text, since it

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shows that in its reception and consumption Shakespeare is subject to endless processes of interpretation, that he is never just one thing, despite the majoritarian political uses to which he has been put. They imagine a way forward. As these chapters will indicate, so often the setting for black women’s rematerialization is a domestic one. A hunger for intimacy—sororal, sexual, familial—moves throughout the works I discuss here. In my characters’ lives, intimacy has been denied, thwarted, withheld. If they know themselves, they cannot be known and understood by others; or, others understand them to be something that they themselves know they are not. But, if, as Sharon Holland has asserted, “racism orders some of the most intimate practices of everyday life,” including “family, generation, and desire,” the notions of intimacy that the heroines of my revised Shakespeares struggle to confront and remake are themselves some of the first staging grounds for others’ racial convictions about them.20 The personal, the intimate, the domestic are political, since these apparently secret domains— “the barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeon’s laboratory, the prison, the cane field, the kitchen, the master’s bedroom”21—were where ideas about the place and nature of black women were first formulated, demonstrated, and enforced. Such private settings were convenient staging grounds for acts of domination precisely because they were hidden from public view: evidence of such acts could be all the more easily denied, ignored, repressed. But still, as Sa’ran says, we “know.” If blackness and black women are frequently such spectral, allusive presences in Shakespeare, the remade intimacies they yearn for will also share this phantom quality—almost visible, almost tangible, but not always fully achieved. So my book begins in that absence. Or, instead of absence, exile: with black women’s exclusion from domains of high culture, romantic love, emotional intimacy, civic standing. In the adaptations I examine here, we can see black female characters—sometimes in the work of black female authors—emerge as authors of their own stories, actors in their own lives, secret editors of stories that others have told about them. This revisionary work is emancipatory in impulse even if it cannot always achieve the goal of completely rewriting the western histories of gender and of race that have contained and defined my subjects. It yearns to make explicit what has been effaced, muted, repressed in Shakespeare—in Shakespeare especially because of how richly his texts invoke blackness, and how they yet paradoxically limit the physical presence of black people. The adaptations

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I discuss here want to find out what happens when we retell Shakespeare through the terms of black women’s lives and experiences within existing racial orders. My second chapter, on the use of Othello in Gayl Jones’ 1999 novel Mosquito, places its reimagining of the Shakespeare play within the heroine Mosquito Johnson’s efforts to help undocumented refugees from Mexico and Central America find refuge in the United States. Mosquito herself is largely invisible or incomprehensible in her own life along the border. She is odd because she’s a woman in a man’s job—long-haul trucking—and odd again because she doesn’t match standard notions of what women are “supposed” to look like; she’s not white, blond, petite, or thin. Yet, despite Mosquito’s gendered and racially framed exclusion from an American world conceived in terms of a white racial dominance that was never designed to comprehend her, she enjoys rich friendships with other women of color, participates in black institutions that emotionally sustain her, possesses a dynamic inner life grounded in a generative alternative history for herself and her people, and finally acts politically to help create a civic order that embodies her hopes for a new kind of communal, egalitarian, racially multiple future. The work that Mosquito does with Othello points to the possibility of reading the Shakespeare play within contexts that are spacious and welcoming enough to include a whole new world of readers, in direct response to the ways in which the play turns on excluding black women from its present. Mosquito’s project of rewriting the stories Shakespeare tells (or declines to tell) reappears in my third chapter, on the connections between Mira Nair’s 1992 film Mississippi Masala and Romeo and Juliet. Mississippi Masala takes up the motif of voyaging and border-crossing that is so prominent in both Jones’ novel and Othello and enlarges it even further, splaying its star-crossed lovers’ backstory across oceans and continents, providing a history that offers a possible explanation of what kinds of barriers could be so powerful as to force lovers apart in the present. Filling in the details of a colonial history helps to explain why Nair’s lovers must not be together, in contrast to Shakespeare’s play, where we are expected merely to accept that Romeo and Juliet’s love must not be. Explaining the past works to strengthen Mississippi Masala’s alternative ending, exposing the operations of its racial machinery so that it loses its power to hurt—or, so that it is also found to contain the potential to heal. My fourth chapter, on Derek Walcott’s play A Branch of the Blue Nile, transposes the first two chapters’ interest in the possibility of reimagining

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the past and generating new futures from the American south and southwest to the Caribbean. The colonial histories implicit in Mosquito’s division between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking America, or in Mississippi Masala’s portrait of division between African Indians and African Americans—divisions whose origins lay across the oceans or in the distant past—are brought to the forefront by Blue Nile’s setting in an island that, only a generation before, had won its freedom from its British masters. The cultural and racial means through which that authority was enforced are still in full force, despite the rumblings of liberation that can be heard in an acting company’s desire to mount a West Indian Antony and Cleopatra, affecting both the minds of the performers and the assumptions of the artistic gatekeepers who believe it is their duty to vet admission to their ranks. The play’s heroine, Sheila, is fully capable of playing Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, but the role terrifies her because of the ways in which it will require her to face and reject what she has been taught to believe about her own character, her social standing, the color of her skin, and the meaning of her own sexuality. Another example of how deeply Walcott’s work contemplates the nature of making art after empire, and the terms under which we can say empire actually ends, A Branch of the Blue Nile sets limits to the emancipatory hopes of Mosquito and Mississippi Masala. In Chap. 5, the work Canadian playwright Djanet Sears’ play Harlem Duet does with Othello explicitly ties Walcott’s sense of our limited ability to liberate ourselves from the past to Gayl Jones’ and Mira Nair’s interest in women as agents of that liberation. Sears’ heroine Billie saw her now-­ broken love affair with her lover Othe as her chance to intervene in a history of black romance that seemed to her not only to deny black lovers their happy ending, but also to enforce that denial through rejection of the value of black women as lovers and life partners. Billie repeatedly invokes the past—of Harlem, her chosen neighborhood; of iconic black lovers whose personal commitment to each other was grounded in their commitment to the political liberation of black people; of traditions of ancient African knowledge—as a way of arguing that the life she and Othe can have in the present day can be infused with comparable symbolic depth. Together in the present, they would honor the sacrifices and accomplishments of their ancestors as they carried the lessons of a shared informing history into their joined future. However, tragedy ensues when Billie realizes that Othe is not invested in a sustaining notion of an heroic black past as deeply as she is; in fact, he may not even see himself as being

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black in the same way she does, so that he cannot share a sense of their origins or destiny. Like A Branch of the Blue Nile, but without that play’s interest in the capacities of art to effect and reflect social change, Harlem Duet also suggests that there are clear limits to the ways in which black women in the present can draw sustenance and inspiration from the past. That past, both plays suggest, is too deeply shaped by its foundations in racism to lend itself easily—or possibly at all—to contemporary reshaping, by black women or anyone else. As it responds to The Taming of the Shrew, Gary Hardwick’s 2003 film Deliver Us from Eva begins by having already acknowledged the difficulty built into recasting Shakespearean effects of racial and gendered exclusions. Shrew remains a problem child of the Shakespeare canon: its incomplete induction shows its author’s shaky craftmanship, and its apparent absolute endorsement of patriarchy and the deformed social relations it produces has made audiences uncomfortable since the eighteenth century. Of course, it’s precisely this ill-ease that has given the play such a vigorous history of adaptive and revisionary performances; we can’t quite accept that it means what it says, so we keep trying to make it say something else, or at least to show the emotional costs of its unquestioned investment in male dominance. What makes Hardwick’s film so interesting to me is that it addresses the political intransigence of Shakespeare’s play by daring to shift the ground it stands on: the authority of fathers and of the patriarchal order that serves them. By shifting the story’s center of gravity from the exchange of women between men to a group of sisters who are making their own affective and economic way alongside the men who love them, Deliver Us from Eva takes a big step toward reimagining and undoing some of the gender absolutism can make reading or watching Shrew so unsettling. Just as Mississippi Masala acknowledges the existence of a nonwhite audience that might imagine a story of star-crossed lovers differently than that story is presented in Romeo and Juliet, Deliver Us from Eva begins rethinking The Taming of the Shrew for a black audience by undoing the play’s bedrock assumption of unquestioned male authority in the family.22 Both films thus use race as a lever to pry open and retract their initiating plays’ central motivating beliefs. By making its protagonist a black woman and setting her and her sisters in a web of black institutions and relationships, the film puts in the foreground what Shakespeare keeps offstage, in the background, or in the past of his dramatic worlds. That Deliver Us from Eva is a love story also works to recenter the questions of

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intimacy, emotional connection, and family bonds that animate the plays whose adaptations I consider here. The absence of black female characters from Shakespeare does constitute a crisis of representation. But Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World argues that this representational crisis is itself a symptom of a larger crisis of recognition—both recognition of what is there but has been “hidden, but not completely; deliberately buried, but not forgotten,” and of what it might mean to have those secrets unburied and spoken out loud. In the texts I examine here, adaptation becomes the flexible tool for excavating black women from their repressed places in Shakespeare. Adaptation can work to disrupt the form of the original text as well as to dispute the cultural value it has been thought to transmit. As they refuse and recast their Shakespearean originals, as they remember those texts differently, the adaptations I discuss in this book also dispute the powers of racial erasure that those originals have been used to solicit.

Notes 1. My thinking on this subject is, of course, indebted to Kim Hall’s Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. 62–122. 2. Dympna Callaghan made this point in her essay “‘Othello was a White Man’: Properties of Race on Shakespeare’s Stage,” in Terence Hawkes, ed., Alternative Shakespeares Vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1996), 192–215. 3. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.6.26; Much Ado About Nothing, 5.4.38; As You Like It, 4.3.35–36; Pericles, 6.20–21; The Winter’s Tale, 4.4.361–362. The phrase from Pericles translates “Your light is my life.” Here and throughout this book, I take all Shakespeare citations from The Oxford Shakespeare, 2nd ed., gen. eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). 4. Besides Hall, note 1 above, I am following Arthur Little, Jr., “Re-Historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespearean Property,” SQ 67, no. 1 (2016), esp. 90–92. 5. As formulated by Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1710–1791. 6. M.  Lindsay Kaplan, “Jessica’s Mother: Medieval Constructions of Race and Gender in The Merchant of Venice,” SQ 58, no. 1 (2007): 1–30. Dennis Britton, Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 145–156, builds on Kaplan’s pioneering discussion by noting how Renaissance drama

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inflects its degrees of anxiety about miscegenation through the gender of the parties involved. 7. Akhimie’s Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2018), discusses Merchant (although not Lancelot Gobbo), 1–4. On how low status could be conceived in racial terms, see her 83–116. 8. Sowandé Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017); Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 9. I take the term “flesh” from Hortense Spillers’ landmark essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81, which argues that understandings of black women’s formation as historical subjects come to us through knowledge of their commodification in slavery. On current black feminist re-citation of Spillers’ work, see Samantha Pinto, “Ungendering, Flesh, and Post-Spillers Epistemologies of Embodied and Emotional Justice,” Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships 4, no. 1 (2017): 25–45. 10. Deriving in part from the work of Spillers and Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), modern theories of Afro-pessimism hold that blackness is not so much a matter of identity as it is an ontological state of subjective nullity in the face of the history of racism and white supremacy. Mathieu Chapman’s Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other “Other” (New York: Routledge, 2016), is the first book-length discussion to read Shakespeare through this critical method. 11. Another inaugurating event could be G. K. Hunter’s “Othello and Colour Prejudice,” Proceedings of the British Academy 53 (1967): 139–163. Also see Jones’ The Elizabethan Image of Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1971), and, for example, Anthony Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1987); Elliot H.  Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550–1688 (Boston: G.  K. Hall, 1982); Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991), and Peter Erickson, “Representation of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance,” Criticism 35, no. 4 (1993): 499–527. 12. For example, Peter Erickson and Kim Hall, “‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race,” SQ 67, no. 1 (2016): 1–13; Virginia Mason Vaughan, Picturing Blackness on English Stages,1500–1800

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Peter Erickson, “Picturing Race: Early Modern Constructions of Racial Identity,” JEMCS 13, no. 1 (2013): 151–169; Sujata Iyengar, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Margo Hendricks, “Race: A Renaissance Category?,” in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 690–698. Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion, ed. Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), compiles excerpts from period writings on racial, ethnic, and national difference. 13. Besides Hall, note 1 above, such work includes Women,‘Race’ and Writing in the Early Modern World, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York: Routledge, 1994); Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Francesca Royster, Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge, 2000), which includes the Othello essay cited in note 2 above; Heidi Hutner, Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Arthur Little, Jr., Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-visions of Rape, Race, and Sacrifice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). All of these works helped focus my thinking in Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 14. Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008); Miranda Kaufmann, Black Tudors: The Untold Story (London: Oneworld, 2017). 15. John Pitcher, ed., The Winter’s Tale, 3rd ed. (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 322. 16. In Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2009). 17. Jacques Derrida, trans., Eric Prenowitz, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995), 10. 18. Desdemona (London: Oberon Books, 2012), 26. I’ll provide subsequent references parenthetically in my text. 19. I am thinking especially of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1989). On the degree to which teaching English literature, including Shakespeare, worked to enforce British imperial authority, see Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, 10–37; and Jyotsna Singh, “Different Shakespeares: The Bard in Colonial/Postcolonial India,” Theatre Journal 41, no. 4 (1989), 456–458. 20. The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 20, 10.

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21. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008), 1. 22. On audience as a factor in adaptation especially across media, see Linda Hutcheon with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 82–85.

References Akhimie, Patricia. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World. New York: Routledge, 2018. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature. London: Routledge, 1989. Barthelemy, Anthony. Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1987. Britton, Dennis. Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Callaghan, Dympna. “Othello Was a White Man: Properties of Race on Shakespeare’s Stage.” In Alternative Shakespeares 2, edited by Terence Hawkes, 192–215. London: Routledge, 1996. Callaghan, Dympna. Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage. London: Routledge, 2000. Chapman, Mathieu. Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other “Other”. New York: Routledge, 2016. D’Amico, Jack. The Moor in English Renaissance Drama. Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991. Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 9–63. Erickson, Peter. “Picturing Race: Early Modern Constructions of Racial Identity.” JEMCS 13, no. 1 (2013): 151–169. Erickson, Peter. “Representation of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance.” Criticism 35, no. 4 (1993): 499–527. Erickson, Peter, and Kim Hall. “‘A New Scholarly Song’: Rereading Early Modern Race,” SQ 67, no. 1 (2016): 1–13. Fuentes, Marisa. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Habib, Imtiaz. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. Hall, Kim. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1710–1791. Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1–14.

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Hendricks, Margo. “Race: A Renaissance Category?”. In A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, edited by Michael Hattaway, 690–698. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Hendricks, Margo, and Patricia Parker, eds. Women, ‘Race’ and Writing in the Early Modern World. New York: Routledge, 1994. Holland, Sharon. The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Hunter, G. K. “Othello and Colour Prejudice.” Proceedings of the British Academy 53 (1967): 139–163. Hutcheon, Linda with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Hutner, Heidi. Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Iyengar, Sujata. Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Jones, Eldred. The Elizabethan Image of Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1971. Jones, Eldred. Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Kaplan, M.  Lindsay. “Jessica’s Mother: Medieval Constructions of Race and Gender in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2007): 1–30. Kaufmann, Miranda. Black Tudors: The Untold Story. London: Oneworld, 2017. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. New  York: Routledge, 2009. Little, Arthur, Jr. “Re-Historicizing Race, White Melancholia, and the Shakespearean Property.” SQ 67, no. 1 (2016): 84–103. Little, Arthur, Jr. Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Loomba, Ania. Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Loomba, Ania, and Jonathan Burton, eds. Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Morgan, Jennifer. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage International, 2004. Morrison, Toni. Desdemona. London: Oberon Books, 2012. Mustakeem, Sowandé. Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

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Pinto, Samantha. “Ungendering, Flesh, and Post-Spillers Epistemologies of Embodied and Emotional Justice.” Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships 4, no. 1 (2017): 25–45. Pitcher, John, ed. The Winter’s Tale. 3rd ed. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2010. Royster, Francesca. Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Singh, Jyotsna. “Different Shakespeares: The Bard in Colonial/Postcolonial India.” Theatre Journal 41, no. 4 (1989): 445–458. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81. Tokson, Elliot H. The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550–1688. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Vaughan, Virginia Mason. Picturing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor, gen. eds. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.

CHAPTER 2

Claiming Wisdom: Re-reading Othello in Gayl Jones’ Mosquito

As early as 1982, novelist Gayl Jones declared her ambition “to deal with the whole American continent in my fiction—the whole Americas—and to write imaginatively of blacks anywhere/everywhere.”1 Her first novel, Corregidora, traced the heroine’s family’s backstory in Brazilian slavery, contextualizing the experiences of black subjects in the United States within diaspora throughout the hemisphere. Her last novel, Mosquito (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), offers a more grandly scaled meditation on the African diaspora as a transatlantic as well as a Pan-American phenomenon. Set along the Rio Grande in south Texas—and thus poised along the imaginary line drawn between global north and global south, Anglo and Hispanic, Protestant and Catholic—the novel passionately affirms American national and racial identities as the product of crossings between old world and new, and across arbitrarily drawn hemispheric borders. Its heroine, Mosquito Johnson, is an African-American independent trucker whose decision to join a secret “new Underground Railroad” (235) dedicated to smuggling undocumented immigrants into the United States enacts this principle of creative flux. Structured in an assertively nonlinear manner, Mosquito unfolds entirely through the perceptions and observations of its title character, Sojourner Nadine Jane Nzingha Johnson, who got the nickname “Mosquito” after a childhood reaction to an insect bite. The main plot of the novel stems from her discovery of a pregnant Mexican woman hiding in a truckload of industrial detergents that Mosquito is bringing across the border on her © The Author(s) 2020 J. Green MacDonald, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World, Palgrave Shakespeare Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3_2

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way back home to her base in Texas City. Despite her inability to understand the woman’s language, Mosquito understands her to be in some danger and decides to take her to Father Ray, whom her friend Delgadina—a scholarly bartender who wants to become a detective—has led her to believe is the head of a shadowy movement dedicated to smuggling political prisoners across the Mexican border into the United States. Mosquito soon becomes involved in this Sanctuary movement. But outside this central narrative throughline, the much greater bulk of the novel consists of jazzy riffs: asides, meditations, speculations, and verbal trickery that mix facts up with made-up details that have the appearance of facts. Readers can’t always tell the difference, and neither can Mosquito herself, although she is scrupulous in flagging the places where she is not sure of, or decides to withhold some of, the whole truth. The novel’s very digressiveness is what most offended Henry Louis Gates. Jr. His exasperated review found it to be “sprawling, formless, maddening,” “drunk with words and out of control.”2 Commenting on Gates, Carrie Tirado Bramen observes that in wanting the novel to make more linear sense, he might have missed one of its most important points: that it deliberately sets out to “play with readerly expectations about linear development, character exposition, and hidden meaning.”3 I too see the novel’s discursive nature as a feature of its style and not a defect. In a fiction so deeply committed to creative and joyful acts of violating borders— between nations, between races and ethnicities, between registers of speech—the resistance to being a “linear narrative[s] with a beginning, a middle and an end” (Gates) becomes the formal manifestation of Jones’ vision of what race and nation can mean at the end of an American century. Mosquito’s location along a hemispheric and cultural divide usefully opens the novel to analysis in terms of what has been characterized as the “borders” school of theorizing race and ethnicity in the United States. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt emphasize the usefulness of borders in furthering discussion of comparative and intracultural histories of the United States, as well as establishing a framework for placing American situations within global or transnational contexts.4 Both of these areas of concentration—inside and across American borders—will figure in what I have to say about Jones’ novel. Focused especially in Chicano/a studies, border theory has consistently drawn attention not only to the extent of the mixing—sexual and otherwise—of Hispanic and non-Hispanic peoples in the Americas but the effects and consequences of that mixing, as new biological, aesthetic, and cultural forms enter the world. “The

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U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta5 where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds,” Gloria Anzaldúa writes. “And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture.”6 Anzaldúa’s striking imagery of bloody, unhealed wounds implies the colonial violence of political dispossession and of the state apparatuses refined to administer it. But her discussion also importantly emphasizes the creative responses to these forced dispossessions, responses generated out of acts of recovery and reassemblage.7 Much work has already been done on the implications of Jones’ Pan-­ American vision and its recuperation of a contemporary black subjectivity.8 Here, though, I plan to draw on Mosquito’s border sensibilities as well as Jones’ Pan-Americanism in pursuit of the novel’s use of Shakespeare’s Othello. A body of scholarship in history and cultural studies has detailed the ways in which African-Americans (I mean from all of the Americas, not just the United States) have reached across diaspora to solicit a global black subject actively working toward political and cultural liberation.9 Alongside this work on black internationalism, border theory insists specifically on a necessarily internationalized new world space and new world culture.10 Thinking of places where relations between the global north and south, as well as between Europe and the Americas, cross, with Othello as their hinge, my discussion of Mosquito will place a critical sense of black peoples’ roles as makers of the Atlantic world in relation to an account of their movements through specifically American spaces. Jones’ new world opens itself through the potent dialogue she imagines between feminism and postcolonialism, between African-American and Renaissance studies, between black nationalism and feminism, between high and popular culture—through, in short, a process of mixture in which the component parts both retain their individual tang and enter into transformative communion. Just as Mosquito imagines a borderless America, its use of Othello models the dissolving of disciplinary borders. Both a new world and a new reading practice might follow. To think about the United States in connection to postcoloniality has been a project complicated by resistance to seeing the United States as an internally colonial power, one created out of waging internal political struggles against races and cultures felt to deviate from a dominant “American” norm. Almost 20 years after Mosquito’s publication, however, an American president signed an executive order to begin building a wall on the United States’ border with Mexico, deporting undocumented

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immigrants who have lived in the United States for much of their lives, and denying passport renewals to American citizens it assumes—but cannot clearly prove—obtained their proofs of US citizenship fraudulently.11 This sense of imminent contamination and danger emerging from the Mexican side of the border was reiterated in the prepared version of a 2017 speech made by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to a meeting of Customs and Border Protection agents in Nogales, Arizona. Referring to undocumented immigrants who commit violent crimes in the United States and will be the targets of intensified prosecution, Sessions said, “We mean international criminal organizations that turn cities and suburbs into war zones, that rape and kill innocent civilians, and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across our borders. Depravity and violence are their calling cards, including brutal machete attacks, even beheadings. They threaten the very integrity of our nations and our hemisphere. It is here on this sliver of land, on this border, where we first take our stand against this filth.”12 As early as 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer charged that her state’s police had found beheaded bodies in its remote deserts, implying that they were victims of crime cartels made up of Mexican criminals who had illegally entered the country. In reality, none of the coroners of the Arizona counties bordering Mexico had ever seen a beheading that could be connected to illegal immigration, and statistics compiled by the FBI and various state police agencies showed that the number of rapes, murders, and robberies in Nogales had, in fact, slightly dropped between 2000 and 2009.13 The ideological exploitation of racialized fear ignores factual evidence that a wave of increasingly horrible crimes committed in the United States by undocumented Hispanic immigrants never took place.14 Such fearful assertions also ignore the degree to which the notion that the border can be rigidly enforced or can actually work to demarcate national spaces is already a fiction, since the space between Texas and Mexico is far more blurred in practice than it seems to be on the map. Mauricio Vidaurri, whose family has lived on land south of Laredo, Texas since 1750, worried that a wall would cut him off from the cemetery where three generations of his family are buried and from the place where his father was born. “Are they going to cut us from our family history?” Vidaurri asked. “We were here before the United States was the United States.”15 African-American studies, and the black cultural studies evolving from within it, have crucially called attention to the role of race in internal US struggles toward nationhood, struggles displayed across space as well as

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class and gender and race, struggles played out in mass as well as high culture.16 As much as investigation of internal American dispossessions of authority—slavery and Indian removal, to name two—may have been enabled by postcolonial assumptions, however, scholars have also recognized the limits of these assumptions. Postcolonial theory has been faulted, for example, for its formation of a subject that is most visible only as the “other” of the unified, western and white speaker it presumes.17 Such implicit centering of a male, white subject underplays the degree to which slaves and Native Americans—women as well as men—fought back to defend themselves politically and militarily. The assumption of a white European male speaker as the real subject of postcolonial theory has inadvertently inscribed postcolonial subjects into a position of cultural dependence and reaction by regarding their social formation as taking place entirely within a European sphere of value.18 In the reception of Renaissance drama, such implicit reflexive inscription of the authority of whiteness has worked both to force a false equivalency between the study of race and the study of characters who are not white, and—because of the fixedness ascribed to notions of race as well as to the institution of Shakespeare—to render the range and inventiveness of the racial politics of American responses to Shakespeare nearly culturally invisible.19 It has also sometimes worked to disavow points of resemblance and overlap between modern ideas about the formation of racial identities and these notions of identity as they appeared in the Renaissance past, thus weakening the anti-racist potential of race criticism to help imagine a new politics of relation.20 In clear rebuke of such lingering implicit assumption of a permanent condition of subjection and lack of political recourse, Mosquito’s portrayal of the evolution of a new political order in the American borderlands yearns toward realizing the possibility of new categories of discourse and being “independent of white people” (535). Jones’ novel imagines a world liberated from a linear model of containment and suppression, actively recreated from the materials of a newly examined past. This notion of free flow across putatively rigid lines of racial, linguistic, and political demarcation is where Mosquito’s playful engagement with the early modern begins. An unabashed product of American popular culture—she loves Denzel Washington, Bud Light, Oprah, and “Afromance” novels—Jones’ Mosquito also, and perhaps more unexpectedly, commands the resources of high canonical western literature. Mosquito describes making love to Father Ray as a moment when she and he are “circles and each the center

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of each circle…then we’s all things and each other. What my mama say about you’s got to learn from everything in the universe? What my daddy say about claiming wisdom? Well, there’s all kinds of wisdom. We’s the entire universe and usselves” (570). To my ear, Mosquito’s talk of circles and centers both evokes and revokes Donne as she remaps past poetic play with geometry onto her love for a man actively engaged in charting a newly unbounded political world. She announces her transgressive love in a poetic vocabulary which traditionally failed to recognize women’s independent capacity for desire, and conceived of male sexual longing as a way of staking territorial—and therefore, supposedly irrefutable—claims over women’s bodies.21 “O my America! My newfound land!” exclaims the rapturous lover in Elegy 19. Donne was writing during a moment when older cosmographies were being displaced by a scientific cartography, generating new kinds of maps which could serve as instruments of colonization as they granted Europeans naming rights over lands and civilizations.22 His obsession with circles allies him with an older Ptolemaic cosmology, which conceived of the universe as a series of concentric spheres: ordered, self-contained, and static.23 Speaking, Donne engages Mosquito in more than the witty appropriation of a familiar metaphysical conceit to her own use, a woman’s use, which playfully dislocates rigid equations between language and culture, subject and object. Mosquito’s invocation of the endless circle of desire and consummation she enters with Father Ray also proposes an alternative to the cartographic imperative emerging in the early modern period, erasing lines of division and dominion, which were being drawn with increasingly rigorous scientific precision. When Mosquito describes how she and her lover dissolve the borders between their bodies and between their bodies and the world, she is speaking of a way of understanding space, which, in this novel, will have political consequences. As they enter and belong to each other, they will also work to liberate the landscape from its colonial history of claiming and taming. Anticipating Mauricio Vidaurri, she remarks, “I bet Texas don’t know it ain’t Mexico” (149). Mosquito’s Donnean moment invites us to speculate about the significance of ways of reimagining space—geographical, sexual, national, cultural—a reimagination that is deeply functional in a novel about undoing the human damage wreaked by arbitrary borders. The reconception of discursive boundaries and reconfiguring of political and sexual horizons she does here are a brief version of the work the novel does on Othello, another text produced during that early modern period of colonization

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and contact. In Jones’ hands, the play opens into a thoughtful meditation on the roles of American blacks as diasporic subjects, and as importers, consumers, and producers of international racial cultures. Othello is a particularly well-chosen text for a novel as interested as this one is in questions of cultural geography, the relations between people and their environments—or the relations they can have, given the exigencies of colonization. The play traces the fateful consequences of a series of cultural crossings: Desdemona’s defiance of her father’s right to choose her husband for her; the various adventures Othello endures on the way to meeting Desdemona and falling in love with her; the newly married couple’s movement from cosmopolitan Venice to the farthest edge of the west in Cyprus; Othello’s transit from the African, woman-centered, erotically charged world in which he was raised to patriarchal Venice. The Moor himself has been reacculturated by these border crossings, learning to judge himself by European valuations of skin color (“Haply, for I am black,” 3.3.267) and of national affiliation. Overcome by remorse after killing his wife, Othello sees his suicide as being as necessary to the restoration of public order as were the many slaughters of the “turbaned Turk” (5.2.362) he has performed on behalf of the Venetian republic: he is so thoroughly the product of a Eurocentric imagination of original self and barbarian other that he believes he deserves to die. John Gillies draws our attention to how profoundly the Renaissance read maps and geographical spaces as intercessors in “a primal drama of identity, difference, and transgression”24 But what Gillies’ discussion of Renaissance assumptions about the domestic and the foreign does not do is to study the implications of the explosion of voyaging and colonization which accompanied and was enabled by the emergence of this distinctive sense of what Giambattista Vico called a “poetic geography,” under whose terms “in describing unknown or distant things, in respect of which they…have not had the true idea themselves…men make use of the semblances of things known or near at hand.”25 Othello commits suicide out of the convictions assigned to him as the product of a way of imagining the world and its people that takes western Europe as its starting point and can only understand new phenomena as “the semblances of things known,” rather than as things new in themselves.26 When Mosquito plays with Donne, the novel reverses this Europeanized circuit of travel and encounter, tracing a path from new world/woman back to old world/male colonial speaker. But the novel’s use of Othello goes beyond mere reversal to address the unexamined consequences of

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drawing principles of European/American and white supremacy on the map. Jones’ Renaissance-postmodern mash-up forcibly estranges her readers from the play’s European-male perspective as she first relocates the play to the US borderlands, and then at greater length imagines black spectators and consumers of Othello. The result is a meditation which reconfigures the play’s geographical mystique, unfixes its conclusions about racial identity and difference, and reformulates its connection between race and nation as a question about the diasporic identities of black Americans. In the Renaissance, Cyprus—Othello’s main setting—marked the farthest edge of western possession in the Mediterranean. It lay directly across trade routes to Egypt and the Ottoman Empire and thus attracted pirates, smugglers, and outlaws of every description, leading one modern editor to suggest that Cyprus “could be called the Wild West of the Mediterranean.”27 Venice controlled it in the sixteenth century, but only through violently suppressing the native Cypriots. The constant threat of the Ottoman Empire loomed over Venice’s embattled possession of the island; indeed, the Turks seized control of Cyprus in 1572, bringing Islam to the edges of Christian and European dominion.28 For Cyprus’ role as the Renaissance badlands and Othello’s allusion to the island’s violent history as the backdrop for domestic tragedy, Mosquito substitutes the dusty border town where the story of the sanctuary movement unfolds. Rather than the concerns of dominant Venetians attempting to secure a rebellious foreign garrison, the novel is more concerned with the effects acts of border crossing might leave on the Europeans who find themselves in the New World. It unfolds from the understanding of those who have always lived along the borders between worlds, rather than from nationalist and colonialist certainty. The owner of the cantina where Mosquito’s best friend Delgadina works is married to a white, possibly European, woman called Miguelita. Having come to south Texas with her husband, Miguelita (her husband’s name is Miguel Delgado; she and Delgadina thus exist as female diminutives of the man who is both husband and boss in this story) is trapped between memories of her past and her inability to set down roots in her new landscape. Rumored to have been born a “real daughter of privilege,” possibly in Paris, she met her present husband when she was “selling them slave bracelets and biker jewelry out on the Avenue” (152). Letters from Paris, apparently written by someone named Sophie, have arrived at the cantina, so that Miguelita’s true origins remain cloudy. She is full of knowledge that serves no purpose in her new environment:

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The ordannance des vins? Oh, you know, Mosquito, like with oysters and fish you can have Muscadet, Quincy, Alsace, Chablis; with liver a good Sauterne, Jurançon or Montrachet blanc, a Gewürztraminer; with red meats, a Pauillac, a Margaux, a Vonay, Nuits-Saints-Georges; with cheese, Pommard, Hermitage, Musigny, Pomerol; with patisseries, that’s pastries, ice cream, and then you got your sweet wines: Malvoisie, Muscat, Grenoche; with poultry and your white meats, a Saint-Amour, Saint-Estephe, Saint-­ Julien, Saint-Émilion; and then you got to know which ones to serve frais and which ones chambre, that’s room temperature. It’s all very complicated…And I’m teaching Delgadina the ordonnance des vins, though you don’t much need to know the ordonnance des vins in a Mexican cantina. (155–156)

She tells Mosquito about Sophie, who “says Americans always think she’s Mexican, not just when she’s in America but when they meet her in France, and she has to keep telling them that she’s French. In England they always know she’s French. The English rather see the French the same way we see our Mexicans. French women who resemble English women are always thought the most aristocratic” (156). When a pair of tourists—“the man look like a gringo, but the woman look kind of Italian” (156)—come in and sit behind Miguelita and Mosquito, Miguelita “turned as if she were talking more to them than to me” (156), and tells the story about Europeans’ perceptions of others’ nationality again, except she tells it differently: “I was traveling through France with an Englishwoman, Jane, and she kept pointing out the quaint and cute little French villages, just like we do our Mexican villages. And when you see English movies about France they seem to always be set in these quaint little French villages and the French behave just like our Mexicans behave…But to the English…the French are sort of like our Cajuns or the way the French in Quebec are to the English Canadians. It’s all social status, Mosquito. France is England’s Mexico” (156–157). The two versions of the story reach the same conclusion, but the second version, recited to a possibly European couple, places Miguelita herself into a European context, traveling through the French countryside with her English friend. The normativity of Anglo culture and Miguelita’s presumed place within it are underlined for the benefit of these new European visitors to the cantina, despite the fact that Mosquito believes that Miguelita has lost that social place: her husband met her on the Avenue, not in the French countryside. The authority Miguelita may have

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wielded as a leisured European is almost completely absent, now almost completely replaced by the solicitous care her husband extends to her, as he would to any other invalid. Miguelita suggests a replicated Desdemona in a rewritten Othello, one whose husband survives to take her home from a sojourn among Europeans to a new world—strange to her—where she, and not he, will always occupy a compromised, tenuous place. The strangeness of Mosquito’s new world, of course, invokes another Shakespearean text of cultural supersession and erasure, The Tempest. Postcolonial revisitations of the late romance have been explicitly concerned with how the language of the metropolitan center has operated to drown out the voices of the colonized periphery, and with how those colonized voices might still maintain themselves within and after imperial culture.29 “Call me X,” Aimé Césaire’s Caliban demands in A Tempest. “That would be best. Like a man without a name. Or, to be more precise, a man whose name has been stolen.”30 Authors’ choice of The Tempest and their focus on the figure of Caliban further suggests the degree to which the African and African-Caribbean postcolonial subject of Shakespearean revision has been conceived as male. To the degree that it has essentialized the colonial subject as only and always male, much Shakespearean revision based in the New World has linked masculinity to the reconstitution of a black nation in ways that run directly counter to Jones’ vision in Mosquito.31 The novel rejects this strategy of reconstructing a black nation through rehabilitating a masculinity colonized by the cultural power of the Shakespearean text.32 At any rate, its diasporic sensibility renders the cultural nationalism of an earlier generation of postcolonial readers of Shakespeare moot; Jones’ focus on the processes of transit and mixing works to deny the emphasis on point of origin that characterizes a colonial geography, and her American setting is as important as her heroine’s African roots. Mosquito herself does not hesitate to dismiss the weak cultural imperialism she feels marks black Americans’ appropriations of Africa. She remembers an occasion when she walked into a rehearsal for an African-­ American theatre group where she “seen these African Americans dressed up like Africans, but Africans in the New World. Ain’t real Africans. They own versions of Africa, African-Americanized Africans or some shit” (117). Skeptical about the possibility of recovering some pure, uncompromised contact with her African roots, much less of making that contact the basis of a vision of diasporic identity, she insists on recognizing what Stuart Hall calls “the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social

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experiences, and cultural identities which compose the category ‘black’”33 Discussing the fellowship she finds in her church, Mosquito explains that Some members of the Perfectability Baptist Church are Negroes, others is colored people, others is blacks (with a small b), others is Blacks (with a big B), others is Afro-Americans, others is African-Americans (hyphenated), others is African Americans (unhyphenated), others is Just Plain Americans, others is New World Africans, others is Descendants of the Victims of the African Diaspora Holocaust, others is Multiracialists, others is Multiethnics, others is Sweeter the Juice Multiracial Multiethnics (these are people like myself who have other races and ethnic groups, like Mexicans, Irish, Greeks, and Italians in they ancestry but who resemble pure African gods and goddesses), others is Cosmopolitan Neo-Africans, others is African-­ Internationalists, others is African Memphians from the Republic of New Africa Memphis and drapes theyselves in the Africa Memphis flags. (613)

Mosquito’s Perfectability Baptists regard blackness as both inevitable and constructed: socially real and theologically fundamental on the one hand, a prior whole dissolved and invested with new meaning in the experience of the new world on the other. Fully aware of its own historical contingency, Perfectability’s assumption of a strategic racial essentialism— all members of the congregation grant each other the freedom to experience and define their blackness as they choose, at the same time as they also agree that their shared blackness is a central article of their faith— paradoxically helps generate Mosquito’s awareness of the transactionality of her racial identity. Her multiple and internally divided, yet reconciled, position will energize her efforts to act out her convictions of the multiplicity of America.34 Like Othello, then, Mosquito is marked by the paths of several kinds of journeys: the physical crossings the heroine undertakes in defiance of arbitrary American borders, the linguistic journeyings back and forth between standard usage and personal invention, the appropriative journeys black Americans have made across time and through the bottomless abyss of transatlantic space in search of the African roots they have believed will anchor them in the United States. Othello’s overt appearance in the narrative will mark another kind of cultural crossing, one which explicitly takes up what happens when African-Americans speak specifically as citizens of the global north as well as out of an internationalized sense of black identity.35

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Mosquito’s old friend Monkey Bread has fallen in love with Danny James, a “neo-African modernist” novelist whose latest work, The New Confessions of Othello, is being turned into a movie. Danny James has encountered frustration and rebuff as he struggled to become recognized as a maker of culture. As Monkey Bread puts it, “he usedta write this real obscure poetry about Gurdjieff and shit, but ain’t nobody heard about him till he started writing them neo-African satires” (508)—until, that is, he chose black people, and especially the iconic Moor of Venice, as his subject. The New Confessions of Othello approaches the racial inscriptions of Shakespeare’s text by reversing what Danny James sees as the play’s “traditional preconceptions” (503) of the relative place of black and white. For example, Delgadina explains, “in certain parts of the novel he reverses all the imagery so that people are always talking to Othello about the prestige of his race, the African race” (502). James’ Desdemona is still white, but, in this novel within Mosquito, she “is the one who is depicted with the exotic history…Desdemona is depicted as the exceptional white, you know. If all whites were like you, Othello is always saying” (503). Miguelita adumbrates the ecumenism and exceptionality of Danny James’ Desdemona. When her husband first saw her fallen from social grace, “selling that biker shit and them slave bracelets and she wasn’t acting like the ordinary gringa…I think that it’s more than Miguelita herself that he’s in love with, the fact that there’s a gringa who’s not a gringa, you know” (153). Yet, merely reversing racial tropes is not always the same as undoing them altogether; the context within which the reversal is accomplished and the spectators of the reversal must apply conscious critical pressure if any new meanings are going to be produced.36 Such postcolonial readers of Shakespeare as C. L. R. James, for example, doubt that it is either possible or necessary entirely to overthrow his authority on the way to achieving cultural autonomy, despite the fact that they became acquainted with it only through the process of their colonial educations. “How am I to return to non-European roots?” James asked in some annoyance. “If that means Caribbean writers today should be aware that there are emphases in their writing that we owe to non-European, non-Shakespearean roots, and the past in music that is not Beethoven, that I agree. But I don’t like them posed there in the way they have been posed either-or. I don’t think so. I think both of them.”37 For her part, Jones insists that gender, as well as formal education, matter crucially in the international experience of dissolution and

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reconstitution of black identity. “[O]ver six feet tall” (52), Mosquito knows that she will “never resemble none of them women that plays the love interest, white or African American” (72). Mosquito’s race complicates her access to cultural mobility as much as it contradicts her claims to female beauty: “[W]hen I go to some of these warehouses to get my industrial detergents, you know, they be asking me to show them my green card, like they be thinking I don’t look American enough for them, and I be telling them I’m a citizen” (307). A black woman, she is a weak signifier of feminine, as well as civic, values, virtually invisible under the terms of white and US dominion. But occupying a place outside what Spillers calls “the traditional symbolics of female gender” (“Mama’s Baby,” 80) comes in handy once she begins to smuggle refugees into the country. Unlike the less privileged Mosquito and Monkey Bread, Danny James’ sense of himself as a black American has been developed through his recourse to a more familiar kind of black internationalism: his travel to Paris. His contemporary yearning for a sense of cultural validity shows in his response to what he feels is a vanished golden age of black intellectual accomplishment. Monkey Bread accompanies him to a club where he sat with some of his musician friends talking about Albert Ayler and the Congo, the New Republic of the Congo. One of them musicians kinda reminds me of a rajah. They usedta all know each other in Paris. But say Paris today ain’t like the old days and talking about Wilfredo Lam and Ahmed Yacoubi and even somebody named Cleopatra who ain’t the historical Cleopatra but some woman they all knowed in Paris who usedta congregate at Port Afrique which were formally known as Bwana’s Table but that were not politically correct so they renamed it Port Afrique. I told them I didn’t know none of what they were talking about, so he gived me a copy of a book called From Harlem to Paris by a French intellectual who writes about Richard Wright and other writers and intellectuals of color and which tells about all the Negroes that usedta go to Paris. Danny James say he been to Paris, but he ain’t in that book, though, ’cause he ain’t considered one of the canonical writers. (508–509)

Later, she accompanies Danny and his girlfriend Djamila, “a African woman from London” (509), to a bar where “they was talking about Bricktop’s in Paris and the Bal Colonial and the Nardals and Prince Kojo and Claude McKay, Jessie & Nella, Dorothy and Anna and Emanuel’s wife…and Angela Davis in Paris reinventing herself” (510). In the novel, Paris’ iconic status for black intellectuals of a certain stripe perhaps stands

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in for Venice, the glamorous cosmopolitan capital where Othello begins. While Danny James’ fascination with the city’s historic role as a cradle of black intellectual achievement is not so surprising, the novel implies that his Francophilia carries serious implications for the ways in which he can comprehend Monkey Bread. For all his frustration with a white literary culture, which will not grant him a speaking voice until he learns to commoditize his blackness for its consumption, he nonetheless speaks in its voice as he responds to Monkey Bread primarily as an exotic primitive: “He says I reminds him of Bastet and the Venus Hottentot combined,” she reports in a letter to Mosquito (509). The reference here to Bastet, the cat-headed ancient Egyptian goddess of music and ecstatic dance, fits in with the promotion of African culture in the world outside Africa and black American communities in the United States undertaken by such pioneers of Négritude as Lam, the Cuban-born painter who was the son of a Chinese father and grandson of a slave born in Senegal. What is more troubling is James’ comparison of Monkey Bread to the so-called “Venus Hottentot,” the South African woman Saartje Baartman who was displayed naked throughout Europe between 1810 and 1815 as a living example of the physical difference of black African women from white European ones.38 Just as discussion of the Renaissance’s new geography seems incomplete without consideration of the material effects of the cultural work that those new ways of mapping made possible, so too does a consideration of Paris as a liberating site for black intellectuals seem incomplete without consideration of how the négrophilie of the 1920s and 1930s worked to codify blackness as only the subject of a white and French racial gaze.39 French fascination with Africa and with black bodies may have been given new life by a sense of how World War I had exposed the moral emptiness of an old imperial order, but the primitivism, which was the cultural expression of this fascination, drew and built on pre-existing assumptions of Africa as the product of colonial knowledge. Rejecting a modernism it perceived as hypocritical and sterile, primitivism embraced and constructed blackness as modernism’s opposite: atavistic, sauvage, expressive, and free. These fantasies of the primitive subject repeatedly appropriated blacks’ sexuality—and especially the sexuality of black women—as their visual expression. The French career of Josephine Baker, the “Jazz Cleopatra,” began by tracing a similar (if less publicly debased) narrative of Africanized sexual display.40 Danny James’ masculinity allows him access to this trade in black female bodies, even though his blackness has, up to now, barred him from

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eloquence in white literary culture. Shakespeare, and especially the contested figure of Othello, the Moor of Venice, grants him entrance, but differently, I would say, from the familiarity with European literary culture Mosquito expresses in her easy invocation of metaphysical lyric. Mosquito brings up Donne only to turn him inside out, and then makes her linguistic inversion material by joining it to a radical politics of reorientation. In contrast, Danny James reverses Shakespeare’s visual trope, but is content to maintain the practice of “appropriating and fetishizing the primitive”41 that marks Othello’s stage history.42 He reproduces Monkey Bread as a cultural manifestation of something he, as a black male artist and thinker, is not. She becomes his exotic other: juke-joint nature to his café culture. When he was introduced to Monkey Bread “and she started talking to him he said, Lawdy Miss Clawdy” (507). The song “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” reached Number One for R & B singer and producer Lloyd Price in 1952: Well lawdy, lawdy, lawdy miss clawdy Gal you sho look good to me But please don’t excite me baby I know it can’t be me I always give you all my money Yeah but you just won’t treat me right You like to ball every morning Don’t come home till late at night.

He tells Monkey Bread that “he could relate to some of his other womenfriends intellectually, but he related to (her) emotionally. Or something like that” (507). Mosquito generously notes in response to Monkey Bread’s report of this first meeting that there “ain’t too many intellectuals that even know who Lawdy Miss Clawdy is”; Danny James saw Monkey Bread as part of “‘the masses’” but didn’t reduce her to “‘an abstraction’ like a lotta intellectuals” (507). Fair enough. But it is also clear from Monkey Bread’s letter and from Mosquito’s commentaries on her friend’s attraction to Danny James that her standing among the masses prevents him from recognizing her as another maker of culture. Her associates in the underground Daughters of Nzingha, a spiritually minded political and cultural advancement organization for black women that maintains a secret of “wisdom books” (613) on the internet, know she is precisely that. (More on the Daughters of Nzingha later.) Instead, she appears to him as a

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modern pop archetype of black womanhood, the funky, destructive, and irresistible Miss Clawdy. He may be more the product of a globalized US popular culture, with its production of non-white women both in the United States and abroad as the objects of “individualized, and often eroticized, modes of cultural appropriation and consumption that substitute for equitable exchange,”43 than he realizes. Monkey Bread, Miss Clawdy, the Cleopatra who was not the real Cleopatra, the Venus Hottentot are all racial prosthetics through whom he can experience and express the black identity which his identification with white literary culture has compromised in him. To be entirely accurate, Mosquito does not unequivocally assert that Danny James produces Monkey Bread within primitivist discourse. Our informant is Mosquito herself, who tells us that Danny James refers to Monkey Bread “as a naive representative of the race or something like that, and told her he would put her into one of his books.” But she adds to this account that she’s not sure “whether he called her a naive representative of the race or a native representative of the race, ’cause you know I don’t know if that were a typo of Monkey Bread’s, ’cause she uses them word processors now, you know” (507). My point, though, is whether his impulse to primitivize Monkey Bread is overt or not, Danny James still seems to see her only as the perfect blank slate to write both the goddess Bastet and the whore Miss Clawdy upon, intellectually void herself but waiting to be filled up with his and his friends’ reminiscences about Paris in “the old days.” It is Shakespeare’s disbelieving Othello, of course, who asks whether “this fair paper, this most goodly book” of his white wife’s open countenance was “Made to write ‘whore’ upon” (4.2.73, 74). That Othello sees Desdemona as a “fair paper” points us to her white skin, but the reference to her as a “goodly book”—a prewritten script—also invokes a certain quality of familiarity and readability about her. If his blackness emphasizes her whiteness by the principle of contrast—black ink and white paper?— her moral fairness is also, and fatally, compromised by the agency she shows when she chooses him, and by her loving desire for him.44 Othello knows, or has known, who she is just by looking at her. What feels most insupportable about his suspicions of her infidelity is that the suspected new truth about her deviates so devastatingly from his belief in her innocence: “O thou weed, / Who art so lovely fair, and smell’st so sweet, / That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne’er been born!” (4.2.69–71). Othello’s belief in Desdemona’s ineffable sweetness is

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probably a misunderstanding of his strong-willed, sensuous wife, grounded at least in part in the racist logic that overtakes them both, just as Danny James misconstrues Monkey Bread. Danny James’ reading (or misreading) of Monkey Bread results in no one’s death, and neither robs anyone of their own innocence or destroys their belief in another’s. But it does impose a certain kind of purity and blankness on its object, an imposed purity of origins and purpose which runs counter to Mosquito’s sense of the multivalence of African-American identity. Seeing her only through his own frames of reference blinds him to the possibility that she may live a rich concealed life of her own, outside of the ways in which he is equipped to understand her. As a member of the Daughters of Nzingha, named for a seventeenth-century queen in what is now the African nation of Angola, Monkey Bread has helped build a secret women’s archive of blackness whose maintenance is eventually turned over to Mosquito. Indeed, the first page of the novel states that the book itself is part of those archives, and tells us that Mosquito is the “spiritual descendant” of a character invented by Lucille Jones, Gayl Jones’ mother, who died in 1997. Claiming this female creative genealogy for herself and for the novel, Gayl Jones uses the Daughters of Nzingha—who include a charitable foundation and the “Afro-womanist Development Bank” (391) among their enterprises—to advance the idea of a counter-archive of women’s knowledge. Just as some people have a photographic memory, Mosquito possesses an auditory memory which makes her capable of remembering everything she’s ever heard and suits her well for her cataloguing duties. Like Mosquito’s play with Donne and Danny James’ play with Othello, the Daughters of Nzingha’s secret archive overturns the received rules of its form. Its use of oral instead of written transmission, and the importance it places on listening and responding to storytellers—“we has got to know that the listener is as important to the story as the storyteller,” Mosquito observes (614)—rather than simply treating a written document as a dead letter that cannot admit interactive engagement, marks it as an expression of the novel’s will to decolonize knowledge.45 Her archival obligations of analysis and active listening call on skills she already possesses, instead of on the specialized training of a Danny James. As she tells us, “When you’s African American…you gets good at that sorta interpretation, and when you’s a woman too you’s even better, ’cause you ain’t just colonized you’s precolonized and recolonized” (36). But, as the novel surprisingly reveals, Monkey Bread herself exerts some of the same colonizing and objectifying

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will against other black people that Danny James exerts on her, suggesting that class difference, as well as gender difference, operates within black communities, and is not merely a force imposed on them from the outside by whites. Inviting all members of the Daughters of Nzingha to “another one of her famous Jim Dandy to the Rescue parties,” Monkey Bread says it will be “a good, old-fashioned party and is not for Negrophobics. We’re going to have Native African watermelon, fried chicken, pork chops, turnip greens and grits!”46 Like Danny James, she indulges in a primitivist vision of other black people. Her party will take place on board the yacht of the Hollywood star Monkey Bread serves as a personal assistant, and she advises prospective guests that “There will be numerous opportunities to party with the local coloreds as the yacht cruises the historical towns and villages of peoples of African descent” (429). Monkey Bread is marked by her hybrid social status and the scopic privilege it purchases for her. She is both an object and an objectifier, and her party will turn some of the same curatorial gaze on “the local coloreds” that Danny James turns on her. The New Confessions of Othello’s rehabilitation of Othello as a debonair and irresistible man of the world is about Danny James’ finding a way to counter the weight of Shakespeare, gatekeeper to the edifice of literature from which he felt himself to be barred. But if his reaction to Othello turns on a mere reversal of racial tropes (and on stealing some of Shakespeare’s mojo as cultural progenitor for himself), what is striking about Mosquito’s reaction to Delgadina’s précis of his novel is how different her reaction to Shakespeare’s play is from his. Mosquito knows “That Othello supposed to be a true Shakespearean hero,” and remembers that, somewhere in her family, there’s an “Othello Johnson” (503). Not only is she not as powerfully struck by the new novel’s mere reversal of racial stereotypes unaccompanied by any fuller attempt to interrogate, much less attempt to undo, the rigidly binary thinking that undergirds them as Hollywood seems to be, but the presence of the play has been written across her own family’s bloodline in the naming of this distant relative. Living as she does under the radar of citizenship and literacy, she can cultivate a relationship to Shakespeare that is unavailable to the old-fashioned cosmopolitan Danny James, who culturally forms himself primarily in relation to Europe. Although she shares his ability to laugh at aspects of current racial culture—“I’m a neo-African myself…but I still appreciates a good satire of who I am” (505)—she is also capable of an unironic claiming of Shakespeare as part of her multiple cultural arsenal.

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I must admit that the Othello references occupy only a small amount of space in an extraordinarily rich fiction more than 600 pages long. But here, I have tried to trace their contribution to Mosquito’s project of reconceiving borders. Performing a more truly dissident meditation on Othello than The New Confessions of Othello’s mere displacement of masculine and racial authority from Shakespeare to Danny James, the novel’s handling of the Shakespeare play enables contemplation of how this master-­text of western domination, male sexual anxiety, and illicit race-­ mixing might read in a new context, one dedicated to uncovering the obscured histories of colonized landscapes and their human subjects. Jones’ novel posits an energetic renewal of Danny James’ and Miguelita’s halting acts of memory and recovery, this time aimed beyond mere reconstitution of their wounded selves to challenge the grounds on which ancestral stories—the received histories that we believe make us who we are—can be made and understood. By the end of the novel, Mosquito has become “the official griot to the small New World African community of Cuba, New Mexico” (614), a town whose very name speaks to the accomplishment of an America which recognizes and openly includes all its constituent parts. In this capacity, she listens as well as passes stories on. Not helpless before or only reactive to the power wielded by ancient story, she will be an active and discerning listener, one “able to distinguish between the stories that is wisdom stories and them that is trickster stories” (615). Listening to Othello from inside the international and multiethnic frame of Mosquito’s New World setting uncovers the play’s power as an index of fixed racial and national affiliations. But Mosquito moves beyond uncovering Othello to disarticulate and reassemble it. Doing so, the novel reveals how the play might read differently once it is fully possessed by Jones’ New World Africans, who will be free to assign and derive meanings of their own.

Notes 1. Charles H.  Rowell, “An Interview With Gayl Jones,” Callaloo 16 (1982), 40. 2. “Sanctuary,” New York Times Book Review, 14 November 1999, 14. 3. “Speaking in Typeface: Characterizing Stereotypes in Gayl Jones’ Mosquito,” MFS 49 (2003), 129. Here, also see Deborah McDowell’s review, “The Whole Story,” Women’s Review of Books 16.6 (1999): 9–10.

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4. In the introduction to their edited collection Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity and Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 3–69. 5. “Is an open wound.” 6. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), 25. 7. Here, see Rafael Pérez-Torres, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 8. For example, Casey Clabough, “Afrocentric Recolonizations: Gayl Jones 1990s Fiction,” Contemporary Literature 46, no. 2 (2005): 243–274; Sarika Chandra, “Interruptions: Traditions, Borders, and Narrative in Gayl Jones’ Mosquito,” in After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones, ed. Fiona Mills and Keith Mitchell (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 137–153; Fiona Mills, “Telling the Untold Tale: Afro-Latino/a Identifications in the Work of Gayl Jones,” in Mills and Mitchell, 91–115; Lovalerie King, “Resistance, Reappropriation and Reconciliation: The Blues and Flying Africans in Gayl Jones’ Song for Anninho,” Callaloo 27 (2004): 755–767; Stellamaris Coser, “Stepping-stones Between the Americas: The Narratives of Paule Marshall and Gayl Jones,” PALARA 1 (1997): 80–88; Ifeoma Nwankwo, “The Promises and Perils of US African-American Hemispherism: Latin America in Martin Delany’s Blake and Gayl Jones’ Mosquito,” ALH 18.3 (2006): 579–599; and Angela Naimou, Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 145–147, 154–182. 9. For an account of some of this internationally minded scholarship, see two essays by Robin D.  G. Kelley, “‘But a local phase of a world problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,” JAH 86 (1999): 1045–1077; and “How the West Was One: The African Diaspora and the Re-Mapping of U.S.  History,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 123–147. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003) describes the dislocations and challenges of a transatlantic African diaspora between the world wars. Perhaps most influentially, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) traced the role played by the transatlantic migrations of African-descended people in the making of the modern west. 10. See, for example, Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); and José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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11. A partial wall was built along the Rio Grande in 2006 as part of the Secure Fence Act, although it is not uninterrupted. http://www.cnn. com/2017/01/23/politics/border-series-texas/index.html. See Alan Gomez and David Agren, “First protected DREAMer is deported under Trump,” USA Today 18 April 2017; Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Trump Orders Mexican Wall to Be Built and Plans to Block Syrian Refugees,” New York Times 25 January 2017; and Kevin Sieff, “U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question,” Washington Post.com 1 September 2018. 12. In the version of the speech he actually delivered, Sessions omitted the phrase “against this filth,” although it had already been circulated in the prepared version he provided to the press. 13. Dana Milbank, “Headless bodies and other immigration tall tales in Arizona,” Washington Post.com, 11 July 2010, includes the information from coroners’ offices and police agencies. 14. Recent studies indicating that undocumented immigrants are in fact more law-abiding than either native-born citizens or legal immigrants include Bianca Bersani, “An Examination of First and Second Generation Immigrant Offending Trajectories,” Justice Quarterly 31.2 (2014): 315–343; and Michael T.  Light and Ty Miller, “Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime?,” Criminology 56.2 (2018): 370–401. 15. Jenny Jarvie, “Trump promised a border wall. Now these Texans worry the government will take their land,” Los Angeles Times 20 April 2017. 16. On ways in which black studies anticipated many of the characteristic methods of cultural studies, see Mae Henderson, “‘Where, by the Way, is This Train Going?’: A Case for Black (Cultural) Studies,” Callaloo 19 (1996): 60–67. On tensions in the academy between the rise of postcolonial theory at the cost of the possible displacement of ethnic studies, see Ann DuCille, “Postcolonialism and Afrocentricity: Discourse and Dat Course,” in The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African-American Literature and Culture, ed. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 28–41. On the limits of postcoloniality as an analytical tool for US cultures, see Lora Romero, “Nationalism and Internationalism: Domestic Differences in a Postcolonial World,” American Literature 67 (1995): 795–800. 17. Here, see especially Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 18. Ella Shohat, “Notes on the Post-Colonial,” Social Text 31 (1992): 99–113. 19. On the first of these topics, see Ian Smith, “We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies,” SQ 67, no. 1 (2016): 104–124. Ayanna

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Thompson, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), is one recent discussion of the rich history of contemporary nonwhite American Shakespeare adaptations. 20. Besides Smith, note 19 above, see Lara Bovilsky’s Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 14–33. 21. See Tom Cain, “John Donne and the Ideology of Colonialism,” ELR 31 (2001): 440–476; Shankar Raman, “Can’t Buy Me Love: Money, Gender, and Colonialism in Donne’s Erotic Verse,” Criticism 43 (2002): 135–168; and Walter S. H. Lim, The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (Newark, DE: Associated University Presses, 1998), 64–103. 22. The literature on the connection between maps and Renaissance colonialism is large and rich. See, for example, Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 259–314; Rebecca Ann Bach, Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World, 1580–1640 (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 67–112; David Turnbull, “Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 5–24; Bernhard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001); and Jerry Brotton, “Mapping the Early Modern Nation: Cartography Along the English Margins,” Paragraph 19 (1996): 139–155. 23. Lisa Gorton, “Donne’s Use of Space,” EMLS 4.2 (1990): 9.1–27. 24. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 12. His discussions, 25–30 and 137–140, of the significance of Othello’s geographic origins and experiences in lands outside Venice are relevant here. Also see Martin Orkin, “Civility and the English Colonial Enterprise: Notes on Shakespeare’s Othello,” Theoria 68 (1986): 1–14. 25. Vico quotes his own Axioms on p. 254 of The New Science, ed. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948). Gillies discusses the significance of Viconian ideas of the familiar and the foreign, 4–12. 26. On the fantastical elements of Othello’s history and how they work to associate him and his marriage with notions of the monstrous and uncivilized, see Patricia Parker, “Fantasies of ‘Race’ and ‘Gender’: Africa, Othello, and Bringing to Light,” in Hendricks and Parker, Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing (London: Routledge, 1994), 84–100. 27. Kim Hall, Othello (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), 248. I have drawn heavily on Hall’s discussion of Cyprus in the Renaissance, 248–249.

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Also see Virginia M. Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 22–28. 28. On Othello’s eastern contexts, see Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 77–106; and Ambereen Dadabhoy, “Two Faced: The Problem of Othello’s Visage,” in Othello: The State of Play, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2014), 121–147. 29. For discussions of some of these works, see Jyotsna Singh, “Caliban versus Miranda: Race and Gender Conflicts in Postcolonial Rewritings of The Tempest,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 191–220; Rob Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest,” Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 557–578; Chantal Zabus, Tempests After Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Peter Hulme, “Reading From Elsewhere: George Lamming and the Paradox of Exile,” in ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William H.  Sherman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 220–235; and Jonathan Goldberg, Tempest in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 30. A Tempest, Based on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’: Adaptation for a Black Theatre, tr. Richard Miller (New York: TCG Translations, 2002), 20. 31. In Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. 177–206, Paul Gilroy mounted a controversial critique of contemporary black nationalism, which focuses on what he sees as its retreat from programmatic political engagement into a romantic view of a sovereign individuality which it virtually always denominates as male. On women and gender within the Négritude movement, whose historiography has been strikingly male-oriented, see Edwards, 119–185. 32. Mosquito holds this refusal in common with other revisions of Shakespeare by black American women. See two essays in Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare, ed. Marianne Novy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Malin Lavon Walther, “Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby: Re-Figuring the Colonizer’s Aesthetics,” 137–149, and Valerie Traub, “Rainbows of Darkness: Deconstructing Shakespeare in the Work of Gloria Naylor and Zora Neale Hurston,” 150–164; as well as James Andreas, “Signifyin’ on The Tempest in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day,” in Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, ed., Shakespeare and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 1999), 103–118; and Gilbert Yeoh, “From Caliban to Sycorax: Revisions of The Tempest in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John,” World Literature Written in English 33–34, no. 1–2 (1994): 103–116.

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33. “New Ethnicities,” rpt. in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 166. 34. Here I am thinking about Stuart Hall’s remark in “Minimal Selves,” another essay reprinted in Black British Cultural Studies, that “Looking at new conceptions of identity requires us also to look at redefinitions of the forms of politics which follow from that: the politics of difference, the politics of self-reflexivity, a politics that is open to contingency but still able to act” (118). 35. I borrow my thoughts on the Perfectability Baptists’ internally multiple identities and Mosquito’s identification with a sense of her own blackness that is more than either merely African or merely American from Kelley, “How the West Was One”: “Too frequently, we think of identities as cultural matters, when in fact some of the most dynamic (transnational) identities are created in the realm of politics, in the way people of African descent sought alliances and political identifications across national borders” (136). 36. This is a point Denise Albanese makes in “Black and White and Dread All Over: The Shakespeare Theatre’s ‘Photonegative’ Othello and the Body of Desdemona,” in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 226–247. Also see Angela Pao, “Ocular Revisions; Re-Casting Othello in Text and Performance,” in Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, ed. Ayanna Thompson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 27–45. 37. Edward Said quotes James on p. 300 of Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993). 38. On Baartman, see Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 223–261, and Janell Hobson, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2018). 39. Here, see Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000). 40. Archer-Straw discusses the Baker phenomenon, 107–133. Also see T.  Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 105–118, and Royster, Becoming Cleopatra, 9–11 and 15–17. 41. Coco Fusco, English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: The New Press, 1995), 46. 42. See, for example, Paul H. D. Kaplan, “The Earliest Images of Othello,” SQ 39 (1988): 171–186; Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and

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the Hideous in Othello,” SQ 40 (1989): 383–412; Kris Collins, “White-­ Washing the Black-a-Moor: Othello, Negro Minstrelsy, and Parodies of Blackness,” JAC 19.1 (1996): 87–101; and Joyce Green MacDonald, “Acting Black: Othello, Othello Burlesques, and the Performance of Blackness,” Theatre Journal 46 (1994): 133–146. 43. Fusco, 69. 44. Bovilsky, Barbarous Play, 37–65. 45. On Jones’ use of the archive, see Naimou, Salvage Work, 173–179. 46. At the risk of sounding pedantic, “Jim Dandy to the Rescue” was a late-­1970s hit by the southern rock band Black Oak Arkansas.

References Albanese, Denise. “Black and White and Dread All Over: The Shakespeare Theatre’s ‘Photonegative’ Othello and the Body of Desdemona.” In A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Dympna Callaghan, 226–247. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. Andreas, James. “Signifyin’ on The Tempest in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day.” In Shakespeare and Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, 103–118. London: Routledge, 1999. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007. Archer-Straw, Petrine. Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000. Bach, Rebecca Ann. Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World, 1580–1640. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Bersani, Bianca. “An Examination of First and Second Generation Immigrant Offending Trajectories.” Justice Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2014): 315–343. Bovilsky, Lara. Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Brady, Mary Pat. Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Bramen, Carrie Tirado. “Speaking in Typeface: Characterizing Stereotypes in Gayl Jones’ Mosquito.” Modern Fiction Studies 49 (2003): 124–154. Brotton, Jerry. “Mapping the Early Modern Nation: Cartography Along the English Margins.” Paragraph 19 (1996): 139–155. Cain, Tom. “John Donne and the Ideology of Colonialism.” ELR 31 (2001): 440–476. Césaire, Aimé. A Tempest, Based on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’: Adaptation for a Black Theatre. Tr. Richard Miller. New York: TCG Translations, 2002.

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Chandra, Sarika. “Interruptions: Traditions, Borders, and Narrative in Gayl Jones’ Mosquito.” In After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones, edited by Fiona Mills and Keith Mitchell, 137–153. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Clabough, Casey. “Afrocentric Recolonizations: Gayl Jones 1990s Fiction.” Contemporary Literature 46, no. 2 (2005): 243–274. Collins, Kris. “White-Washing the Black-a-Moor: Othello, Negro Minstrelsy, and Parodies of Blackness.” Journal of American Culture 19, no. 1 (1996): 87–101. Coser, Stellamaris. “Stepping-stones Between the Americas: The Narratives of Paule Marshall and Gayl Jones.” PALARA 1 (1997): 80–88. Dadabhoy, Ambereen. “Two Faced: The Problem of Othello’s Visage.” In Othello: The State of Play, edited by Lena Cowen Orlin, 121–147. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2014. Davis, Julie Hirschfeld. “Trump Orders Mexican Wall to Be Built and Plans to Block Syrian Refugees.” New York Times 25 January 2017. https://www. nytimes.com/2017/01/25/us/politics/refugees-immigrants-walltrump.html. DuCille, Ann. “Postcolonialism and Afrocentricity: Discourse and Dat Course.” In The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African-American Literature and Culture, edited by Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich, 28–41. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Fusco, Coco. English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New York: The New Press, 1995. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Sanctuary.” Review of Mosquito, by Gayl Jones. New York Times Book Review, 14 November 1999. Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Gilman, Sander. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” In ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 223–261. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Goldberg, Jonathan. Tempest in the Caribbean. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Gomez, Alan, and David Agren. “First protected DREAMer is deported under Trump.” USA Today 18 April 2017. Gorton, Lisa. “Donne’s Use of Space.” EMLS 4, no. 2 (1990): 9.1–27. Hall, Kim, ed. Othello. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007.

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Hall, Stuart. “Minimal Selves.” In Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, edited by Houston Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, 114–119. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996a. Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” In Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, edited by Houston Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H.  Lindeborg, 163–172. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996b. Henderson, Mae. “‘Where, by the Way, is This Train Going?’: A Case for Black (Cultural) Studies.” Callaloo 19 (1996): 60–67. Hobson, Janell. Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2018. Hulme, Peter. “Reading From Elsewhere: George Lamming and the Paradox of Exile.” In ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels, 220–235, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Jarvie, Jenny. “Trump promised a border wall. Now these Texans worry the government will take their land.” Los Angeles Times 20 April 2017. https://www. latimes.com/nation/la-na-texas-border-wall-20170407-story.html. Jones, Gayl. Mosquito. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Kaplan, Paul H. D. “The Earliest Images of Othello.” SQ 39, no. 2 (1988): 171–186. Kelley, Robin D.  G. “‘But a local phase of a world problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950.” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1045–1077. Kelley, Robin D.  G. “How the West Was One: The African Diaspora and the Re-Mapping of U.S.  History.” In Rethinking American History in a Global Age, edited by Thomas Bender, 123–147. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. King, Lovalerie. “Resistance, Reappropriation and Reconciliation: The Blues and Flying Africans in Gayl Jones’ Song for Anninho.” Callaloo 27, no. 3 (2004): 755–767. Klein, Bernhard. Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001. Light, Michael T. and Ty Miller. “Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime?” Criminology 56, no. 2 (2018): 370–401. Lim, Walter S. H. The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Raleigh to Milton. Newark, DE: Associated University Presses, 1998. MacDonald, Joyce Green. “Acting Black: Othello, Othello Burlesques, and the Performance of Blackness,” Theatre Journal 46, no. 2 (1994): 133–146. McDowell, Deborah. “The Whole Story.” Women’s Review of Books 16, no. 6 (1999): 9–10. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Milbank, Dana. “Headless bodies and other immigration tall tales in Arizona.” Washington Post.com, 11 July 2010.

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Mills, Fiona. “Telling the Untold Tale: Afro-Latino/a Identifications in the Work of Gayl Jones.” In After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones, edited by Fiona Mills and Keith Mitchell, 91–115. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Naimou, Angela. Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Neill, Michael. “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello.” SQ 40, no. 4 (1989): 383–412. Nixon, Rob. “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest.” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 3 (1987): 557–578. Nwankwo, Ifeoma. “The Promises and Perils of US African-American Hemispherism: Latin America in Martin Delany’s Blake and Gayl Jones’ Mosquito.” ALH 18, no. 3 (2006): 579–599. Orkin, Martin. “Civility and the English Colonial Enterprise: Notes on Shakespeare’s Othello.” Theoria 68 (1986): 1–14. Pao, Angela. “Ocular Revisions; Re-Casting Othello in Text and Performance.” In Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, edited by Ayanna Thompson, 27–45. New York: Routledge, 2006. Parker, Patricia. “Fantasies of ‘Race’ and ‘Gender’: Africa, Othello, and Bringing to Light.” In Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing, edited by Hendricks and Parker, 84–100. London: Routledge, 1994. Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Raman, Shankar. “Can’t Buy Me Love: Money, Gender, and Colonialism in Donne’s Erotic Verse,” Criticism 43, no. 2 (2002): 135–168. Romero, Lora. “Nationalism and Internationalism: Domestic Differences in a Postcolonial World.” American Literature 67, no. 4 (1995): 795–800. Rowell, Charles H. “An Interview With Gayl Jones.” Callaloo 16 (1982): 32–53. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993. Saldívar, Jose David. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the Post-Colonial.” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 99–113. Sieff, Kevin. “U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question.” Washington Post, 1 September 2018. Singh, Amritjit and Peter Schmidt, eds. Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity and Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. Singh, Jyotsna. “Caliban versus Miranda: Race and Gender Conflicts in Postcolonial Rewritings of The Tempest.” In Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, edited by Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan, 191–209. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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Smith, Ian. “We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies.” SQ 67, no. 1 (2016): 104–124. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Thompson, Ayanna. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Traub, Valerie. “Rainbows of Darkness: Deconstructing Shakespeare in the Work of Gloria Naylor and Zora Neale Hurston.” In Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare, edited by Marianne Novy, 150–164. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Turnbull, David. “Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces.” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 5–24. Vaughan, Virginia Mason. Othello: A Contextual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Vico, Giambattista. The New Science. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, eds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948. Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Walther, Malin Lavon. “Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby: Re-Figuring the Colonizer’s Aesthetics.” In Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare, edited by Marianne Novy, 137–149. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Yeoh, Gilbert. “From Caliban to Sycorax: Revisions of The Tempest in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” World Literature Written in English 33–34, no. 1–2 (1994): 103–116. Zabus, Chantal. Tempests After Shakespeare. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.

CHAPTER 3

Uncrossed Lovers: Remembering Race in Romeo and Juliet and Mississippi Masala

There are no black people in Romeo and Juliet. Nevertheless, blackness does figure in the play, as the ground against which Juliet’s beauty shows best. Repeatedly, the play summons this supplemental relationship between darkness and light: the latter cannot be fully understood except in contrast to the former.1 At first sight, Juliet shines as brightly to Romeo against the background of the other girls at the Capulets’ masked ball as “a snowy dove” would “trooping with crows.” She “hangs upon the cheek of night / Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear” (1.5.44–45). “[B]escreen’d in night” (2.1.94) in the Capulets’ garden, Romeo finally emerges fully into Juliet’s sight in the balcony scene. Such is blackness’ paradoxical revelatory power that “all the world will be in love with night” (3.2.24)—yearning for access to the mysteries it conceals, then dazzlingly reveals. The play’s invocations of mysterious, potent, revelatory darkness finally not only embody the prohibitions hedging love in Verona, but racializes them, as a fragment of an otherwise sanctioned black body becomes the expressive vehicle for the impact of Romeo’s sudden flash of emotional and erotic insight. The blackness of night, of that imaginary Ethiope’s ear, is the foil that makes Juliet’s beauty visible and comprehensible. In his sonnets, first circulating in the same time during which he was working on Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare is equally conscious of how blackness makes (hitherto implicitly white) beauty legible.2 Addressing the so-called Dark Lady in Sonnet 131, the speaker declares her to be “as tyrannous… / As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel.” She is © The Author(s) 2020 J. Green MacDonald, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World, Palgrave Shakespeare Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3_3

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every bit as imperious and withholding as any golden-haired, ivory-skinned woman in lyric, but, “to my dear doting heart, / Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel” (1–4). The speaker thus first applies conventional ways of talking about darkness and fair beauty to the dark lady—she’s just as cruel as any of those blonde girls poets are always talking about—but then inverts them, saying that because he’s in love with her, her “black is fairest in my judgment’s place” (12). Her blackness is, for him, the definition of what is “fairest” because it belongs to her, and he finds everything about her compellingly beautiful. The only things that he sees as conventionally “black” (13) about her are the evil deeds she commits against him, but the depth of his love for her is such as to be able to transform even the nature of her bad behavior; the physical darkness of her looks has always been immaterial. Sonnet 132 continues with the conceit that the speaker has the power to revalue languages of blackness, fairness, and women’s beauty. At first, it’s only the eyes of the woman he loves that are black, because she’s put on mourning for his romantic “pain” (4). But because the blackness of her eyes is so beautiful he pleads for it to penetrate her heart as well, as he overturns the received meaning of a black (evil) heart. If she permits herself to be entirely engulfed in the color of mourning, “Then will I swear that beauty herself is black, / And all they foul that thy complexion lack” (13–14). In these examples, race organizes desire. It gives Romeo expressive access to his love, and, in driving the self-possessed virtuosity of the last 28 sonnets, it affords Shakespeare the chance to question and reorder the archive of his own lyric inheritance. But the poet’s responses to the shaping relations between blackness, beauty, and desire are not all confined to formal experimentation. Romeo and Juliet has the bones of a romantic comedy, with comedy’s certainty that love can be reconciled to the preservation of social order and familial continuance that marriage was designed to ensure.3 As much as the sonnets glory in the poet’s power to revalue words and their meanings, they also recognize that the love he records is not only self-destructive but destructive of principles of marriage, family, and inheritance; the affair, “grounded on sinful loving,” has “Robbed others’ beds’ revenues of their rents” (142: 2, 8). The languages of race, color, and desire that obsess Shakespeare in the mid-1590s stubbornly point outwards, to the frame of custom that makes illicit love a “scandal,”4 and to a sense of the social cost that illicit lovers must pay. I begin with these considerations of racial difference and its connections to sexuality in these early works because explicating this deeply

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politically charged dyad is a major driver behind director Mira Nair’s 1991 film Mississippi Masala, a postcolonial revisitation of Romeo and Juliet.5 The film details the progress of a forbidden love affair between Meena, the daughter of Indian immigrants from East Africa, and Demetrius, an African-American small businessman, in modern-day Greenwood, Mississippi. The couple meets at the scene of a car accident, quickly find reasons to contact each other again, and fall in love against the wishes of Meena’s family and the town itself. The sexual and racial histories Nair attaches to Shakespeare’s first love tragedy, riffing off the racialized sexual consciousness built into the historical moment of Romeo and Juliet and the sonnets, combine to illuminate new grounds for the play’s stifling emotional prohibitions as well as to stage a rescue of romantic love itself, and to suggest the possibility of a way forward from what Shakespeare first presents to us as inevitable doom. Unlike Jones’ Mosquito, Nair’s film does not explicitly name its Shakespearean pre-text, although critics vaguely recognized that the film and the love tragedy did have something in common. Mississippi Masala presented a “star-crossed love affair” that could be understood as a “revised multicultural Romeo and Juliet romance.”6 “Revised” is the important term here, since Nair’s lovers do not die but instead leave Greenwood to start their lives together in California. Neither are they particularly star-crossed, since the film emphasizes that the forces that want to keep them apart are not merely the result of some unpredictable fatal destiny, but in fact the outcomes of specific racial and cultural histories. As it reveals how its characters have been shaped by these histories of histories of exile and migration and repression, we can catch it in the act of what Gilles Deleuze calls “becoming”: the constant and multiple processes of transformation through which objects define themselves across time, in response to each other and to other like objects which have pre-­ existed them.7 Meena and Demetrius find each other and fall in love; Mississippi Masala returns to Romeo and Juliet to deny that it must end in grief. Perhaps the biggest critical challenge facing especially new readers of Romeo and Juliet is understanding why their story must be a tragedy. In one way, of course, the play tells us why they have to die: because of their parents’ feud. Notably, though, we never find out what the feud is about; Prince Escalus mentions its origins in “an airy word” (1.1.86) between old Capulet and old Montague, so it’s not something that simply has always been, even though it now dominates current life in Verona. The play’s

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opening, though, consistently suggests that Verona’s hostility has a distinctly sexual register, one that separates sex from love, lust, or even pleasure and associates it with violence and death. The Capulets’ servingmen Sampson and Gregory enter boasting about their own formidability. After beating Montague’s male servants, Sampson vows, he will rape his maids. Gregory demurs that the fight is “between our masters and us their men” (1.1.18–19), but Sampson—in his own view a “tyrant” (1.1.20), like some cut-rate Tamburlaine—sees fighting men and forcing women as interchangeable expressions of his unconquerable personal might. The potency of this equation of sex and violence, or the identification of sexual predation as a particular aspect of a generalized belligerence, finally affects Gregory, too. When Capulet’s men Abram and Balthasar enter, Gregory urges Sampson to “Draw thy tool” (1.1.31) and Sampson warns the two newcomers that his “naked weapon is out” (1.1.32): penises and swords are interchangeably identified as instruments of destruction. The scene ends with a general brawl, involving not only the servants but Tybalt and Mercutio, with the elderly Capulet and Montague themselves attempting to join in. The former’s call for his “long sword” (1.1.72) reiterate Gregory’s more prosaic reference to Sampson’s “tool.” It is not new to identify the threat of sexual violence as a kind of counterpoint to the rapturous physicality of Romeo and Juliet’s love, or to recognize that the play joins sex and death from its beginning.8 Verona’s rigidly patriarchal norms can only produce a performative, aggressive masculinity.9 But the play’s link between sex and violence is not merely a rhetorical expression of a masculinity that has gone off the rails. Sampson’s allegiance to a virulently patriarchal sense of social and gender order points us to how deeply a reflexive linkage of sex and death, love and violence, informs characters’ understanding of the nature of reality. When Lord Capulet has to tell Paris that his intended bride—his own only child—is dead, he says that “the night before thy wedding day / Hath death lain with thy wife” (4.4.62–63). She has been “deflowerèd” (4.4.64) by death, which has usurped his own paternal prerogative to choose her marriage partner and name his beneficiaries: “Death is my son-in-law, death is my heir” (4.4.65). Sex and death again emerge as near-literal bedfellows in Romeo’s final fear that the reason Juliet remains so beautiful is that Death himself plans to prey on her:     Shall I believe That unsubstantial death is amorous,

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And that the lean abhorrèd monster keeps Thee here in dark to be his paramour? (5.3.102–105)

The necrophiliac horror of the Capulets’ tomb—Paris newly murdered, Tybalt lying unburied and wrapped in a “bloody sheet” (5.3.97), Romeo and Juliet dead by suicide—swallows Verona’s posterity.10 Inexperienced readers of Romeo and Juliet might well wonder how a family feud can lead to this cataclysm. More experienced readers are taught to recognize the unmotivated feud as a blocking device that exists to set the love story in motion; at least that’s the way such devices operated in Shakespearean romantic comedy, whose shape the play follows for its first two acts. And yet here it is in this powerful tragedy, plainly presenting itself and then asking us to accept and forget it. Far from being raised only to be overcome, as such devices must be in comedy, it works here to naturalize the impossibility of a desire that can exist independently of hate and grief. We see this paradoxical and inevitable union from the beginning of the play: “O brawling love, O loving hate” (1.1.173), Romeo murmurs when, frustrated by his own lack of progress with Rosaline, he sees the bloody evidence of the servingmen’s quarrel and immediately assumes that his personal crisis has somehow made itself publicly—and violently—known. Julia Kristeva argues in effect that Romeo and Juliet must die; a passionate love such as theirs, born in defiance of “an antiquated, tribal law that, from the very beginning, rejects the jouissance of bodies and decrees social incompatibilities” simply cannot fit into the world of daily affairs.11 At times, the play seems to come close to arguing that because of the corrosive effects of time, no love at all, not merely great romantic love, is safe in this world. One thinks here of the Nurse’s fond remembrance of Juliet’s toddler days, when her own late husband—“a merry man”—looked forward to the time when a grown-up “Jule” (1.3.42, 45) would eagerly fall onto her back, instead of stumbling forward on unsteady legs. The Nurse’s memory here is double, as her longing for her late husband foreshadows the grief of Juliet’s own future love; both past and future are drenched in loss. Kristeva holds that loss is essential to the definition of love as it can be experienced under the rule of those “social incompatibilities” that govern us all: Shakespeare’s lovers “spend less time loving each other than getting ready to die” (210). More Marxist-minded critiques of the play dispute Kristeva’s sense of inevitability by insisting that Romeo and Juliet is implicated in its early modern historical moment, participating in the ideological formation and

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reproduction of ideas about love that turn it into a tool for mystifying the economic and gendered functions of bourgeois marriage that lie at the play’s core.12 The play assumes that love is at best a simple choice (as we see when Benvolio urges Romeo to cure his unrequited passion for Rosaline by simply settling on “some new infection,” 1.2.48) and at worst a project doomed to fail, because great love flies in the face of the need for conformity to the rules of public order. This pervasive assumption keeps us from recognizing that the play does in fact gesture toward love as it might be experienced in a better world, one beyond the reach of Verona’s arbitrary, cruel rules and the emotionally stunted existence those rules have created. When Juliet asks why Romeo must be a Montague and declares her willingness no longer to be a Capulet if he will only swear that he loves her, she is inviting him to join her in an erotic insurrection that could create a new world where they could be free of the rules of their fathers. In these terms, the tragedy of the play lies in Verona’s success at having normalized the conditions of hate and aggression under which its citizens are forced to live. But even as Juliet waits for Romeo to come to her and consummate their marriage, her speech jumbles blackness, night, sex, and death together in an orgiastic tangle:     [C]ome, loving black-browed night, Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun. (3.2.20–25)

Love may not be distinguishable from death (whether the literal deaths that shock us in the play, or the “little death” of sexual pleasure she looks forward to on her wedding night) after all. In this moment, the inevitability of Romeo and Juliet’s deaths under Verona’s diseased social order appropriates the play’s language of a sexualized blackness to its own purposes even as Juliet anticipates the pleasure of lying with her husband. The blackness that here expresses love’s delight will eventually blur into the darkness of the Capulets’ tomb, where it will set off Juliet’s beauty for the last time. Later in his career, Shakespeare will return to a scene of star-crossed love but treat the two deaths—this time a murder-suicide—in such a way

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as to examine more deeply the social mechanism that made them inevitable. There, the final terrible image of Othello and Desdemona lying dead together on their wedding sheets will be “hid” (5.2.375) from sight, too painful to be acknowledged even by erecting monuments to their memory. As the performance history of Othello suggests to us, the horror that must be hidden by drawing those bed curtains is not just the coupling of the erotic and the violent, of love and loss that Romeo and Juliet accepts as inevitable, but also the fact that this was a love that is explicitly, and not just figuratively, associated with blackness and racial difference. A look at Othello’s stage history repeatedly shows how productions trafficked in their white spectators’ fears of an interracial love. Playing Othello, William Macready recognized and exploited nineteenth century white audiences’ horrified fear of and fascination with the idea of sex between a black man and a white woman by setting Desdemona’s murder behind the closed curtains of her marriage bed. The screams and struggles finally subsided to a moment of stillness—and then, after a beat, Macready would thrust “his dark despairing face, through the curtains of the bed when Emilia calls to him.” The effect was shocking enough to make one white female spectator faint in her seat.13 White American spectators proved equally susceptible to the racial anxiety that the play provoked. When Abigail Adams saw Othello in London in 1786, she admitted in a letter to a friend that the interracial nature of the central relationship distracted and worried her so much that “I lost much of the pleasure of the play.” The “sooty appearance of the Moor” filled her mind with “disgust and horror” every time she saw him touch Desdemona, and she found herself ready to believe with Brabantio that “some love potion or some witchcraft had been practiced” to make her fall in love.14 The bitter grief built into Othello is augmented by systems of racial and sexual order that Romeo and Juliet acknowledge and longed to possess for themselves. Modern theatrical practice has transposed Othello’s explicit racial consciousness onto many productions of Romeo and Juliet, as directors have seized on interracial or cross-ethnic casting as a way of visualizing the arbitrary separation between Montagues and Capulets, and of using audiences’ knowledge of racial prejudice to clarify what the play’s naturalizations of social compulsion and sexual violence can obscure. James Loehlein lists a production in Sarajevo with a Serbian Romeo and a Muslim Juliet, and in Jerusalem with an Arab Romeo who spoke Arabic to a Jewish Hebrew-speaking Juliet in the balcony scene. Britain’s National Theatre set it in an unnamed postcolonial African state with a black Romeo and a

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white Juliet,15 and Cornerstone Theatre played a modernized version in Port Gibson, Mississippi, informed by that town’s history of a successful two-year black boycott of whites-only businesses.16 These examples of conceptual and cross-cultural casting17 were all consciously undertaken with the idea of connecting the play more closely to the social and political environments in which it was being produced. And yet, the play and the sonnets’ use of blackness—sexual, alluring, forbidden—still resonates in a post-Renaissance world. The sonnets’ imagination of a white man’s disastrous affair with a cruel, faithless, and irresistible “black” mistress predates the criminalization of such relationships in the Atlantic world, but not by much.18 Interracial relationships, or potential relationships, are everywhere in Shakespeare and were not unknown at the time,19 although the commonly accepted term used to describe such relationships—“miscegenation”—didn’t come into use until the nineteenth century. Abigail Adams’ visceral ill-ease over the idea of interracial sex (perhaps especially between a white woman and a black man) was culturally available before her uneasy viewing of Othello, and remains so more than 200 years later. The history of race is both modern and pre-modern, and pre-modern formulations of race continue to resonate in modern understandings not just of race but of the ways race is connected to sex and love and of how it undergirds modern social, sexual, and aesthetic hierarchies.20 It’s therefore not particularly surprising that modern directors should call on beliefs about race to help articulate what would otherwise remain mysterious in Romeo and Juliet. After all, the play displays a whole language linking blackness and illicit desire, ready to use—or to be used by—current racial assumptions. But productions that cast an interracial pair of young lovers in an attempt to make the play’s unvoiced conflict between love and hate visually available to audiences will not automatically succeed in providing a pretext for the conflict if the productions stop short of staging their own explicit rejection of a reflexive discomfort with interracial sex. This lack of connection between casting and the conscious will of the production as a whole to embrace the full range of meanings capable of being generated by the sight of a pair of interracial lovers is apparently what handicapped the 2009 Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare’s Globe, which featured a black Romeo and a white Juliet but was otherwise more-­ or-­less traditionally set in Renaissance Verona, and seemed resolutely to underplay any sense of sexual chemistry between the two protagonists.21 Sometimes, even when a production is more consciously designed to make

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the implications of a cross-cultural Romeo and Juliet clear, audiences will still resist the new built-in cues, as when some audience members for a 2005 bilingual English-Spanish college production of the play were “alienated” by the lines in Spanish and “did not seem to enjoy” the production’s emphasis on the play’s sexuality.22 As I have suggested, this play has a difficult enough time with disentangling love and sex from violence and death. Audience members simply may not be additionally able to recognize and unpack racial antagonism as the designers of interracial Romeos might wish them to, since differently raced lovers call attention to “a complex set of racial injunctions which operate in part through the taboo on miscegenation.”23 This is a taboo that older audience members especially, who make up a large proportion of American theatregoers, have grown up under. Naturalizing the rules of racist distinction as glibly as the play asks us to accept Verona’s violence and compulsion may effectively work to reinforce this taboo, creating the impression that interracial relationships are destructive and dangerous in their very nature, rather than being specifically regarded as such under the racial terms called upon to enforce a restrictive sexual regime.24 Just like a black Othello and a white Desdemona, a Romeo and Juliet of different races would be at least partially inscribed within an enabling history of white supremacy that needs to be deconstructed if we are to grasp the way that their play relies on race to make itself clear, but can also in production screen race from our sight. Interracial productions of Romeo and Juliet can thus sometimes yield to histories of racial stereotypes and fears as they attempt to explicate the backstory for a love that cannot be. Baz Lurhmann’s 1996 film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, with its visual tangle of Mexican, Latin American, and Caribbean production details serving as an exotifying but nonfunctional backdrop for its two white stars, comes to mind here.25 But in Mississippi Masala, neither of the lovers is white. The film responds to the Shakespeare play’s account of forbidden love by revealing more complex ways in which specific racially marked contexts can militate against the lovers. Taking place in a world where racial difference can only be understood as an insupportable scandal, Mississippi Masala’s interracial love story becomes the means through which the unspecified forces keeping Romeo and Juliet apart come to light. Although we don’t recognize it at the time, Nair’s film begins with a racial origin story for the principles of separation and exile that will frame Meena and Demetrius’ romance, and that invites us to reflect backward on

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how Romeo and Juliet’s language achieves its metaphorical force. The film opens with a tense scene of a black man at the wheel of a car and an Indian man in the passenger’s seat, as armed police shine lights on them. As the police give them permission to drive on, the voice of an announcer on Radio Uganda tells us that this day—November 7, 1972—is “the end of one chapter in the history of this country and the beginning of another.” This day is the deadline for Uganda’s Asian population to leave the country “in order to pave the way for the indigenous people of Uganda to control the economy.” General Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians in Uganda was the postcolonial climax of decades of economic and racial exploitation. Indian-East African relations began as early as the sixteenth century, when merchants from Gujarat and Goa on India’s west coast had begun trading with cities of the east African coast,26 but steady large-scale Indian emigration was not institutionalized until thousands of skilled Indian workers were imported by British colonial authorities to help build the Uganda Railway beginning in 1896.27 Most of these workers went back to India after the railway was finished in 1901, but many stayed in east Africa. Becoming the managers of the cotton gins that processed the Uganda Protectorate’s first great cash crop beginning after the turn of the twentieth century, and then into roasting and exporting Kenyan and Ugandan coffees after midcentury, Indian Ugandans eventually comprised much of the country’s middle class and contributed crucially to its modern economy.28 With white Europeans still occupying most of the high-status roles of civil servants and government administrators, black Africans were largely relegated to the roles of laborers and servants, and largely blocked from land ownership. Coming after Uganda’s independence and General Idi Amin’s 1971 military coup against the African-socialist regime of Milton Obote, the new government decreed the expulsion of the country’s Asians as part of a nationalist movement. In the film, the black man, Okelo, is a close friend of Jay, the Indian, and has apparently just picked Jay up from being questioned by the police after he gave an interview to the BBC in which he described Idi Amin as “evil.” Okelo calls Jay a coward for having resisted the expulsion order until the deadline arrived. When Jay protests “Where should I go? Okelo, this is my home!,” Okelo answers him quietly but firmly: “Not any more, Jay. Africa is for Africans. Black Africans.” Okelo drives Jay home to his worried wife Kinnu—“Where did they take you?,” she asks; “Did they hurt you?”—and his young daughter Meena, who doesn’t understand

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what is happening, where they will go, or when they will come back. Okelo comes to the station where they will catch a bus for the airport and says goodbye to Meena and Kinnu, but Jay ignores him. On the way to the airport, a group of armed soldiers stops the bus, comes on it to survey the passengers, and tells Kinnu to get off with her suitcase. Pointing his gun at her by the side of the road, he tells her to open the bag to see what she is carrying: clothes, a recorder with tapes of Indian music, a photograph of Jay in his lawyer’s robe and wig. Finally, he allows her to get back on the bus, with only the photograph, and the passengers are allowed to ride on to the airport. We don’t see a screen shot of the film’s title until more than 15 minutes of this unsettling exposition, when a caption tells us that we are now in Greenwood, Mississippi, 18 years later. Jay, Kinnu, and Meena have settled there among friends and family who had already emigrated. Kinnu is running a small liquor store, and Meena cleans rooms at the motel owned by family friends. Jay has never quite become reconciled to his reduced American circumstances, busying himself with constant requests to the post-Amin Ugandan government to be allowed to return home and reclaim the property he had to forfeit. Meena and Demetrius first meet when she rear-ends his truck driving back home, and his double take at her when she gives him her insurance information makes his attraction to her immediately clear. The two don’t take long to find excuses to speak more personally, with Meena calling him first and Demetrius calling her again late at night when both are alone in bed. By the time he invites her to a family celebration of his grandfather’s birthday, they are falling in love. The film thus implies that Demetrius and Meena’s relationship is made possible by her family’s history of displacement and exile. They would never have met each other otherwise; their passionate love affair figures as the sweet and unexpected outcome of the fear, conflict, and implied violence with which the film opens. As a rethinking of Romeo and Juliet, Mississippi Masala offers an explicitly political explanation of some of the secret reasons why Verona’s social relations are so distorted that murderous violence seems unremarkable and unavoidable. It also explicitly racializes that explanation, beginning with the film’s setting. Greenwood, Mississippi hosted the original chapter of the Citizens Council of America, a white supremacist organization founded in 1954 on a platform of stopping school integration and keeping black people from voting. It is about ten miles south of Money, where fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

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Greenwood also became the headquarters of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s first Mississippi Delta voting registration project in 1962, and was an epicenter of white state violence—ranging from police harassment and economic reprisals to unprosecuted murders— against black citizens agitating for voting rights. Eleven years after Emmett Till’s murder, Greenwood was where Stokely Carmichael declared the necessity of a new political movement based on “black power.”29 Greenwood’s history of racial repression and anti-racist resistance is completely different from Meena’s family’s history in Uganda, but it carries its own racial charge. Neither of these histories is explicitly outlined in the film, but both remain present—sometimes allusively, sometimes overtly— ready to be called on to serve the love story unfolding over these unpromising foundations, in what Linda Hutcheon describes as the “palimpsestic”30 manner characteristic of adaptation. I am not saying that the real reason the Capulets and the Montagues hate each other is about race—even though Romeo and Juliet do express their amazement and delight in loving each other in racial terms—or that the Indians’ expulsion from Uganda was motivated by racism. Rather, Mississippi Masala layers and combines two different racial histories—what happened in Uganda and what happened in Greenwood—and then sets them over Romeo and Juliet’s consciousness of blackness in order to provide its own account of how race can frame love. Doing so, it animates Shakespeare’s expression of a love that is not supposed to be, allowing us to see what might happen if that love came to be anyway, under racial and/or historical circumstances that seem to repeat, or at least recall each other, over time. Some critics of the film have argued that, by not filling in the details of the film’s Ugandan background, Nair distorts or even dismisses its significance.31 I’m not sure this is true; Amin is clearly recognizable in the film’s television news clips, and the November 7, 1972 caption does identify the moment being dramatized.32 But the history the film is interested in includes more than large-scale movements of regime change and ethnic expulsion. Its sense of racial history and identity is also personal, internal to the Indian community in Greenwood. Dressing for a wedding where the eligible young Harry Patel will be present, Meena teasingly asks her mother why she should bother making a special effort with her appearance; after all, she’s just her “darky daughter,” and Harry’s mother would never stand for him marrying a “darky.” Kinnu’s friends in Greenwood take this colorism for granted, one (played by Nair herself) asserting that

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“you can be dark and have money, or you can be fair and have no money, but you can’t be dark and have no money and expect to get Harry Patel.” Nair herself has remarked of her own upbringing in India that “it’s so apparent, the consciousness we have of degrees of color within our own communities.”33 “People think of racism as black versus white, but there’s a different kind of consciousness of color within minority groups as we equate beauty with fairness and ugliness with darkness,”34 she added on another occasion. This kind of racial thinking by nonwhite people toward themselves and toward other nonwhite people deepens the explanation of why Meena and Demetrius’ affair is experienced as so unacceptable. Strikingly, however, early commentary on the film tended to minimize the importance of its portrayal of racism in Meena’s community. It’s true, for example, but not necessarily relevant, that “there are almost no white people in Nair’s Mississippi,”35 which one critic of the film cited as an example of the film’s over-idealized view of the lovers’ struggle; presumably only white people would express objections to Meena and Demetrius’ affair. (According to 2010 census data, Mississippi had the highest proportion of black residents of any state, at 37%; that year, black people also made up 72% of Greenwood’s population.) “Just think of the racism awaiting the two lovers,” another Masala skeptic exclaimed, as though neither Meena nor Demetrius had experienced racism up to this point in their lives, despite Meena’s childhood in colonial Uganda and being surrounded now by people who think her dark skin makes her undesirable to Indian men of means.36 bell hooks and Anuradha Dingwaney acknowledge Jay’s rejection of his daughter’s relationship with Demetrius but see it as an example of “the racist and imperialist attitudes that some South Asian immigrants acquire in the States when they assimilate white supremacist attitudes” (42) and not an expression of beliefs he may have brought with him from Uganda, intensified by the trauma of the expulsion and by the long history of white racism that has shaped Greenwood.37 If Romeo and Juliet calls on blackness to name what is otherwise inexpressible and unknown, critical reactions to Mississippi Masala that saw racism only as something that white people do to nonwhite people, rather than as a social grammar called on to organize subjectivity, seemed to dismiss blackness’ place in the film’s racial scene altogether. To be sure, characters’ awareness of racial difference is sometimes confused; one elderly white man who owns a motel in direct competition with the one where Meena works grumbles that he wishes someone would send his Indian business rivals “back to the reservation.”

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Besides missing its internal dynamics, readings of the film’s handling of race also often tended to dismiss ways in which, prompted by Romeo and Juliet, it connects race to sexuality. In a flashback to what may have been Meena’s last birthday in Uganda before the expulsion, the television on in the background at her parents’ house is showing a speech by Idi Amin, who explains the economic injustice that he claims inspired the expulsion, but also insists that the social system that has dispossessed black Ugandans extends into the sexual domain; South Asians in the country “refuse to let their daughters marry Africans,” he says.38 In Greenwood, as in Kampala, the economics of racial prejudice have an explicitly sexual register. Not only does her father tell Meena that she and Demetrius cannot be together—all people must “stick to their own kind”—but once it becomes known that Meena and Demetrius are lovers, the white bankers who have financed Demetrius’ business immediately call in the loans that let him start his business.39 Race-mixing in Greenwood is strictly forbidden, as it was socially prohibited between South Asian women and African men in Uganda, and as it was punishable by death for Emmett Till. Like the internalized color prejudice that devalues Meena as a potential mate for a well-off Indian man, prohibitions against interracial sex may have crossed the ocean with Meena’s family, colliding with and being informed by American fears of black-white miscegenation. We cannot be sure whether Kinnu’s shame over the affair comes from the fact that Meena had sex with a man who was not her husband or if it has a root in racial prejudice, but she makes her disappointment with her daughter clear: “You call this love? When all you’ve done is bring shame on our heads?” Reactions to the film’s sex scenes fail to recognize the layered racial contexts for Jay and Kinnu’s reaction to their daughter’s affair. Instead, the scene became an object of particular scorn, seen as valuing the attraction between the two lovers even above “familial ties, as if the ultimate goal of life is individual happiness, which they acquire by satisfying mutual lust” (hooks and Dingwaney, 42–43). The character of Meena was regarded as little more than an exoticized sexual object “molded for the viewing pleasure of the white male audience.”40 Her character was a disappointment, “phenomenally unconcerned with issues of race, history, culture, and gender,” emerging as essentially a white girl in brownface, “who, by virtue of a little color, can bridge the gap between black and white (not through activism, of course, just romantic love).”41

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Again, the gap the film portrays is not (or not primarily) between black and white. Neither is there any such thing as “just romantic love” in the kinds of Shakespearean adaptations and reproductions I discuss here, if only because romantic love is so often the point of entry to—or, rather, the point of exclusion from—the original text for the black female characters who interest me. In Romeo and Juliet, romantic love embodies everything that life in Verona cannot be. Without a sense of how Mississippi Masala holds Romeo and Juliet in mind, questioning the links it makes between sex and race as a foundation of social order, critics can only read the lovers’ connection in purely personal—rather than historical—terms, failing to see that personal experience is often shaped by larger historical and cultural forces. Neither Meena nor Demetrius, who defies both Jay and the advice of his business partner Tyrone to defend his right to be with her, quite fits into the terms of Romeo and Juliet’s racial imaginary, in which white women’s beauty and desirability become visible against a black background. Both are active protagonists. But neither of them fully counts in Greenwood, except to each other. Here, it is worth recalling the treatment of the young lovers’ sexuality in Romeo and Juliet; Benvolio knows better than to take Romeo’s transient passions too seriously, and while they love her, Juliet’s parents regard her marriage primarily as the fulfillment of their own social and financial ambitions. In Mississippi Masala, the lovers reclaim their bodies from a social order that has defined the places they can occupy, and live to tell the tale. Ignoring the particular racial contexts the film establishes, as in the assertion cited above about how Jay didn’t learn to judge Demetrius negatively until he had been exposed to anti-black racism in the United States, also underestimates its appeal for nonwhite audiences. As the first film about South Asian American characters that received a wide US release, Mississippi Masala understandably bore a heavy weight of expectation from an unserved audience hungry for representation. Very few of its characters are white; the film mostly unfolds among and between people of color.42 Not only did it feature South Asian stars like Roshan Seth (in the role of Jay, Meena’s father) and Sharmila Tagore (who played her mother, Kinnu), it was also one of the first Denzel Washington films released after he won the 1990 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (Glory). Premiering in the United States in February of 1992, it was followed that November, after months of anticipation, by Spike Lee’s widely acclaimed Malcolm X, with Washington in the title role.43 A broad nonwhite popular audience existed for Nair’s film, solicited by Seth and

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Tagore’s reputations as well as by Washington’s leading-man stardom and the growing fame of Nair herself.44 Still, black and brown characters looking at each other and being looked at by black and brown audiences watching a film directed and written by two Indian women45 marks a different kind of relation between audience and spectacle than that offered by the kinds of Romeo and Juliet productions I note above, played for mostly older, mostly white theatregoers. To have treated the film as though it was really only about white people and ideologies of white racism, or about postcolonial politics, is to have missed the pleasure it offered of watching it circulate and valorize black and brown subjectivities.46 Adaptation is the site where those subjectivities can speak and be heard. As members of an Indian diaspora, Jay and Kinnu are shaped by a set of cultural and political relationships that are “overdetermined by the past,”47 no matter how passionately he protested to Okelo that he has somehow become “Ugandan first” and is no longer Indian. In order to assert an African identity, Jay must forget the colonial history that brought his father to Uganda and that allowed him to move into a comfortable life there, while black Ugandans were forced to the bottom of the social order. Yet, the lessons from this history rise to the surface and dictate Jay’s response to his discovery of Meena’s affair. With its interest lying as much in the characters’ American lives as in the African segments that frame the love story, the film does not so much draw a direct equation between anti-­ black racism in Uganda and anti-black racism in the United States as it posits an historical flow and parallel between the lives these characters, South Asian as well as African-American, can lead in diaspora. The town’s Indians and Africans are connected by rupture, exile, and loss, whether they recognize this or not. At the cookout celebrating Demetrius’ grandfather’s birthday, his younger brother Dexter—fascinated by the fact that Meena is Indian though she has never been to India—observes that she and Demetrius’ family have something in common: “We from Africa, but we never been.” The two lovers find each other and connect across this gap of time and space. Gaps also exist between the film’s two communities. Although Greenwood’s Indians seem friendly enough with the town’s blacks—the Indian owners of the Monte Cristo Motel where Meena works hire Demetrius’ carpet-cleaning business to clean their rooms—the rapprochement is razor-thin, as is the town’s apparent lack of racial tension. Indians of Jay and Kinnu’s generation do not seem to have black guests in their homes, for example, as Demetrius’ family welcomed Meena to his

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grandfather’s party. (These prohibitions may be relaxed among younger members of the community, as Harry Patel does take Meena to a predominantly black club to go dancing after Anil’s wedding reception.) Kanti, the motel manager, declares solidarity—“people of color must stick together!”—after Meena runs into Demetrius’ van, but he is hoping at least in part to stave off any personal-injury lawsuit Demetrius might be thinking of filing. (As it turns out, Kanti’s fear is well founded.) To be clear, the fact that Meena and Demetrius have sex is not in itself political. But having sex despite the state’s and the community’s deep-­ seated prohibitions against certain bodies joining might be. It’s sex that shatters Greenwood’s provisional cross-racial solidarity, just as Romeo and Juliet’s mutual desire violated the terms of their town’s feud: in both societies, people need to stay in their place to preserve the status quo. Anil, the wealthiest Indian businessman in Greenwood, whose car Meena was driving when she crashed into Demetrius, is in Biloxi for a weekend with his friends when he is outraged to discover that Meena and Demetrius have sneaked off there to make love. (Earlier, a scene of a clearly dissatisfied Anil lying awake next to his bride has led us to believe that he might be experiencing sexual boredom, ignorance, and/or incompatibility in his new marriage.) He breaks into their motel room, attacking Demetrius and shouting at him to “leave our women alone!” When the police arrive to investigate the disturbance, Anil immediately escalates the quarrel by claiming that Demetrius was an interloper who was trying to kill him and Meena, assuming that the police would believe any story about a black aggressor (they do) and that they would assume that he and Meena were a couple. Meena fights back, and both she and Demetrius are arrested. At this point, Mississippi Masala borrows and transmutes Romeo and Juliet’s assumption that Juliet belongs to her parents, especially her father, to bestow in marriage as they see fit. (Recall her father’s grief when he first believes she is dead; Death has somehow seized his prerogative by naming himself Capulet’s son-in-law.) Whether he secretly wants her or not, dark skin and all, Anil believes that Meena belongs to him and the other Indian men. Because they see her as theirs, they cannot imagine any way in which she could be free to choose her own lover, as Juliet chooses to consummate her marriage to Romeo even after she learns he’s responsible for her cousin Tybalt’s death, or as Desdemona chooses Othello. The film builds on this assumption of control over women’s sexuality with the kind of racism that we’ve already observed in operation among Meena’s neighbors. The same woman who earlier said no dark-skinned girl could get Harry

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Patel gossips on the telephone about Meena’s choice: “Can you imagine dumping Harry Patel for a black?” More explicitly, the same white owner of a rival motel who complained about Indian competition calls Kanti to ask gloatingly, “Are y’all havin’ nigger trouble?” Interracial sex becomes everybody’s business because of its power to muddy the categories of separation and exclusion that shaped Greenwood’s past as well as the past life of Meena’s family in Uganda, pasts that still resonate—if in less violent forms—in its present. “If you want the money,” Tyrone tells Demetrius when he goes to pick him up from jail, with rumors about the bank recalling his loan already beginning to circulate, “you better leave them fuckin’ foreigners alone. They ain’t nothin’ but trouble. ‘United we stand, divided we fall,’” he says scornfully, repeating what Kanti told them after the car accident. “You fall in bed with one of their daughters, you gonna swing.” After their arrest, Meena finally rebels against her parents. “I love him!,” she says of Demetrius. “That’s not a crime, is it?” Similarly, Demetrius tells his father, who tells him he needs to drop Meena so as to preserve the security of his bank loan, “I didn’t do nothing wrong.” (His father’s sister supports him, decrying the bank’s power to ruin him for being with Meena: “The days of slavery, they’re over!”) Early critics of the film did not so much regard Meena’s love as a crime as they saw it as an unwise rejection of the values of home and kinship that could steady her in a hostile new world: “Mississippi Masala suggests that personal fulfillment cannot be found within a context of nation or family where one is able to reconcile the longing for personal autonomy with the desire to function within community” (hooks and Dingwaney, 43). But if, as I have been arguing here, any notion of personal autonomy is as completely incompatible with the rigidly exclusionary nature of life in Nair’s Greenwood as it is with life in Shakespeare’s Verona, there is no way to completely reconcile personal longing with community demands. That is, thinking of Nair’s film in light of Romeo and Juliet, as hooks and Dingwaney do not, makes it impossible to imagine a political solution that can both defer to Meena and Demetrius’ families and forge a path toward a life together for the two of them. Their family origins in principles of separation and oppression rob any notion of “home” of the cultural nurture and support hooks and Dingwaney invoke, despite the love each has for their parents. With the Capulets, “home” was as much concerned— perhaps more—with sustaining the feud and maintaining Lord Capulet’s authority to arrange his daughter’s marital future than with offering Juliet emotional support. In the film, even though Demetrius’ father and

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Meena’s parents love their children, both sets of parents cannot help seeing their children’s welfare through the eyes of the racist social systems that maintain in Greenwood and that Jay and Kinnu lived under in Uganda. Even Tyrone, who earlier tried and failed to start a career as an actor in California, decides to go back there after he bails Demetrius out of jail; it’s as far away from Greenwood as he can get, and he’s willing to go even if he ends up driving a bus. Greenwood’s dark and bloody ground has never offered an uncontested home to the town’s black citizens, just as the meaning of “home” has been fragmented for its Indians, and may be irreparable. As the film ends, Jay has decided to move his wife and daughter back to Uganda, where the courts are finally giving signs of recognizing his property claim. Demetrius goes to Meena’s parents’ house to try to speak to her before they leave, but her father refuses. Demetrius accuses him of being as racist toward him as his banker is, even though Jay’s skin color “ain’t but a few shades” lighter than his own: “As soon as you get here you start acting white.” Jay denies the charge, insisting that he would object to his daughter’s love affair even if there had been no scandal. “I thought I could change the world,” he says of his own youth, implying that his daughter’s love is performative rather than real, that her choice to be with Demetrius is as naïve as he now apparently believes his earlier declaration that he was a Ugandan and bore no ill will toward his black countrymen was. “I don’t want her to go through the same struggle I did.” Demetrius rejects the notion that her father’s postcolonial dispossession has been any harsher than the daily conditions under which he must live: “I’m a black man in Mississippi. There ain’t a damn thing you can tell me about struggle.” Realizing that she loves Demetrius too much to leave him, Meena takes Anil’s car to go see him one last time. He’s bitter about her father’s rejection of him as a possible suitor for her, and tells her he never intended to fall in love with her. She is the one who suggests that she go with him and Tyrone to Los Angeles; they still have his business van, even though the bank will try to repossess it in two weeks once his loan comes due. Since she knows how to clean rooms, she could be his partner. Although we don’t see him telling Meena about it, Demetrius has already contacted the lawyer who gave him a matchbook with his contact information printed on the back at the scene of the car accident at the beginning of the film, and the lawyer has filed a $50,000 civil suit against Anil for the pain and physical suffering he has supposedly experienced as a

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result of the impact. The lovers have two weeks to get as far away as they can, two weeks during which Anil may well settle the lawsuit; Demetrius’ father, respected in the community, will run interference for him with the bank until his son gets settled. Meena calls Anil to tell him she’s left the car and its keys at a local convenience store, and she and Demetrius take off. Driving out west together, she tells him, they could “see the world.” As the final credits roll, the last we see of them is an idyllic scene of them swaying joyfully together, dressed in traditional Indian and African garments, embracing and kissing in what looks like a cotton field. The early critics I cited seem particularly irritated by this last romantic look at Demetrius and Meena. Their leaving Greenwood together at film’s end with no firm plans except to be together was derided as rash and irresponsible, mere lip service to a fashionable 1990s multiculturalism, an uncritical celebration of “the commodification of hybridity. The two young lovers walk away into the rain in a Hollywood resolution of the agonies of history,” where “the only thing that matters is the bonding between two bodies” (Radhakrishnan, 225). Since the parents of the real first-generation Indian-American girls who made up an enthusiastic portion of the film’s audience too often left their daughters “emotionally and socially defenseless in regard to all issues of sexuality,” one writer worried that Meena’s behavior in the film might lead them to participate in the American “fad” for dating non-Indian boys, which could leave them exploited and adrift: “Not all of us can frolic with Denzel Washington as the credits roll by” (DasGupta, 77). Sadly, we cannot. But what seems most truly significant to me in the final shot is the cotton field in the lovers’ background. Cotton was the crop that Demetrius’ slave ancestors raised in the Mississippi Delta, as well as the crop that generated massive British colonial wealth in India. Mississippi Masala thus “visually reinscribes Meena and Demetrius within the historical contexts that produced them” (Bose and Varghese, 159) and implies that their love is a kind of historical outcome in itself. Their relationship is framed by a larger account of displacement, exile, exploitation, and migration that frames the film, but with the final scene replaying Jay and Kinnu’s frightening initial expulsion as a longed-for mutual departure toward “unpathed waters, undreamed shores” (The Winter’s Tale, 4.4.567). The film thus links South Asian to African-American history, beginning by invoking the Ugandan past and ending in the Mississippi Delta where the lovers meet before continuing journeys their ancestors began long ago.

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Mississippi Masala’s postcolonial self-awareness exists alongside other understandings of the forms that domination and exploitation can take. The lovers’ journey into an unknown future serves an emotional need that has been brought into existence by cultural and racial strictures against exogamy, against Indian women’s pursuit of sexual autonomy, and against African-Americans’ self-determination. When Meena leaves the community that has stifled her as much as it has nurtured her, the film is not celebrating her turning her back on the traditions under which she has been raised. It is impossible for her to make “a total break from the messy past” (Radhakrishnan, 226) since she and her lover both carry their pasts—historical, racial, colonial, familial—within them. When he returns to Uganda, Jay additionally discovers that his past is not what he thought it was; his friend Okelo, who got him out of jail even though he agreed with Amin’s general assertion that Africa must return to the control of Africans, is long dead, possibly because of the friendship he extended to him then. As his daughter and her lover begin their new lives together in the United States, Jay finally lets go of the illusion that the power and comfort of his past life will become available to him again, that he can in effect start history over. What he does have is his present, with Kinnu. The past—national, racial, familial—no longer bears on the life he lives now; too much has been broken, dislocated, rearranged. Like Meena and Demetrius, all he can do is let go, leap into the life his history has created, and accept the process of becoming.

Notes 1. On blackness and beauty in Romeo and Juliet see Nicholas Radel, “The Ethiop’s Ear: Race, Sexuality, and Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,” The Upstart Crow 28 (2008): 17–34. 2. Kim Hall, “‘These Bastard Signs of Fair’: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Postcolonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 64–83. 3. Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979, rpt. 2019), 56–70. 4. Margreta De Grazia, “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York Garland, 2000), 105–106. Also see Scott Oldenburg, “The Riddle of Blackness in England’s National Family Romance,” JEMCS 1, no. 1 (2001): 46–62.

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5. Starring Denzel Washington (Demetrius) and Sarita Choudhury (Meena); produced by Black River Productions and Channel Four Films. 6. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 120; Jinga Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York: Routledge, 2004), 75. 7. Deleuze and Félix Guattari introduce their notion of these objects, which they call “concepts,” but for my purposes especially mean Shakespeare plays and the responses they elicit, in What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 15–60. 8. See, for example, Robert N. Watson and Stephen Dickey, “Wherefore Art Thou Tereu? Juliet and the Legacy of Rape,” RenQ 58.1 (2005): 127–156; Clayton MacKenzie, “Love, Sex and Death in Romeo and Juliet,” English Studies 88.1 (2007): 22–42; William Carroll, “‘We Were Born to Die’: Romeo and Juliet,” CompD 15.1 (1981): 54–71, and Lloyd Davis, “‘Death-­Marked Love’: Desire and Presence in Romeo and Juliet,” ShS 49 (1996): 57–67. 9. This is an argument made by Coppélia Kahn, “Coming of Age in Verona,” MLS 8.1 (1977): 5–22. Also see Robert Appelbaum, “‘Standing to the Wall’: The Pressures of Masculinity in Romeo and Juliet,” SQ 48.3 (1997): 251–272. 10. Ramie Targoff, “Mortal Love: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and the Practice of Joint Burial,” Representations 120 (2012), discusses the links between love and mortality in the play, 28–33. 11. In Tales of Love, tr. Leon S.  Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 210. My discussion here uses some of the same examples as Catherine Belsey, ‘Romeo and Juliet’: Language and Writing (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), which discusses Kristeva 59–62. 12. Dympna Callaghan, “The Ideology of Romantic Love: the Case of Romeo and Juliet,” in Callaghan, Lorraine Helms, and Jyotsna Singh, The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 59–101. 13. Julie Hankey, ed., Othello, Plays in Performance Series (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987), cites this anecdote from Westland Marston’s 1888 theatrical memoir on her p. 64. 14. Tilden G.  Edelstein, “Othello in America: The Drama of Racial Intermarriage,” in Werner Sollors, ed., Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 359, 358. The role of white visual horror in these anecdotes supports Ian Smith’s argument in “White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-­ Dressing on the Early Modern Stage,” RenD 32 (2003): 33–67 about the

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degree to which race was experienced as a “visual transaction” (37) between spedtsyor and blacked-up actor. 15. In his edition of Romeo and Juliet in the Shakespeare in Production series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 79–80. 16. Angela C. Pao, “Recasting Race: Casting Practices and Racial Formations,” Theatre Survey 41.2 (2000), 15–17. 17. The Nontraditional Casting Project (NTCP), a US-based group advocating for inclusive casting in theatrical productions, developed these terms in the late 1980s. It defined “conceptual casting” as the choice of an “ethnic, female, or disabled actor” in order to give a play greater resonance for modern audiences, and “cross-cultural casting” as setting “the entire world of a play” in “a different cultural setting” than the one its original script lay it in. Angela C. Pao, note 16 above, expands her discussion of the NTCP in No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 4–15. 18. While fornication was legally frowned upon for all in colonial Virginia, in 1662, the colony’s House of Burgesses mandated that interracial couples found guilty of the crime would be fined double the amount levied against couples of the same race. 19. Miranda Kaufmann, “‘Making the Beast With Two Backs’: Interracial Relationships in Early Modern England,” Literature Compass 12, no.1 (2015): 22–37. 20. Two examples of criticism that read Renaissance racial moments’ implication in modern formulations are Robert Hornback, Racism and Early Blackface Comic Traditions: From the Old World to the New (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and Ayanna Thompson, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2013). 21. Nicola Hyland, “‘Young Hearts’/White Masks: Leading the (Color)blind at Shakespeare’s Globe,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9.2 (2015). 22. Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, “My Own Private Shakespeare; or, Am I Deluding Myself?,” in Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, ed. Ayanna Thompson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 125–136. 23. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), 167. 24. She is not concerned with interracial relationships; for further discussion of the implications of colorblind productions, see Christy Burns, “Suturing Over Racial Difference: Problems for a Colorblind Approach in a Visual Culture,” Discourse 22, no. 1 (2002): 70–91. 25. Alfredo Modenessi, “(Un)Doing the Book ‘without Verona walls’: A View from the Receiving End of Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo

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+ Juliet,” in Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical theory and Popular Cinema, ed. Courtney Lehmann and Lisa Starks (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 62–85. W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) argues that the film’s constantly iterated but disconnected markers of an undetailed latinidad point to its marketing to “the white norteamericano imaginary,” rather than to a more truly international and multiracial imagined audience (140). 26. Edward A. Alpers, “Gujarat and the Trade of East Africa, c. 1500–1800,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 9.1 (1986): 22–44. 27. This massive undertaking began at Mombasa in British East Africa (now Kenya) and extended almost 700  miles northwest across the country to Kisumu, on the east coast of Lake Victoria. Ferries travelled from Kisumu to other ports on the lake and a short spur line was built to extend the rail line to Kampala, capital of the Uganda Protectorate, thus connecting the east African interior to the Indian Ocean. 28. Vali Jamal, “Asians in Uganda, 1880–1972: Inequality and Expulsion,” EHR 29.4 (1976): 602–616. 29. For this history, I recommend the rich SNCC Digital Gateway, https:// snccdigital.org. 30. A Theory of Adaptation, 9. 31. bell hooks and Anuradha Dingwaney, “Mississippi Masala,” Z Magazine, July–August 1992, argue that the film “erases” (42) the colonially generated hierarchical relationship between Asians and Africans in Uganda. Desai, Beyond Bollywood, believes that the film “does little to portray [the] racial hierarchy and economic disparity or the failure of the multiracial nation-­state as a legacy of colonialism,” instead leading viewers to believe that its Ugandan scenes are the result of “an essentialized and ahistorical antiblack racism” (81). I will include subsequent references to hooks and Dingwaney parenthetically in my text. 32. Purnima Bose and Linta Varghese, “Mississippi Masala, South Asian Activism, and Agency,” in Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the ‘Real,’ ed. Wendy S.  Hesford and Wendy Kozol (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), also believe that hooks and Dingwaney underestimate the film’s awareness of the colonial contexts for Jay’s response to his daughter’s affair, 143–144. 33. In an interview with Amina Meer, Bomb 36 (1991), 47. 34. Peggy Orenstein, “Salaam America!,” Mother Jones 17.1 (Jan./Feb. 1992), 60. On color-consciousness among Indian-Americans, see Saeed Khan, “Let’s Talk About Racism: Why Indian-Americans Have a White Skin Fixation,” Hindustani Times 23 May 2017.

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35. Sayantani DasGupta, “Glass Shawls and Long Hair: A South Asian Woman talks Sexual Politics,” Ms. Magazine 3, no. 5 (1993), 76. I’ll include future references to DasGupta parenthetically in my text. 36. R.  Radhakrishnan, “Is the Ethnic ‘Authentic’ in the Diaspora?,” in The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, ed. Karin Aguiilar-San Juan (Boston: South End Press, 1994), 226. I’ll include future references to Radhakrishnan parenthetically in my text. 37. On how American notions of race shape South Asian immigrants’ relations to whiteness and to white productions of African-American identity, see Amritjit Singh, “African Americans and the New Immigrants,” in Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva, eds., Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 93–110. On racial difference in the film, see Radharani Ray, “Interrogating Race in Mississippi Masala,” Race, Gender, and Class 8, no. 4 (2001): 155–175. 38. Anthropologist Agehananda Bharati noted the co-existence of South Asians’ strong antipathy toward intermarriage between South Asians and Africans in East Africa and the pervasiveness of skin-color prejudice among South Asians themselves in “Patterns of Identification Among the East African Asians,” Sociologus 15.2 (1965), 132. 39. This kind of economic punishment of black people behaving in ways that broke rules of proper comportment toward principles of white supremacy also appeared in the historical Greenwood. When the area’s black citizens would not stop organizing to register and vote, in the winter of 1962–1963, the county’s board of supervisors ended its participation in the federal surplus commodities program, which fed up to 28,000 people annually—90% of them black. SNCC organized a national food drive for donations to Mississippi, and registration continued. 40. “Mississippi Meena: A Critique of South-Asian Womanhood in Mississippi Masala.” Manavi Newsletter (1992), 1. 41. Sonia Shah, “Presenting the Blue Goddess: Toward a National Pan-Asian Feminist Agenda,” in Aguilar-San Juan, 157. 42. On the significance of the film’s predominantly nonwhite cast, see E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997), 173–177. Binta Mehta discusses its significance for nonwhite audiences in “Emigrants Twice Displaced: Race, Color, and Identity in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala,” in Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, ed. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 153–169. 43. It also opened a few months after Lee’s film Jungle Fever, which portrayed the course of another interracial affair, this one a conflicted relationship between a married black architect and his lover, an Italian-American secretary.

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44. Mississippi Masala was Nair’s second feature film. Her first, 1988’s Salaam Bombay!, won the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival and was named best first feature at Cannes. On her career and the significance of her films, see Urmila Seshagiri, “At the Crossroads of Two Empires: Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala and the Limits of Hybridity,” Journal of Asian American Studies 6, no. 2 (2003): 177–198. 45. Mississippi Masala’s screenplay is by Sooni Taraporevala, a Mumbai native who met Nair when they were students at Harvard University. She also wrote two other Nair films, Salaam Bombay! and The Namesake (2006). 46. On spectatorship in Indian cinema, see Lakshmi Srinivas, “The Active Audience: Spectatorship, Social Relations, and the Experience of Cinema in India,” Media, Culture, and Society 24, no. 2 (2002): 155–173. 47. Stephanie Jones, “The Politics of Love and History: Asian Women and African Men in East African Literature,” Research in African Literatures, 42.3 (2011), 171.

References Alpers, Edward A. “Gujarat and the Trade of East Africa, c. 1500–1800.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 9, no. 1 (1986): 22–44. Anon. “Mississippi Meena: A Critique of South-Asian Womanhood in Mississippi Masala.” Manavi Newsletter 4 (1992), 1–2. Appelbaum, Robert. “‘Standing to the Wall’: The Pressures of Masculinity in Romeo and Juliet.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1997): 251–272. Belsey, Catherine. ‘Romeo and Juliet’: Language and Writing. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Bharati, Agehananda. “Patterns of Identification Among the East African Asians.” Sociologus 15, no. 2 (1965): 128–142. Bose, Purnima, and Linta Varghese. “Mississippi Masala, South Asian Activism, and Agency.” In Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the ‘Real’, edited by Wendy S.  Hesford and Wendy Kozol, 137–168. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Burns, Christy. “Suturing Over Racial Difference: Problems for a Colorblind Approach in a Visual Culture.” Discourse 22, no. 1 (2002): 70–91. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New  York: Routledge, 1993. Callaghan, Dympna. “The Ideology of Romantic Love: The Case of Romeo and Juliet.” In The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics, edited by Dympna Callaghan, Lorraine Helms, and Jyotsna Singh, 59–101. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Carroll, William. “‘We Were Born to Die’: Romeo and Juliet.” CompD 15, no. 1 (1981): 54–71.

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DasGupta, Sayantani. “Glass Shawls and Long Hair: A South Asian Woman Talks Sexual Politics.” Ms. Magazine, March/April 1993, 76. Davis, Lloyd. “‘Death-Marked Love’: Desire and Presence in Romeo and Juliet.” Shakespeare Survey 49 (1996): 57–67. De Grazia, Margreta. “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Rpt. in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, edited by James Schiffer, 89–112. New  York Garland, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Desai, Jinga. Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. New York: Routledge, 2004. Edelstein, Tilden G. “Othello in America: The Drama of Racial Intermarriage.” In Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law, edited by Werner Sollors, 356–369. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. Hall, Kim. “‘These Bastard Signs of Fair’: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” In Postcolonial Shakespeares, edited by Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, 64–83. London: Routledge, 1998. Hankey, Julie, ed. Othello. Plays in Performance Series. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987. hooks, bell and Anuradha Dingwaney. “Mississippi Masala.” Z Magazine. July– August 1992, 41–43. Hornback, Robert. Racism and Early Blackface Comic Traditions: From the Old World to the New. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Hutcheon, Linda with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Hyland, Nicola. “‘Young Hearts’/White Masks: Leading the (Color)blind at Shakespeare’s Globe.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9, no. 2 (2015). Jamal, Vali. “Asians in Uganda, 1880–1972: Inequality and Expulsion.” Economic History Review 29, no. 4 (1976): 602–616. Jones, Stephanie. “The Politics of Love and History: Asian Women and African Men in East African Literature.” Research in African Literatures, 42, no. 3 (2011): 166–186. Kahn, Coppélia. “Coming of Age in Verona.” MLS 8, no. 1 (1977): 5–22. Kaplan, E.  Ann. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. New York: Routledge, 1997. Kaufmann, Miranda. “‘Making the Beast With Two Backs’: Interracial Relationships in Early Modern England.” Literature Compass 12, no. 1 (2015): 22–37.

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Khan, Saeed. “Let’s Talk About Racism: Why Indian-Americans Have a White Skin Fixation.” Hindustani Times 23 May 2017. Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Loehlein, James, ed. Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare in Production series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. MacKenzie, Clayton. “Love, Sex and Death in Romeo and Juliet.” English Studies 88, no. 1 (2007): 22–42. Meer, Amina. Interview with Mira Nair. Bomb 36 (1 July 1991), 46–49. Mehta, Binta. “Emigrants Twice Displaced: Race, Color, and Identity in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala.” In Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, edited by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, 153–169. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Modenessi, Alfredo. “(Un)Doing the Book ‘without Verona walls’: A View from the Receiving End of Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.” In Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, edited by Courtney Lehmann and Lisa Starks, 62–85. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Ocampo-Guzman, Antonio. “My Own Private Shakespeare; or, Am I Deluding Myself?” In Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, edited by Ayanna Thompson, 125–136. New York: Routledge, 2006. Oldenburg, Scott. “The Riddle of Blackness in England’s National Family Romance.” JEMCS 1, no. 1 (2001): 46–62. Orenstein, Peggy. “Salaam America!.” Mother Jones 17, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1992), 60–61. Pao, Angela. No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Pao, Angela. “Recasting Race: Casting Practices and Racial Formations.” Theatre Survey 41, no. 2 (2000): 1–21. Radel, Nicholas. “The Ethiop’s Ear: Race, Sexuality, and Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.” The Upstart Crow 28 (2008): 17–34. Radhakrishnan, R. “Is the Ethnic ‘Authentic’ in the Diaspora?” In The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, edited by Karin Aguilar-­ San Juan, 219–234. Boston: South End Press, 1994. Ray, Radharani. “Interrogating Race in Mississippi Masala.” Race, Gender, and Class 8, no. 4 (2001): 155–175. Seshagiri, Urmila. “At the Crossroads of Two Empires: Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala and the Limits of Hybridity.” Journal of Asian American Studies 6, no. 2 (2003): 177–198. Shah, Sonia. “Presenting the Blue Goddess: Toward a National Pan-Asian Feminist Agenda.” In The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, edited by Karin Aguilar-San Juan, 147–158. Boston: South End Press, 1994.

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Singh, Amritjit. “African Americans and the New Immigrants.” In Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality, edited by Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva, 93–110. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. Smith, Ian. “White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage.” RenD 32 (2003): 33–67. SNCC Digital Gateway.snccdigital.org. Snyder, Susan. The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979, rpt. 2019. Srinivas, Lakshmi. “The Active Audience: Spectatorship, Social Relations, and the Experience of Cinema in India.” Media, Culture, and Society 24, no. 2 (2002): 155–173. Targoff, Ramie. “Mortal Love: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and the Practice of Joint Burial.” Representations 120 (2012): 17–38. Thompson, Ayanna. Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage. New York: Routledge, 2013. Watson, Robert N., and Stephen Dickey. “Wherefore Art Thou Tereu? Juliet and the Legacy of Rape.” RenQ 58, no. 1 (2005): 127–156. Worthen, W.  B. Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

CHAPTER 4

Bodies, Race, and Performance in Antony and Cleopatra and Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile: Memory’s Signatures

Derek Walcott wrote for the theatre since the beginning of his career, and his plays consistently reworked the western canon. The Sea at Dauphin revisits Riders to the Sea; his 1974 Joker of Seville Caribbeanizes El burlador de Sevilla by Golden Age dramatist Tirso de Molina; the Royal Shakespeare Company mounted his theatrical adaptation of The Odyssey in 1992. His very first play, Henri Christophe (1949), written before he was twenty, begins with an epigraph from Hamlet, includes an assassin who quotes Richard III, and feels informed throughout by Shakespearean models of tragic heroism as it dramatizes the rise and suicide of the former slave who declared himself king after the Haitian Revolution.1 Walcott’s Shakespearean gestures in Henri Christophe point toward engagements with memory, history, and the nature of his own creative formation within his and his islands’ colonial past that would recur throughout his career. The play’s focus on what happens after a revolution in which “West Indians first became aware of themselves as a people”2 serves in many ways as a first rendition of the concerns that will reappear in A Branch of the Blue Nile (1983), the subject of this chapter. If Henri Christophe is concerned with whether Haitians can fulfill the promise of the revolution and make themselves into a new, free, black nation or will inevitably sink back into the racism, corruption, and violence that infected their society under slavery, A Branch of the Blue Nile will explore in fuller detail the challenges that the opportunity to begin anew will face in the postcolonial world of modern Trinidad. Rather than the seizure and © The Author(s) 2020 J. Green MacDonald, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World, Palgrave Shakespeare Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3_4

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exercise of political agency that concerns Henri Christophe, A Branch of the Blue Nile explores whether and how a Trinidadian theatre company can marshal its own gifts of language and performance in order to activate Antony and Cleopatra for a newly self-conscious Caribbean audience. Both plays, early and late, are haunted by the possibility that the past is never truly over, however we struggle to liberate ourselves from its shadow. In A Branch of the Blue Nile, language becomes the most important tool that bodies in onstage motion can use to bridge the time and space between the audience and the cultural memories that the actors are attempting to solicit into living presence. These memories include the power and beauty of the Shakespearean text, but the actors’ recognition of Antony and Cleopatra’s power is also always filtered through their simultaneous recognition of the ideological barriers standing between it and themselves. Rehearsing the scene of Cleopatra’s grief at Antony’s death, Sheila, the actress playing her, is horrified that one of the company can openly joke about the affair she is having with Chris, the married actor who has contributed the play’s reworked Trinidadian language. Mired in her island’s gendered respectability politics, she rejects the possibility that being honest with each other in the rehearsal process might be “necessary” for an honest performance: “If it means that I have to have the courage to grit my teeth and hear my name abused, well, that’s tough, because I don’t think I have the guts. I’m not a fucking queen, I’m not a celebrity; when you turn my name into mud it stays mud, and no magic in any theatre in the world can turn that mud into gold.”3 Sheila feels that her real life as “a broke, black, West Indian actress over thirty” (238) complicates her access to the freedom and sensuality and emotional range of Cleopatra. Indeed, she finally gives up the role. Her retreat marks one pole of the complicated role of memory in the play: the colonial lessons she has learned about her black womanhood lead her to believe that Shakespeare, or at least this particular Shakespearean role, is not for her. But A Branch of the Blue Nile also posits the existence of another kind of memory, an anti-colonial counter-memory that summons the actors’ and their audience’s imaginations of who they understand themselves to be in spite of the authorities arrayed against them, as well as an intimation of who they might yet become if they can succeed in telling a story about their own identities that is so compelling it will supersede older, stubborn narratives like the ones that drive Sheila out of the play.4 Chris sees his theatre work as an essential weapon against the tyranny of a metropolitan majority that neither sees nor respects the ordinary black

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people of Port of Spain. He writes in the name of people like the local madman Phil, whose shouts from the street sometimes interrupt the company’s rehearsals: “Phil is my Lear, my Mad Tom out in the rain, drenched in the savannah, in real life!” (247). Chris ultimately casts doubt on the idea that doing a straight Shakespeare play is a worthwhile project for the company in the first place; he tells Gavin, the experienced actor playing Antony, that his localized Shakespeare “would have restored you to your origins, your roots, your language, your childhood, because, you ass, that’s where every artist starts from but you, if they call you to play a black cop in a TV series tomorrow, you going!…This is the hysteria they teach black people. To devour their own entrails, their own race” (250). Chris’ insistence that his real audience is made up of the people around him and that he writes in order to speak their truths in their own language reflects a larger discussion about the connections between writing and politics in the Caribbean. Perhaps especially for Caribbean writers of Walcott’s generation—born in 1930, he was in his mid-twenties when African countries began winning their independence from British and French colonial control, in his early thirties when Jamaica and Trinidad became the first West Indian territories to claim independence from Britain, and 40 when Trinidad’s Black Power Revolution ended in a failed military coup against the government of Prime Minister Eric Williams— the region’s desire to integrate its connection to Africa into a modern, self-authorized political and cultural identity was the shaping question of its cultural life. Poet and historian Edward Kamau Brathwaite argued that the project of even recognizing, much less reviving and celebrating, such a connection was particularly difficult within the Caribbean because of the crippling heritage of racial shame attached to Africa and Africanity in the region.5 Until a new kind of public education promoting what he called “a revolutionized value system” (77) consciously aimed at recovering “the African ‘phenomenon,’ continuously present, like a bomb, in the New World” (“African Presence,” 78), could take hold, the people of the region were destined to remain ignorant of the fullness of their origins. Avenues of ancestral memory, whether scholarly or creative or some combination of the two, would remain blocked. For his own part, Walcott was convinced that theatre could be a particularly effective means of soliciting a local, then a national, identity and “strengthening a national spirit”6 that would otherwise remain lost. Almost ten years before the premiere of A Branch of the Blue Nile, he remarked that

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My audience is a fat woman laughing. Or a fat woman crying. I’m not being silly. I’m talking about the people that we tend to have the most social contempt for, and we tend to say, ‘Well, I can’t imagine such and such a person sitting down in a theatre and being moved.’…But it is our duty in the theatre to get to that person, not by any lowering of standards or literacy or anything like that, but by an intensity and clarity of performance that will affect everybody in that audience, from a Minister of Culture down to somebody who’s somebody’s maid.7

Despite his mature belief in the potential of performance to build new nations, the young Walcott’s Henri Christophe—his play about the aftershocks of the moment when the enslaved people of the Caribbean rose up to offer a new account of themselves—concludes that Haitians are inescapably bound to repeat the crimes in which their past is inscribed, imprisoned by memories not of their own making. Waiting at the beginning of the play to hear of the final fate of Toussaint L’Ouverture, General Pétion knows that the ambitious Dessalines—at one time, Toussaint’s most trusted general—would rather hear that Toussaint is dead than that he has escaped his Alpine prison: “This country that stretched, crowing to greet / The sun, of history rising, will have its throat cut; / That’s the truth.”8 Later, even though he supports Dessalines’ assassination and Henri Christophe’s succession to the presidency, Archbishop Brelle also doubts that Haiti is entirely free to choose its own future, in words that recall and reject Cassius’ assumption in Julius Caesar that Caesar’s assassination will be understood and memorially reenacted by future generations. Instead, Brelle can only imagine “children remembering us in queer languages / By cracked columns, in dusty aisles where weeds / Are memory’s signatures” (p. 42): the significance of their revolutionary deeds may one day likely be as faded and illegible as the alleged glories of the classical past (“cracked columns”). Later, having murdered Brelle, in a useless attempt to quell the growing rebellion against his despotism, Henri Christophe insists to Pétion that Toussaint’s heirs have finally “strangled memory and regret” (p. 65). The Haitians of the play’s revolutionary generation seek to free themselves from the memories of their enslavement and avenge the violence done to them, but they can never achieve true emancipation from the ghosts of the past or succeed in laying the groundwork for a glorious free future. Writing much later, Walcott himself will seem to doubt that the colonial past and its works can ever be truly erased. “[M]aturity,” he notes

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sardonically, “is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor”9—even those we would rather not claim, or those who, if they had the choice, would rather keep the fact of their connection to us a secret. To the degree that a truly new world ever becomes possible, it can only be so through titanic acts of forgetting. Recognizing the difficulty of displacing the effects of triumphal imperial narratives of identity and subjection imposed on their victims, Walcott’s later poem “On Empire” dispenses with such effort by simply asserting a new beginning: “And then there was no more Empire all of a sudden. / Its victories were air, its dominions dirt.”10 A Branch of the Blue Nile, however, doubts that forgetting the past is either simple or completely possible. The play’s title echoes in Sheila’s uneasy revelation that an “old African woman, a gardeuse11…saw implicit in my palm a river with seven branches tracing it. That my past was connected with that river and I couldn’t avoid it any more than I could remove the tributaries in my open palm” (240). As we can hear in Henri Christophe’s struggle with the influence of slavery as well as in what A Branch of the Blue Nile will have to say about its acting company’s ill-fated encounter with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare is one of those old rivers that flows and mixes into the region’s sense of what might be possible in its present. Speaking generally about the connections between his training in Shakespeare and his standing as a citizen of the Antilles, Walcott had no difficulty seeing how the two could be reconciled. “We were quite aware that the background of the Caribbean was a background of slavery,” he once remarked to an interviewer. “But my generation was not schizophrenic about the heritage of the Empire and the heritage of the Caribbean. It was a double rather than a split thing…there was no tension in the recitation of a passage from Henry V and going outside and making jokes in patois or relaxing in a kind of combination patois of English and French.”12 But despite this ease with his multiple inheritances, Walcott remained aware of the “acidulous” (“The Muse of History,” 41) quality of poets’ memories of and engagements with the classical past. Even though he might have seen himself “legitimately prolonging the mighty line of Marlowe, of Milton,” his sense of connection to this formal inheritance “was stronger because it came from estrangement. I would learn that every tribe hoards its culture as fiercely as its prejudices, that English literature, even in the theater, was hallowed ground and that colonial literatures could grow to resemble it closely, but could never be considered its legitimate heir.”13

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The notion of “estrangement”—of separation from the mother country not only by distance and language but by hierarchies of racial and cultural value—opens a space for postcolonial art. It was the playwright in Walcott that notes particularly that “even” theatre, popular and performative, was not entirely exempt from western literature’s claim of cultural pre-eminence despite its déclassé status and that it could thus become the appropriate instrument both for exploring the history of the previously degraded and enslaved Caribbean subject and for mapping a creative way forward. He helped found two theatre companies, the Little Carib Theatre Workshop (later the Trinidad Theatre Workshop) in 1959 and the Boston Playwriters’ Workshop in 1981.14 His second Haitian play, Drums and Colours, was commissioned as part of the celebrations marking the opening of the first federated West Indies parliament in 1958: a play on the glories of the historical past was summoned to celebrate the possible glories of a new independent and collective political future.15 Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967), probably Walcott’s best-known play, speaks to the theatrical synthesis of the islands’ high European cultural inheritances and a popular hunger for self-definition. Building toward a climactic declaration of black and colonial liberation, it shows such icons of white authority as Abraham Lincoln, Sir John Hawkins (captain of the first English slaving voyage to West Africa in 1564), Al Jolson, and Shakespeare brought into the criminal dock and condemned to hang. Remembering and processing the rich power of Shakespearean performance—a power experienced politically and ideologically as well as aesthetically—reverberates in many postcolonial treatments of the plays. The explicitly anti-colonial and nationally minded politics of many Asian and African productions work to expose and demystify Shakespeare’s role as a vehicle for cultural domination, while implicitly arguing for a relationship between him and his non-European interpreters that can be mutual and self-reflexive.16 But the relationship between Shakespeare and the Americas remains powerfully vexed by this region’s history of race-based slavery, with Caliban—a deposed ruler—often identified as the emblematic figure in anti-colonialist American Shakespeares, the dispossessed ruler of the island Prospero seized from him. Walcott’s play departs from the commitment to a pan-African politics of Négritude that marked political thought in the postcolonial Caribbean. As political catastrophe closes in on the hero of Césaire’s own Tragédie du Roi Christophe (1968), his doomed king yearns for a purifying return to Africa:

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Help me to return, carry me like an aged child in your arms, and then unclothe me, wash me. Strip me of all my vestments, strip me bare—as when morning comes, one strips off the dreams of the night—of my nobles, my nobility, my scepter, my crown. And wash me! Wash me of their disguises, their kisses, my kingdom. The rest, I can do alone.17

Such a voyage home across the Atlantic would reverse the path of the colonial time that began with slaves’ abduction from Africa and supersede the “bitter memory” (Muse of History, 41) of their bondage. Still, though, what Walcott called “[t]he sigh of History”18 haunts the king’s generation, resists the most passionate desire for a return to the way things had been and confounds the attempt to build a truly new world here in the present. We can see the uneasy survival of the past into the present in Walcott’s Omeros, which reimagines Homeric epics of voyaging and return by transposing them to the Caribbean. At one point, the poem describes an Asian girl with a “black gust of hair” laughing as she strokes the nose of a bust of Homer she has in her rooms, then veers off to imagine that if the bust could read between the lines of her floor like a white-hot deck uncaulked by Antillean heat, to the shadows in its hold, its nostrils might flare at the stench from manacled ankles, the coffled feet scraping like leaves, and perhaps the inculpable marble would have turned its white seeds away, to widen the bow of its mouth at the horror under her table[.]19

Soon, the narrator in this passage will envelop the black-haired girl in his shadow and the ominous memories of how ocean waves sounded when they lapped against slave ships’ hulls will lose their gravity, fading into more ordinary noises “of abrupt fishermen cursing over canoes” (15). But regardless of the experienced depth of present reality, the horror of the incompletely buried past survives, borne on the sea’s current. Sometimes, to be sure, those in the present can possess and exercise the creative authority to impose their own local memories over the past and thus remake it in their own terms. Viewing Winslow Homer’s painting “The Gulf Stream” on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the speaker

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delightedly recognizes its portrait of a lone black man in a boat desperately rowing “toward Africa” with a shark visible near his craft as a dead ringer for an old friend: “Achille! Bigger / than I remembered on the white sun-­ splintered deck / of the hot hull. Achille! My main man, my nigger!” (183). This moment of historically transformative delight—he sees his “main man” as a hero, depicted in the determined act of making his way toward home—dissipates as the speaker leaves the museum and finds that, in the present, cabs still won’t stop for a black man trying to leave the Back Bay: “Sic transit taxi, sport” (184). If memories of a shared and local black past can overwrite even the racialized dread of Homer’s painting, the racial memories framed by the white space “between the Greek columns” (184) of the museum can just as easily negate that experience of recognition and affiliation.20 But Walcott’s Sheila can neither set out for Africa nor spontaneously seize the artifacts of a white past in order to write herself into history. Repeatedly, she feels herself barred from even the local artistic power Chris tries to exert over the Shakespeare play. “The stage isn’t my place,” she sadly concludes; even though she still feels possessed by Cleopatra, “the Caroni isn’t a branch of the river Nile and Trinidad isn’t Egypt, except at Carnival, so the world sniggers when I speak her lines” (p. 285).21 Distance, time, and the corrosive effects of colonial subjection make it impossible for her to own the Shakespearean role, or—she thinks—for her people to imagine their own part of the world as a place where Shakespeare might be at home. Unlike Césaire’s Pan-African heroes, Sheila is a woman, and the female identity generated under colonial circumstances further hinders her ability to speak Shakespeare. She finally gives up the role: I stepped from it down to the congregation because that is what this world expects of us; that’s where an ambitious black woman belongs, either grinning and dancing and screaming how she has soul, or clapping and preaching and going gaga for Jesus. (284–285)

A Branch of the Blue Nile distinguishes itself from both Walcott’s earlier overt and generalized Shakespearean inspiration in Henri Christophe and full-fledged postcolonial refusals of Shakespeare by pursuing what Antony and Cleopatra might be suggesting to us about the significance of performance, the possibility of historical revisitation and re-enactment, and the nature of a specifically female performativity.22 Both Walcott and Césaire

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recognize the gravity of Shakespeare as a synecdoche for European culture generally as it has shaped the culture of the Caribbean, but rather than dramatizing a possible escape from its power, Walcott explores how this gravity has reverberated into the present.23 The company’s experiments with remaking Shakespeare seem to hold out at least some hope for its other members. Emboldened by her good reviews after stepping in for Sheila, their ingénue Marylin decides to try her luck on the London stage. Chris, chastened by the spectacular failure of the broad local comedy he added to Shakespeare, is planning to try again, more thoughtfully this time, with a new piece he has entitled “A Branch of the Blue Nile.” But, for Sheila, there can be no starting over. Walcott’s play sets limits to the completeness with which she can repossess and re-enchant Shakespeare in the Caribbean.24 Walcott soon suggests that Sheila’s doubts about her ability to play Cleopatra are more than merely personal; they engage questions of reproduction and theatrical technique that go to the heart of how traditionally trained western actors learn to perform their roles. At a frustrating moment in rehearsal, Sheila condemns the “foreign Method shit” imported by the company’s white island-born and British-trained director, Harvey St. Just, as irrelevant to the troupe’s goals: “[M]aybe it doesn’t travel” (218). Harvey’s suggestion that she perform Cleopatra’s grief at Antony’s death by imagining how she would feel if Chris were dead assumes that all personal experiences—even ones that cause her deep social and sexual shame—are equally and neutrally available to be translated seamlessly into art. The “method” Sheila refers to is, of course, Method Acting, the Americanized version of the Stanislavsky technique that has dominated actors’ training in the United States. The strongly naturalistic Method and its variations strive for emotional authenticity, guiding an actor toward achieving access to an “essential core” of human nature: “[the various approaches] seem to…all believe that human nature is universal, and that the essence of acting is to uncover the human spirit, to bring out the universal in the specifics of human life.”25 Sheila’s anger about the damage public reference to the secret of her love affair might do to her reputation suggests that it is possible to remember or reveal too much. Harvey’s encouragement of Method Acting ignores Sheila’s precarious social placement and her sense that she must conform to local standards of proper female behavior. Some theatre scholars have criticized the method precisely because of its ahistoricity and its

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incapacity to recognize the implications of social and racial difference among the actors it trains.26 From the beginning, A Branch of the Blue Nile is aware of the difficulties attending its Trinidadian actors’ efforts to enter a performance tradition that creates no room for the reproduction of their experiences on legitimate stages. They can only approach and enact the Shakespearean text through the agency of their specifically colored and gendered Caribbean bodies, but these subaltern bodies’ capacity to perform the cultural authority embodied by the Shakespearean text can barely be conceived, much less accepted. As a local reviewer writes about Harvey’s “abbreviated, aborted, and abominable mounting of Antony and Cleopatra…Certain things remain sacred, or else our civilization is threatened” (269). The white reviewer’s cascade of emotions—scorn, disgust, and finally apocalyptic fear—point to the power that colonial formations of memory and culture maintain and enforce even under postcolonial conditions. (Here, incidentally, we might see why the Haitian Revolution spoke so powerfully to Césaire, Walcott, and later artists and writers: a slave-led revolution against imperial power was also virtually inconceivable, and yet it happened, suggesting that it was indeed possible to break decisively with the past, and even possible to hope for a new kind of future.27) Despite the moment of “grace” (256) Sheila experiences when she finally grasps Cleopatra’s speech over Antony’s corpse, she ultimately experiences her performing body as so wholly defined by what W.  B. Worthen calls its “socialized identity” (286)—that of the other woman who is stuck in a dead-end full-time job as a typist and who believes she is too old, too dark-­ skinned, and too well-brought-up to achieve success as a mainstream (i.e., New York) actor—that she fears she can never disappear into a role. When Chris is surprised to find her exercising in the otherwise empty theatre, she answers him sardonically: “Yeah, we got rhythm.” “Can’t talk Shakespeare, though,” he responds. She agrees: “Lips too big” (228–229). Their sour jokes reflect their experience that their dark bodies are regarded as suitable for some kinds of performances and completely incapable of others. Race, as it is visible in the body and in the cultural contexts in which it achieves signification, thus marks one important limit to theories of the performative.28 I don’t mean by this that notions of racial identity can’t be acted out; blackface performance in all its permutations is only one venue in which race becomes visible through theatricalized excess, a metaphor divorced from or independent of its bodily vehicle. Nor is it impossible that black female bodies can achieve and enact their own performative

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authority, even within theatrical structures designed to rob these bodies of their own agency, while endowing them with the prefabricated notions of excess, defect, and abjection imposed on them by white supremacy.29 My point is rather that all bodies—bodies of work, physical bodies—do not bear the same kind of relationship to racial performance. What matters about the collision between Sheila’s race and her attempt to play Cleopatra is not merely her blackness but also the implications of her recognition that Shakespeare was a white man, and thus socially, aesthetically, and politically invested with a certain kind of immutable privilege. Writing in the wake of slavery and as a resident of the Americas, Walcott knows that bodies’ racial markings are socially meaningful. In his Henri Christophe, for example, Dessalines is irrevocably aware of the corrosive effects of the behavior of the island’s “Big Whites” (8), whose skin color is the emblem of their false superiority. But the racism borne by slavery has also poisoned relations between the revolutionaries. Henri Christophe assumes that because his military ally Pétion is “a mulatto” that he must “hate” him for being dark-skinned (p. 22). As he moves toward tyranny, Dessalines is convinced that both “Mulattos and whites” (p. 25) oppose him because he is black. “You mock my colour,” Dessalines tells Henri Christophe. “You cannot think a black king real” (p. 32). Despite having led a revolution that brought the possibility of a new world into being, Toussaint died alone in an Alpine prison cell, “[c]rucified in a winter’s stubborn nails…[c]oughing on a stone floor. All this because a man was black” (p. 16). If a racist regime’s imposition of skin color as an index to its possessor’s freedom and worth shapes Dessalines’ and Henri Christophe’s view of the world even after that regime has been overthrown, so too has color consciousness and the racist social order whose work it does survived the colonial order in A Branch of the Blue Nile’s Trinidad. Sheila tells Marylin, the ingénue who will eventually replace her as Cleopatra, that she’s physically lucky: “You lighter-skinned than me, girl. You could work abroad” (256). On the one hand, Sheila doubts that her black body can be recognized as a suitable vehicle for imperial performance, but, on the other, she also feels that it’s her darkness and not her chosen repertory that robs her of credibility. As I’ve noted elsewhere, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra completely rejects the signification Romans attach to her skin color; as she has it, she’s been bruised “black” by the sun god’s “amorous pinches” (1.5.28) and not burned in a cosmic accident.30 Contradicting Philo’s disgusted insistence

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at the play’s opening that the noble Antony has been bewitched by a mere “tawny front” (1.1.6), she offhandedly implies instead that her erotic charge is so powerful that it called out a god, and that her dark skin is the emblem of her divine allure.31 In Walcott, however, Sheila is only one character who has been made to experience her blackness as a source of shame and frustration. Gavin, who has voyaged between his home islands and New York in pursuit of his acting career, puts the problem this way: At first off, I didn’t see myself in the mirror. I just plain refused what they wanted me to see, which was a black man looking back in my face and muttering: “How you going han’le this, nigger? How you going to leap out of the invisible crowd and be your charming, dazzling self?” I saw me; then the mirror changed on me…I saw a number under it like a prison picture, a mug shot in a post office, and I began to believe what I saw in the mirror because that’s how they wanted me to look. I reduced that reflection to acceptance, babe…accept the odds, accept the definition, accept the roles if you wanted more than some shit-shrieking, fist-jerking, suicidal revolutionary protest in some black alley of the alleged Afro-American avant-garde, so I gave in to the mirror, I melted right into it, and despised myself, because I gave no trouble, and I got work. (225–226)

Gavin wants to act, to achieve what he imagines as an actor’s protean freedom to assume and exchange roles at will, but he is not recognized by theatrical culture as possessing that capacity because of the single set of meanings socially attached to his black skin. His experience looking for acting jobs suggests the degree to which race’s stubborn lodgment in the body concomitantly structures cultural identity. No actor—and certainly not one in this troupe—is ever just a neutral bodily instrument.32 Gavin’s looks at himself—looks in which his own reflection curiously vanishes and is replaced by what (white) others see in him—reiterate Frantz Fanon’s identification of blackness as social spectacle.33 As he repeats the phrase “Look! A Negro!,” in Black Skins, White Masks, Fanon asserts that black subjects experience their social identities as the imposition of a white racial gaze: “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.”34 With his emphasis on how white looks at black subjects violently fracture and deny the possibility of a black-authored subjectivity—“I am being dissected by white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed”

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(116)—Fanon makes looking relations material and transactional, identifying the emergence into racial subjectivity as prior to and entangled with the emergence into gender or into language. Fanon’s ideas about racial looks and racially charged looked-at-ness suggest that theatre and performance function as what Jane Gaines calls “an ‘othering machine’”: “Othering calls attention to the ways identities are formed across and through others, in relation to those who are like and not like us.”35 In this case, “us” is the audience for Antony and Cleopatra in Port of Spain, an audience which remains—despite Chris’ best efforts at soliciting spectators who speak and feel as he does—full of “white eyes.” The whiteness from whose vantage point black actors can only appear as objects out of place in Shakespeare leads the local theatre critic to tell Gavin—much less pompously than he wrote for publication—that the production “was like pissing in church” (267). In Walcott, however, black female bodies are not entirely submerged within the general nullity still reserved for black subjects in the island’s postcolonial order and under the dictates of Shakespearean performance. Sheila believes that Marylin’s lighter skin color gives her the option of working abroad; when Gavin feels that Marylin has let the reviewer’s approval of her work go to her head, he rages at her as a “dumb, fat, redskin bitch,” a “tangerine bitch” (274, 275). His anger at the relative success of someone who has worked less on her craft than he has might be justified, but he couches it in colorism and misogynist contempt. If Sheila feels cut off from Shakespeare because she is black, the fact that she has darker skin than Marylin inflicts an extra set of obligations on her to prove herself—hence, her shame at daring to think she can be something other than “a typist,” or have more for herself than leaving the theatre “with a responsible married man for a surreptitious fuck in the Chagacabana Motel” (236). The play’s intraracial color consciousness—itself the residue of colonialism—recalls Meena’s situation in Mississippi Masala and specifically attends to black women’s formation as colonial subjects.36 Recalling Walcott’s move in the opening lines of “On Empire,” Chris’ first creative reaction to high culture’s refusal to accept that black bodies can have a place in legitimate theatre is to act as though those prohibitions simply do not exist. The knowing patois-speaking rubes he inserts into Antony and Cleopatra run on parallel tracks to the Shakespearean text, splitting the play between two worlds: “You deaf? He was disposed to mirth, / But on the sudden a Roman thought hath / struck him. Pow!” (214). His attempted folk recontextualization stems from a rejection of

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the company’s ambition to enter onto a global stage—or at least a transatlantic one—by playing Shakespeare: You know I has an A in English? You know I taught English literature for one year as an ass, as an ass, as an assistant master with jacket and tie in them hot rooms? You know I did French? You know what they call this in Racine, Gavin? A tirade. Tirade! Well, I got fucking tired of all them Racinian and Corneillian tirades, when I would look outside over the boys’ heads and see the hot sun, the glare, the dust, the traffic, the trees half dead with dust. (246–247)

Gavin feels demeaned by the “provincial shit” (249) Chris gives him to play, and Harvey believes that he and the company are capable of more than the local-color comedies he specializes in. Chris, however, is convinced that he needs to meet his audience where he believes it is: “I warn him. I say, Harvey, this ain’t England. This ain’t New York. You go put shit in people head. You go make them feel they white. You go teach them self-contempt” (247). “[A]s sure as coconut make copra,” he warns the company, “this high-class work…go change character” (247). Chris’ attempt to make Antony and Cleopatra local is his first, uneasy experiment with the possibility of asserting an equal balance of creative authority between the termini of a cross-cultural traffic in Shakespeare. But A Branch of the Blue Nile questions whether this new world production can have Shakespeare on its own terms. Its account of opening-night disaster comically suggests it cannot. As Marylin, understudying Sheila as Cleopatra, asks for her robe and crown, an inattentive stagehand mistakenly rolls out a “luridly painted” (s.d., 264) flat of tropical vegetation and leaves it onstage behind her, despite her mounting anger and the director’s furious offstage whispers to “Move the fucking bananas!” (265). One way of expressing this impossibility might be to say that the looking relations established by the spectacularization of black bodies, as suggested by Fanon and as reified by theatrical production, can leave precious little place for the assertion of oppositional identity because the racial ideology of mainstream productions—even those appearing to have the gloss of transgressive intent—may actually hinge on maintaining existing subject positions.37 For Walcott, West Indian actors’ attempts to revive the roots of Caribbean performance are compromised before they begin because of colonialism’s marketplace aftereffects: “The lean, sinewy strength of the folk-dance has been fattened and sucked into the limbo of

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the night-club, the hotel cabaret, and all the other prostitutions of a tourist culture” (What the Twilight Says, 26). In specifically Shakespearean performance, any recoding of black bodies has proven an extremely stubborn problem as so-called colorblind casting has sometimes resulted in productions where single black and/or Latino/a actors have been almost arbitrarily placed amid companies that are otherwise all-white, frequently in small or subordinate roles.38 The stage history of Antony and Cleopatra, the occasion of Sheila’s bodily crisis, richly demonstrates this racial ill-ease; to the degree that Romans and Egyptians have been racially identified in mountings of the play, the characters most commonly played by nonwhite actors are Iras and Charmian. The intimacy between the queen, almost always played by a white actress, and these black maid characters visualizes them as accessories to the white queen at the center of the frame. This stubborn racial pattern in casting the female roles in Antony and Cleopatra points to Shakespeare’s status as a technology for reproducing racial hegemony. So did the twentieth century infrequency of casting a black actress as Cleopatra: showing a white Roman Antony overwhelmingly in love with a black woman would deny the history of conquest and control served by the racial optics that Fanon argues structure both black and white identity. No black actress played Cleopatra on a British stage until 1991, when Doña Croll took the role with London’s Talawa Theatre Company. “The fable of the white Cleopatra is just another way of bleaching out history,” Croll remarked at the time.39 In A Branch of the Blue Nile, however, even though a black Cleopatra is cast opposite a black Antony, a representational crisis nevertheless ensues. This crisis suggests that there is something particularly unsettling about the performative conjunction of blackness and womanhood, especially in these Shakespearean, high-culture circumstances.40 Gavin’s experience suggests one kind of difficulty built into black actors’ subjection to the white scopic regime of mainstream theatrical production. Under such an artistic economy, his body can register in only one way—a way that does not speak to his own sense of who is he as a performer or of what he can do onstage. As a theatrical practitioner, Walcott himself certainly recognized how thoroughly styles and means of theatrical production frame performance. In his Nobel Prize lecture, he compared the process of making art within a culture that is internally polyphonic as well as scarred by its colonial past to the act of gluing a broken vase back together:

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Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of the original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent. (Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory, 296–297)

But the cultural labor aimed at articulating a particularly West Indian art—an art inescapably mixed, reconstructed, multiple—is precisely the source of A Branch of the Blue Nile’s conflict and tension, especially as these anxieties are experienced by Sheila. For the Trinidadian acting company in the play, the encounter with Shakespeare and the wider world of theatrical art for which he stands is profoundly racialized, marked by sexual guilt, readily identifiable as a matter of market forces. The company’s attempt at this particular Caribbeanized Shakespeare is the occasion for a larger and incomplete meditation on the nature of empire. Cleopatra, after all, was supposed to be Rome’s subject, propped up on her throne by her promise to maintain her client position. Her play moves freely across geographical space and between poles of cultural experience as its heroes attempt to build a world based on understandings of love and power far removed from their Roman models. “Here is my space,” Antony says, embracing his queen, as though his encircling arms are all that is necessary to mark the bounds of the “new heaven, new earth” (1.1.36, 17) designed for them alone. Published four years before A Branch of the Blue Nile’s first performance, Walcott’s poem “Egypt, Tobago” presages his play’s obsession with the slippage and blurring of supposedly sharply demarcated realms of experience and identity, including gender identity. He identifies sex as the medium for this blurring. “Numb” and sated after making love with Cleopatra, Antony lies like a copper palm tree at three in the afternoon by a hot sea and a river, in Egypt, Tobago

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Her salt marsh dries in the heat where he foundered without armor.41

Walcott’s lyric Antony has fled to Cleopatra because he has been irresistibly called out by “the river / of her young brown blood” (31). For “Shattered and wild and / palm-crowned Antony,” all the imperial compulsions which may have driven him in a previous life now seem nothing but “vanity” (32). His coming to consciousness in Egypt—so different than Rome’s “uproar of arenas, / the changing surf / of senators” (30)— entails recognition and embrace of a different order manifesting itself in “All-humbling sleep, whose peace / is sweet as death” (32). If Shakespeare’s Antony is challenged and finally undone by the struggle to satisfy that part of his soul that is not Roman even as he finds himself the triple pillar of the Roman world, Walcott’s Antony serenely accepts the new Egyptian order (through which the Caribbean is audible, perhaps, in the sounds of “surf”). The keynote of the poem is transformation: the plumes on Antony’s “rusting helmet” are a “shattered palm” (29) on the Egyptian shore; Cleopatra’s body in the sexual act becomes the Egyptian landscape (“the dunes / of her heaving,” 29), the span between Egypt and Rome is measured by his body, “his groin a desert / trench with its dead soldier,” 30). “[R]eady to lose the world,” he is now a lover, even a father as he gazes in “tenderness” on “a woman not his mistress / but his sleeping child” (32)—but he is no longer interested in being a triumvir. In A Branch of the Blue Nile, however, Walcott’s actors can reach no comparable state of equilibrium and forgetting.42 The monument of the Shakespearean past and all the uses to which it has been put—those “cracked columns” Archbishop Brelle imagines—cannot be wished away through sex or magic. Sheila’s comment about the artistic uselessness of a broke, black, post-­ adolescent West Indian actress points to her hate of the body that won’t let her be regarded as an appropriate signifier of Shakespearean meanings despite the rapture that speaking Shakespeare’s poetry generates in her: “When I was small, I hated my hair, my lips, my life. All of that’s gone. Now…It was like being in a state of grace” (256). Her unhappiness with her body both is and is not real. Rather than herself, it might be more accurate to say that Sheila hates what has been revealed to her through the “effect of the histories of contact between bodies, objects, and signs,” as Sara Ahmed has remarked.43 The island’s colonial past has invested her black female body with certain kinds of emotional associations—shame,

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sexual excess, indiscipline—that remain in force even though colonial occupation has ended. This history does not suddenly disappear with the change of government. If Sheila believes that her black body makes her unfit to perform Shakespeare, she also carries a particularly Caribbean history that additionally delimits women’s performance. Describing the class and political elements at play in the history of Caribbean women’s public performance, Belinda Edmonson quotes an 1884 issue of the Port of Spain Gazette that declares that ”The obscenities, the bawdy language and the gestures of the women in the street have been pushed to a degree of wantonness which cannot be surpassed and must not be tolerated.”44 These “women in the street,” known as “jamettes,” sometimes performed the traditionally male sport of stick fighting, and were known to sing the joyfully obscene calypso. This branding of Port of Spain’s working class black women as both masculine and whorish echoes the similar pathologizing of black women during and after US slavery. Both slave economies also distinguished between women by their skin color, with lighter-skinned women of obviously mixed race being judged more feminine, more innately ladylike, more beautiful, because of their more nearly white appearance. Sheila and Marylin’s bodies register differently in performance, entirely independently of their artistic capacity to handle the role of Cleopatra. The particularly Caribbean meaning Edmondson assigns to this differential judgment of black women’s skin color is that since “in the Caribbean, modernity is associated with whiteness, in the sense that it represents the First World, a technologically advanced and therefore superior culture” (5), the employment of lighter-skinned or mixed-race women in public performance and spectacle is an important part of a new nationalism. Sheila’s dark skin registers as a throwback to less politically improved times. Another aspect of the bodily conflict emerging around the company’s encounter with Antony and Cleopatra emerges with Marylin’s success in the role Sheila abandons. Despite Marylin’s lesser talent—Gavin implies that the best part of her performance is her cleavage—it is she who feels emboldened to seek a professional future in London. While the cultural implications of Sheila’s body (which she has fully internalized) work to bar her from wide exposure, those surrounding Marylin may make her particularly suited for it. As a lighter-skinned black woman, she occupies highly charged place in what performance artist Coco Fusco describes as “the sexual history of the Caribbean.”45 After emancipation, mulattas were seen as the ideal free woman of color, urbanized and liberated,

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especially in contrast to the cloistered and domesticated white wives of men of property. Women of mixed race were both vilified—their light skin announced their mothers’ slave history of sexual availability to the men of the white families that owned them—and idealized, seen as having particular mobility and opportunities to associate with white men in the new society developing after emancipation. Marylin will try her luck in the metropolitan center, where her mixed-race status may be enjoyed as a piquant novelty, decontextualized, reproduced, and commodified for safer and more universal consumption. Sheila soon decides to forsake stage performance in favor of the only respectable kind of acting-out permitted to darker-skinned black women: she joins a Holiness church and renounces the rapture she experienced as vanity. “Throw away that filth you all wallow in!” she shouts at her fellow actors on returning to the theatre. “Believe! Prepare for the Judgment. Bathe in His light. What we committed here, the things we did here, that was the work of harlots and sodomites” (276). Ironically, her first sermon from the pulpit in her new church, in which she compares her new enlightenment to “the voice of William Blake” (267) shining in the bright green grass of local playing fields, inspires the preacher to both invoke and reject Cleopatra: “We ha’ to deal with Caesar, He himself said, and you know that Caesar is taxes…and the roof repair and the mortgage…I glad to see that when you render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, you ain’t rendering as Cleopatra, that lecherous serpent of Egypt, rendered. But with love higher than the flesh” (266). The terms of Sheila’s Caribbean world alienate her from her own dark flesh, but the negative valences of her body are clearly connoted by the role she most yearns to play, the role she feels could transform her body’s meaning. Sheila, then, is trapped. Her dark woman’s body is doubly unfit to play the Egyptian queen, first, she thinks, because she doesn’t look like the historical Cleopatra—“she wasn’t black, she was like Marylin, Mediterranean” (284). This would again seem to give the lie to any notion of the actor’s body as a blank and endlessly labile sign. But the second deeper source of what she believes is her unfitness is that the artistic inspiration it takes to play Cleopatra is unavailable to her. She cannot fit into an expression of high culture because her body marks her as properly framed only within the base and popular in ways that cannot be worked around by the lowbrow resources of theatre. To play Cleopatra persuasively, as Sheila did in rehearsal and as she fears to do in public performance, is to affirm her worst fears about her own bodily presence—that it marks her as a

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whore, because of the ways in which black women like her were used in the island’s slave past. That shame has “stuck” to her, to use Ahmed’s term, surviving its moment of colonial origin and thriving in the present, suggesting that although historical circumstances may change, the forms and affect that past historical moments generated are never really over. Gavin, who has made the trip to New  York and returned to Trinidad, assumes, along with Harvey, that her body can escape its historical framing. He explains that Harvey brought up her affair with Chris just to “shock” her into an effective portrayal: “We all thought you were playing the role a bit too decently, like a suburban housewife having a little something on the side, and not the sensual serpent you’re supposed to be. A heat comes off that lady. It made Caesar sweat” (227). If Sheila believes she is too physically unlike the historical Cleopatra to play her at all, her own body is seen as being so negatively charged that she is socially destined to “play” nothing else. To appear as that “sensual serpent” of the Nile without somehow reframing the sign of her body would tip Sheila into representational overdrive, dangerously blurring the lines between what she was personating and what she actually was. For her, the actorly ideal of disappearing into the role is frightening, because doing so would unmistakably announce the primacy of the black sexual body whose agency and possession shames her so. In more ways than one, Cleopatra is an impossible role for her to assay. A Branch of the Blue Nile gestures toward the impossibility of Sheila’s aspiration: the play ends, rather unsatisfactorily, with the sound of her amplified breathing filling the stage space that she must and yet cannot entirely forsake. Harvey St. Just gives up his fight in the islands and returns to London, ill and possibly dying, forgetting the possibility of the Caribbean as a staging ground for something truly new. Yet the play also gives us the madman Phil, who interrupts rehearsals with his shouting from the street outside: “You wasting your time, you wasting your time!” (222). Chris has already cited Phil as the Port of Spain Everyman who forms his ideal audience: “I write for that madman screaming in the street. His language. Not somebody else’s, not how you think madmen should talk, as if insanity was literature” (247). But Phil, who had an earlier career as lead singer of the pop group Phil and the Rockets, sees himself and his professional history in slightly less idealized terms. Dissension among group members was what ended their ride—“Money reach, quarrel start. Ego trip. Phil solo. It have two ways to dead in this business, success and neglect” (298)—not the attempt to sing something new. Phil explains that

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the insulting warning he shouts at the actors is really him not just “walking but running, running from the stage, from my gift, from the past.” [A]nd that is why, I suppose, I does summon brimstone and ashes on everybody head. On a government that don’t give a fart—excuse me, miss—for its artists, on a people you have to remind to find some pride, but ay, the rain stopping. And I go stop, too. But if it was in my power to sprinkle benediction on your kind, to ask heaven to drizzle the light of grace on the work you trying to do here, to waste your time and in fact, your life, in making people see, and feel, and remember, you knows I would, and I would do the same for every actor, every entertainer, because they do incorporate man’s suffering inside their own; they does drive themselves to the point of madness to make confusion true, because Phil knows show business[.] (300)

While Chris emphasizes a theatre’s duty to identify and to solicit its audience, Phil the madman is more concerned with the artist’s duty to himself or herself. The connection with community that forms such an essential part of Chris’ sense of his mission as a playwright develops, for Phil, out of the artist’s attempt to encompass multitudes, to “incorporate man’s suffering” inside his own experience and play it back with accuracy and love. In other words, it’s only a madman who can speak up for the artist’s ability to transcend history and reach out to touch a new world. Sheila’s response to Cleopatra calls into question the entire notion of performative play—much less performative transcendence—at least, as it applies to her, in this particular theatre, in this particular play. Her fear to embrace Cleopatra publicly contrasts with Walcott’s imagination of the second, dark-skinned Helen for whom her island is named and who is desired by Caribbean Achille and Hector as well as by the white colonizer Dennis Plunkett in Omeros.46 The failure perhaps marks the difference between tragic and epic materials. As a poem of origins, epic can accommodate female sexuality at least to the extent of adapting it to the purposes of unfolding national destiny. But the drag of postcolonial history, with its heritage of sexual shame and exploitation, cannot easily permit a self-­ possession similar to the second Helen’s for Sheila, a new Cleopatra. It is impossible to say whether the slim performance history of A Branch of the Blue Nile has anything to do with audience reaction against its reluctance to imagine an erotic or creative future for Sheila. In the Shakespearean original, of course, Cleopatra does seize authority over her own fate and over the right to define what she and Antony stood for in Egypt. That she

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does so through choosing the moment and fashion of her own death is perhaps what forces Walcott’s reimagination of the play toward its less emphatic conclusion. The social invisibility and sexual guilt that shape Sheila’s life in the play already constitute their own kinds of suppression; suicide would only make that suppression literal. She recognizes that fully grasping the role of Cleopatra, with its volubility and sensuality and acute (and acutely theatrical) self-consciousness, forces her outside the borders of what is allowable for a woman like her in her island society. Her histrionic performances at the Holiness church are the only acceptable substitute for deploying the full range of expressive authority that Harvey St. Just sensed lay at her command. Through her acting-out at church, Sheila gestures back through her and her islands’ conflicted history, toward the performative integrity of an African queen. At the end of the play, however, her sense of that history, with its merciless enforcement of a set of brutal definitions of who Sheila is and what her identity as the female child of a colonial past can be, hinder her—like Achille in the painting—from crossing time and space and safely making her way back home.

Notes 1. On Henri Christophe’s Shakespearean modeling, see Edward Baugh, “Of Men and Heroes: Walcott and the Haitian Revolution,” Callaloo 28.1 (2005), 47–49. 2. C.  L. R.  James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd revised ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 391. 3. I cite A Branch of the Blue Nile in Three Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 217, 218. I’ll provide future references parenthetically in my text. 4. Here, I am following Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), who notes that historical narratives are not the sole property of professional historians; rather, they are equally and powerfully generated by competitors including “ethnic and religious leaders, political appointees, journalists, and various associations within civil society as well as independent citizens, not all of whom are activists” (19). See his discussion of the transmission and power of narratives of historical meaning that often contradict or distort available historical fact, 14–22. 5. In “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature,” Daedalus 103.2 (1974): 73–109. Brathwaite is Walcott’s exact contemporary, born in

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Barbados the same year that Walcott was born in St. Lucia. Alison Donnell, “‘The African Presence in Caribbean Literature’ Revisited: Recovering the Politics of Imagined Co-Belonging 1930–2005,” Research in African Literatures 46.4 (2015): 35–55, offers a useful extension of Brathwaite’s essay as she discusses how more contemporary Caribbean authors have taken up his interest in writing a “literature of reconnection” (“African Presence,” 81) between Africa and the New World. 6. Interview with the Trinidad Guardian, quoted in Derek Walcott, the Journeyman Years: Occasional Prose 1957–1974, ed. Gordon Collier (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 119. 7. “We are Still Being Betrayed: Interview Conducted by Raoul Pantin for Caribbean Contact,” July 1973, quoted in Collier, 115. 8. I cite Henri Christophe in Black Drama 1850 to Present, 2nd ed. (Alexander Street Press, 2018), 2. 9. “The Muse of History,” in What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1998), 36. I’ll include subsequent references parenthetically in my text. 10. I cite “On Empire” as it appears in Callaloo 31.4 (2008), pp. 1011–1012. It is included in a lightly revised form in Walcott’s collection White Egrets (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 35–36. 11. The term “gardeuse” literally means something like a keeper or shepherdess, but, in Caribbean usage, connotes a woman who mediates between our world and others that remain unknown. In Walcott’s long poem Omeros (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1990), Ma Kilman, owner of a bar called the No Pain Café, is described as “a gardeuse, sybil, obeahwoman / webbed with a spider’s knowledge of an after-life” (58). 12. Charles H. Rowell, “An Interview With Derek Walcott, Part I,” Callaloo 34 (1988), 81, 83. 13. Derek Walcott, “What the Twilight Says,” in What the Twilight Says: Essays, 28. I will provide subsequent citations parenthetically in my text. 14. On Walcott’s work in the theatre, see Bruce King, Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama: ‘Not Only a Playwright, but a Company,’ The Trinidad Theatre Workshop, 1959–1993 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), which discusses A Branch of the Blue Nile’s premiere in Barbados and a second staging in Trinidad 319–323 and 331–335. 15. Tejumola Olaniyan, “Dramatizing Postcoloniality: Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott,” Theatre Journal 44.4 (1992), discusses Drums and Colours, 490–493. 16. For example, Alexa Huang, Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Margaret Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Alfredo Modenessi, “Meaning by

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Shakespeare: South of the Border,” in Sonia Massai, ed., World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (London: Routledge, 2005), 104–111; and the essays collected in a special issue of the annual African Theatre, 12 (2013), “Shakespeare In and Out of Africa.” 17. The Tragedy of King Christophe, tr. Paul Breslin and Rachel Ney (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 93. 18. Derek Walcott’s Nobel Prize lecture was published as “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” Georgia Review 49, no. 1 (1995); here, 296. I will provide subsequent references parenthetically in my text. 19. Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 14, 15. For a helpful discussion of this poem’s attempts to transform the cultural materials of empire, see Emily Greenwood, Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 165–182. 20. Greenwood discusses the painting episode, 166–167. 21. The Caroni is a smaller tributary that drains into Venezuela’s Orinoco River; the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, where the play is set, lay off the Venezuelan coast. 22. On Cleopatra and performance, see Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 131–134. 23. The general critical discussion on the play is not large. See Lowel Fiet, “Mapping a New Nile: Derek Walcott’s Later Plays,” in The Art of Derek Walcott, ed. Stewart Brown (Bridgend, Wales: Seren Books, 1991), 123–138; Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Imitation versus Contestation: Walcott’s Postcolonial Shakespeare,” Callaloo 28.1 (2005): 104–113; Joanne Tompkins, “Re-citing Shakespeare in Post-Colonial Drama,” Essays in Theatre/Études théâtrales 15.1 (1996): 15–22; Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), 22–23; Tobias Döring, “A Branch of the Blue Nile: Derek Walcott and the Tropic of Shakespeare,” in Massai, World-Wide Shakespeares, 15–22; and Stephen P. Breslow, “Trinidadian Heteroglossia: A Bakhtinian View of Derek Walcott’s Play A Branch of the Blue Nile,” World Literature Today 63.1 (1989): 36–39. 24. I’m delighted here to acknowledge my borrowing of the notion of “enchantment” from my colleague Michelle Sizemore, whose book American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) examines how, in the 50 years after the American Revolution, Americans worked to create new notions of political authority which could be embodied and enacted by the people themselves rather than experienced through the mediation of royal authority. I see Walcott’s postcolonial subjects as living in a similar

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­ atershed moment, trying to articulate their own standing as cultural, w rather than formally political, makers in the aftermath of independence. 25. Debby Thompson, “‘Is Race a Trope?’: Anna Deveare Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity,” AAR 37 (2003), 128. 26. See especially W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 98–119; and Lauren Love, “Resisting the ‘Organic’: A Feminist Actor’s Approach,” in Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, ed. Phillip B.  Zarilli (New York: Routledge, 2002), 277–290. 27. On the historically “unthinkable” (73) quality of the Haitian Revolution, see Trouillot, 70–107. On the revolution as a continuing source of political inspiration, see James, Black Jacobins, and Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). On its resonance in performance, see Jeremy Matthew Glick, The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution (New York: New  York University Press, 2016). 28. This section of my paper is indebted to Kennan Ferguson, “How Peoples Get Made: Race, Performance, Judgment,” Theory and Event 1.3 (1997): 63 pars., esp. paragraphs 22–28. 29. Here, I am much inspired by the work of Daphne Brooks, especially Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), and “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe,” Meridians 8.1 (2008): 180–204. Also see Melissa Blanco Borelli, “Hip Work: Undoing the Tragic Mulatta,” in Black Performance Theory, ed. Thomas F. deFrantz and Anita Gonzalez (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 63–84. 30. “Sex, Race, and Empire in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,” Literature and History, 5.1 (1996): 60–77. Other discussions of the implications of Cleopatra’s color include Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, 122–127; Hall, Things of Darkness, 153–158; John Michael Archer, “Antiquity and Degeneration: The Representation of Egypt and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,” Genre 27, no. 1–2 (1994): 1–27; and Carol Mejia LaPerle, “An Unlawful Race: Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and the Crimes of Early Modern Gypsies,” Shakespeare 13, no. 3 (2017): 226–238. For the story of how Apollo’s half-mortal son Phaethon lost control of the chariot of the sun and scorched half the earth and its people, see Metamorpheses 2: 106–337. 31. Ruben Espinosa discusses the conjunction of darkness and female divinity in “Marian Mobility, Black Madonnas, and the Cleopatra Complex,” in Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider

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World, ed. Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 250–272. 32. Margo Hendricks, “Visions of Color: Spectacle, Spectators, and the Performance of Race,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W.  B. Worthen (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 511–526. 33. Ferguson touches on Fanon in his paragraph 14. 34. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 109. I will provide subsequent citations parenthetically in my text. 35. Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 11. 36. For a discussion of Fanon’s limited analysis of black women’s standing as postcolonial subjects, see Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 141–172; T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); Gwen Bergner, Taboo Subjects: Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 1–18, and Lola Young, “Missing Persons: Fantasizing Black Women in Black Skin, White Masks,” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (Seattle: Bay Press for London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996), 86–101. 37. See, for example, bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 147–154. 38. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, 117–123. On race in casting stage productions of Antony and Cleopatra, see Carol Chillington Rutter, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (London: Routledge, 2001), 57–103; and Celia Daileader, “The Cleopatra Complex: White Actresses on the Interracial Stage,” in Colorblind Shakespeare, 205–220. 39. Croll is quoted in “Dark Star: Dea Birkett Asks if her Latest Incarnation Could Bring Cleopatra’s Whitewashing to an End,” The Guardian 15 May 1991. 40. Jyotsna Singh’s “Renaissance Antitheatricality, Antifeminism, and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,” RenD 20 (1989): 99–121, memorably argues that Cleopatra’s histrionic power particularly challenges Roman ideas of gender and masculinity. Here, I build on Singh by pointing out the degree to which a black Cleopatra intensifies that category crisis by calling Roman racial authority into doubt as well. 41. From the collection The Star-Apple Kingdom (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979), 29, 30. I will provide subsequent citations parenthetically in my text.

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42. Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), trenchantly observes that “Walcott’s resistance to history has involved a specific call for amnesia,” for forgetting the European past “embodied in the canonical texts that have been used to prop up power” (67). Her discussion of Walcott’s relations to the past, 63–90, is relevant here, as is Mary Fuller, “Forgetting the Aeneid,” ALH 4 (1992): 517–538. 43. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 90. Ahmed’s discussion of how affect “sticks” to certain kinds of bodies is concerned with brown Muslim bodies after 9/11 but her point about the adherence of shame and disgust is relevant here to my discussion of black women’s bodies. 44. “Public Spectacles: Caribbean Women and the Politics of Public Performance,” Small Axe 13 (2003): 1–16 (1). But also see Jennifer Thorington Springer, “‘Roll It Gal’: Alison Hinds, Female Empowerment, and Calypso,” Meridians 8.1 (2008): 93–129, for a discussion of how a modern female calypso performer challenges and subverts prevailing social ideologies that public calypso is inappropriate for respectable women. 45. English is Broken Here, 73. 46. On how reimagined colonial and literary histories manage to resonate into the present in Omeros, see Ted Williams, “Truth and Representation: The Confrontation of History and Mythology in Omeros,” Callaloo 24 (2001): 276–286; David Farrier, “Charting the ‘Amnesiac Atlantic’: Chiastic Cartography and Caribbean Epic in Derek Walcott’s Omeros,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39.1 (2004): 23–38; and Srila Nayak, “‘Nothing in that Other Kingdom’: Fashioning a Return to Africa in Omeros,” Ariel 44.2–3 (2013): 1–28.

References African Theatre special issue, “Shakespeare in and Out of Africa.” 12 (2013). Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Archer, John Michael. “Antiquity and Degeneration: The Representation of Egypt and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.” Genre 27, no. 1–2 (1994): 1–27. Baugh, Edward. “Of Men and Heroes: Walcott and the Haitian Revolution.” Callaloo 28.1 (2005): 45–54. Bergner, Gwen. Taboo Subjects: Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Birkett, Dea. “Dark Star: Dea Birkett Asks if her Latest Incarnation Could Bring Cleopatra’s Whitewashing to an End.” The Guardian.com 15 May 1991.

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Borelli, Melissa Blanco. “Hip Work: Undoing the Tragic Mulatta.” In Black Performance Theory, edited by Thomas F. deFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, 63–84. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature.” Daedalus 103, no. 2 (1974): 73–109. Breslow, Stephen P. “Trinidadian Heteroglossia: A Bakhtinian View of Derek Walcott’s Play A Branch of the Blue Nile.” World Literature Today 63, no. 1 (1989): 36–39. Brooks, Daphne. “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe.” Meridians 8, no. 1 (2008): 180–204. Brooks, Daphne. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Burnett, Paula. Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Césaire, Aimé. The Tragedy of King Christophe. Translated by Paul Breslin and Rachel Ney. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Collier, Gordon, ed. Derek Walcott, the Journeyman Years: Occasional Prose 1957–1974. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. Daileader, Celia. “The Cleopatra Complex: White Actresses on the Interracial Stage,” in Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, edited by Ayanna Thompson, 205–220. New York: Routledge, 2006. Dasenbrock, Reed Way. “Imitation versus Contestation: Walcott’s Postcolonial Shakespeare.” Callaloo 28, no. 1 (2005): 104–113. Donnell, Alison. “‘The African Presence in Caribbean Literature’ Revisited: Recovering the Politics of Imagined Co-Belonging 1930–2005.” Research in African Literatures 46, no. 4 (2015): 35–55. Döring, Tobias. “A Branch of the Blue Nile: Derek Walcott and the Tropic of Shakespeare.” In World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, edited by Sonia Massai, 15–22. London: Routledge, 2005. Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Edmondson, Belinda. “Public Spectacles: Caribbean Women and the Politics of Public Performance.” Small Axe 13 (2003): 1–16. Espinosa, Ruben. “Marian Mobility, Black Madonnas, and the Cleopatra Complex.” In Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World, edited by Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea, 250–272. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

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Farrier, David. “Charting the ‘Amnesiac Atlantic’: Chiastic Cartography and Caribbean Epic in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39, no. 1 (2004): 23–38. Ferguson, Kennan. “How Peoples Get Made: Race, Performance, Judgment.” Theory and Event 1, no. 3 (1997): 63 pars. Fiet, Lowel. “Mapping a New Nile: Derek Walcott’s Later Plays.” In The Art of Derek Walcott, edited by Stewart Brown, 123–138. Bridgend, Wales: Seren Books, 1991. Fuller, Mary. “Forgetting the Aeneid.” ALH 4 (1992): 517–538. Fusco, Coco. English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New York: The New Press, 1995. Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers. New York: Routledge, 1995. Gaines, Jane. Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Glick, Jeremy Matthew. The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Greenwood, Emily. Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Hall, Kim. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Hendricks, Margo. “Visions of Color: Spectacle, Spectators, and the Performance of Race.” In A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, edited by Barbara Hodgdon and W.  B. Worthen, 511–526. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1987. Huang, Alexa. Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2nd revised ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1962. King, Bruce. Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama: ‘Not Only a Playwright, but a Company,’ The Trinidad Theatre Workshop, 1959–1993. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. LaPerle, Carol Mejia. “An Unlawful Race: Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and the Crimes of Early Modern Gypsies.” Shakespeare 13, no. 3 (2017): 226–238. Litvin, Margaret. Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Love, Lauren. “Resisting the ‘Organic’: A Feminist Actor’s Approach.” In Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, edited by Phillip B. Zarilli, 277–290. New York: Routledge, 2002. Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

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MacDonald, Joyce Green. “Sex, Race, and Empire in Antony and Cleopatra.” Literature and History 5, no. 1 (1996): 60–77. Modenessi, Alfredo. “Meaning by Shakespeare: South of the Border.” In World-­ wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, edited by Sonia Massai, 104–111. London: Routledge, 2005. Nayak, Srila. “‘Nothing in that Other Kingdom’: Fashioning a Return to Africa in Omeros.” Ariel 44, no. 2–3 (2013): 1–28. Olaniyan, Tejumola. “Dramatizing Postcoloniality: Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott.” Theatre Journal 44, no. 4 (1992): 485–499. Rowell, Charles H. “An Interview With Derek Walcott, Part I.” Callaloo 34 (1988): 80–89. Rutter, Carol Chillington. Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage. London: Routledge, 2001. Sharpley-Whiting, T.  Denean. Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Singh, Jyotsna. “Renaissance Antitheatricality, Antifeminism, and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.” RenD 20 (1989): 99–121. Sizemore, Michelle. American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-­ Revolutionary World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Springer, Jennifer Thorington. “‘Roll It Gal’: Alison Hinds, Female Empowerment, and Calypso.” Meridians 8, no. 1 (2008): 93–129. Thompson, Debby. “‘Is Race a Trope?’: Anna Deveare Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity.” African American Review 37, no. 1 (2003): 127–138. Tompkins, Joanne. “Re-citing Shakespeare in Post-Colonial Drama.” Essays in Theatre/Études théâtrales 15, no. 1 (1996): 15–22. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Walcott, Derek. “Egypt, Tobago.” In The Star-Apple Kingdom, 29–31. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979. Walcott, Derek. Three Plays. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1986. Walcott, Derek. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1990. Walcott, Derek. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” Georgia Review 49, no. 1 (1995): 294–306. Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says: Essays. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Walcott, Derek. “On Empire.” Callaloo 31, no. 4 (2008): 1011–1012. Walcott, Derek. Henri Christophe. In Black Drama 1850 to Present. 2nd ed. Alexandria: Alexander Street Press, 2018. Williams, Ted. “Truth and Representation: The Confrontation of History and Mythology in Omeros.” Callaloo 24 (2001): 276–286.

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Worthen, W.  B. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Young, Lola. “Missing Persons: Fantasizing Black Women in Black Skin, White Masks.” In The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, edited by Alan Read, 86–101. Seattle: Bay Press for London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996.

CHAPTER 5

Echoes of Harlem: Women’s Memories in Othello and Harlem Duet

Currents of memory flow through Othello. The best-known example of the play’s use of memory—its sense of the past, the ways in which its characters summon that past in their accounting of the present—is Othello’s proud, affectionate memory of the “conjuration, and…mighty magic” (1.3.92) that won him Desdemona’s love. He told her stories. The Moor not only remembers all the beguiling “discourse” (1.3.149) that brought her to his side, but also recalls Desdemona’s susceptibility to the form of his personal history: [S]he thankèd me, And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her, I should but teach him how to tell my story And that would woo her. (1.3.162–165)

It’s not only the marvelous events themselves, but the particular “how” of their communication to her, that leads her to respond to the power of his storytelling with her own carefully phrased erotic invitation. The power of his storytelling and the power of his story combine to create the history of their love. In this recalled moment, memory, response, history all blur into one. Othello’s life story created a mood, found its ideal audience, solicited response and interpretation apparently much more so than it merely recounted a fantastical set of events, so that the power of the story he and © The Author(s) 2020 J. Green MacDonald, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World, Palgrave Shakespeare Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3_5

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Desdemona shared as narrator and audience challenges the ability of outsiders to understand their mutual attraction. She loved the way he told his story; he loved the way she responded to it, and to him. By the climax of the play, of course, these sweet shared intimate memories have corroded away in the endless reservoir of racial doubt that Iago recognizes, exploits, and turns against Othello. The world of practical affairs in which Othello must run the Cyprus garrison and Desdemona must adapt to life as the general’s wife ultimately proves more powerful than their memories of how they first fell in love. Professional rivalries, personal jealousies and obsessions, social and sexual privilege, fill the space that once seemed to contain only the two of them, crowding out their memories of a shared private story. Othello loses the mastery of language and expression that once beguiled Desdemona’s ear. “Noses, ears, and lips” (4.1.4), he shouts, bits of a fragmented face replacing his memories of her when she first listened to him, her ear “greedy” (1.3.148) for his stories, her heart exuding sympathy for his sufferings. For her part, the only story Desdemona can remember when she tries to grasp the fact that her husband now hates her is the musical complaint sung by her mother’s maid Barbary. Her access to her own pain through her memory of Barbary’s is so powerful that she can barely keep herself from imitating the maid’s posture by hanging her “head all at one side” (4.3.31) as she feels driven to sing the song as well. At this point, as Emilia recognizes that their love is ending and suggests that Desdemona should entertain the idea of Lodovico as a possible new suitor—“I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip” (4.3.36–37)—Desdemona’s attempt to remember love can only summon Barbary’s own tragic ending. Her love with Othello broken, the thread of shared sustaining memory breaks as well. Performing Barbary’s song, Desdemona performs two different kinds of memory work on it. The first of these is generic and literary. Imitating Barbary, Desdemona sings a complaint. Along with every other heartbroken female speaker in this mode, she, Barbary, and the anonymous speaker in the Willow Song find their authorial voices through the depth of their romantic suffering: The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,      Sing all a green willow. Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,     Sing willow, willow, willow.

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The fresh streams ran by her and murmured her moans,     Sing willow, willow, willow. Her salt tears fell from her and softened the stones[.] (4.3.38–44)

Renaissance complaint, narratives of romantic heartbreak voiced by a female character, is most familiar to us as a companion piece to published sonnet sequences, as in the case of A Lover’s Complaint’s place at the end of the 1609 edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets or the placement of the “legend of Cassandra” at the end of Richard Barnfield’s Cynthia, With certaine sonnets (1595). In connection with and in contrast to the male-voiced sonnet sequence, women’s complaint re-narrates and supplements the experience of love’s sorrows that sonnets tell. Here, set within Othello, Desdemona’s recitation of Barbary’s complaint similarly augments the play’s story of lost love by telling it from an emotional perspective, rather than from the corrosively racist and misogynist vantage point that Iago succeeds in naturalizing. But in addition to amplifying the narration of the end of a great love, Desdemona’s recitation also works to erase the substance of Barbary’s original. Imitating a song that was already “old” (4.3.28) when she first heard it, Desdemona admits that she can’t quite remember all its verses or their proper order. Her memorial recitation of romantic heartbreak domesticates, reduces, normalizes the secret history of erotic, female-driven magic that gives the strawberry-embroidered handkerchief its power. Desdemona’s rendition of Barbary’s song removes it from the sphere of the ancient prophetess who sewed it and the African women who called on its power and relocates it within a more familiar westernized frame of male perfidy and female suffering. The Willow Song offers one kind of story about love’s tragic power that locates that tragedy in men’s fickle hearts. Othello’s account of the handkerchief’s origins and significance tells a very different story—one that is not about faithless men, but about how love is wayward in its very nature, so unaccountable that ancient magic may be necessary to control it. One is a story about individuals, and the other is a story about the systemic obstacles standing in the way of human happiness. Once Othello and Desdemona’s shared stories diverge, they also lose their sense of certainty in the order of their world: “Chaos is come again” (3.3.93). If it fails to capture the whole truth of the handkerchief’s emotional associations, Desdemona’s imperfect performance also gestures toward a second, public and historical, kind of memory. To see her so compelled by the memory of Barbary’s old song that she can barely keep from imitating

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her posture as she sang it herself is to witness an act of what Joseph Roach calls “surrogation,” in which history is reanimated through performance, reconstruction, and reproduction. For Roach, surrogation “does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric. Into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure…survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates.”1 Her drive not only to sing Barbary’s song but to look like Barbary while she sings it speaks to an urge to make some aspect of the past live again in the present, through the instrument of her body. As her memory link to a love story she shared with Othello breaks, she invokes another kind of memorial connection—to her memories of the sorrow of another woman. To be sure “Barbary” was an old British diminutive for “Barbara,” and so it is possible that there is no particularly racial connotation to her name. But, given this play’s interest in worlds outside and beyond Venice, and in those other worlds’ power to determine both its lovers’ fates and others’ understandings of what Othello and Desdemona’s connection to each other must mean, the unseen Barbary’s name may also invoke the shadowy African women who live in the play’s memory.2 Singing Barbary’s song, Desdemona voices her own grief through copying the posture and borrowing the emotional labor of the play’s absent black women who formed Othello and whose labor, in the larger story of the Atlantic world, was both central to and effaced and disfigured within the European writing of early modern encounters with Africa.3 The Moor’s emotional history and the cultural and racial contexts that formed them disappear from view, effaced in all but Barbary’s name. What we are allowed to receive in their place is Desdemona’s performance of loss. Her surrogate enactment of what she assumes—but what we don’t know—was the context of Barbary’s knowledge is a pre-modern example of what Diana Paulin describes as surrogation’s capacity to act out multiple and simultaneous “levels of substitutions in representations—white bodies standing in for black ones, families standing in for nations, romantic encounters standing in for social relations, race standing in for gender, and the past standing in for the present.”4 Desdemona’s substitute performance maps the nature of her grief over what Barbary may have experienced. It maps a western understanding that heartbreak is personal over the understanding that it is a public, social, cosmic force that reigned in the world of Othello’s origins. Finally, it maps her white body over the black bodies of Othello’s countrywomen—that ancient prophetess who worked the embroidery, the Egyptian “charmer” who enchanted the

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handkerchief, his mother, who understood the magic and passed its secrets on to him—whose knowledge guides his behavior but whom we never meet.5 Desdemona’s substitute performance both cements their presence in and announces their separation from this story. This substitution of a white female body for a black one and the knowledge that black female bodies might convey is where Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet (1997), her adaptation of Othello, begins its encounter with Shakespeare’s text. Instead of imposing Desdemona’s understanding of her broken love affair over the story that Barbary told, Sears’ play reimagines lost love from the vantage point of those black women who have been pushed to the edges of Shakespeare’s play, and of their diasporic descendants. This intervention into the racial logic that appropriates so much of Othello’s Atlantic performance history to a white supremacist imaginary— more on this later—permits us to hear the stories and memories and histories that the process of surrogation inevitably causes to slip away from view. Consider the forgettings and substitutions that drive Shakespeare’s play. Forgetting his own standing as heir to “men of royal siege” (1.2.22), Othello comes to understand his tragedy from the point of view of the white Europeans who forged their own identities against those of the nonwhite world east and south of Venice. At the moment of his suicide, he simultaneously associates himself with the western soldiers he commands in battle against the “malignant and…turbaned Turk” (5.2.362), and with those malignant foreigners themselves. His whole life before he met Desdemona becomes lost and forgotten, as is the love story that he and Desdemona shaped together. All of these stories and the knowledge they contained about what love means, how it is experienced and sustained, how vulnerable its intimacies are to outside pressure and chance, have disappeared like the play’s African women, leaving only their distorted shadows behind. Roach emphasizes how the performative surrogacies he examines serve as ways of acting out reconstructions of racial identity and memory, a “selective memory” that advances through “public enactments of forgetting” (3). He warns us that “surrogation rarely if ever succeeds,” since “[t]he intended substitute either cannot fulfill expectations, creating a deficit, or actually exceeds them, creating a surplus” (2). Desdemona’s performance of Barbary’s song is one such failed re-enactment. She can’t quite remember the lyrics’ proper order, and her husband’s (and Iago’s) misogynist disgust rushes in to fill the vacuum her disturbed memory

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creates. Tentatively, she introduces a new interpretation that imposes her current shock over the original’s account of female heartbreak: can women who “do abuse their husbands / In such gross kind” actually exist (4.3.60–61)? This new interpretation supports the tangle of misogyny and racism that drives the play to its painful climax, serving as a plausible reproduction of “something else that preexists it,” in Roach’s formulation (3), but which now must be forgotten. “Something else” thus comes to operate more powerfully than the original female-centered circumstances of Barbary’s song or the enchantments the shadowy African women from Othello’s past summoned as they attempted to conjure and preserve love. Another indication of the play’s misremembering, this one of Othello’s African origins, can be glimpsed in Brabanzio’s struggle to comprehend his daughter’s runaway choice of a black husband, when the notion of erotic magic struggles to the surface of his own anxious mind as sinister dark “charms” through which unsuspecting white girls might be “abused” (1.1.173, 175). He tells Roderigo that the horror of Desdemona’s elopement “is not unlike” the “dream” (1.1.144) that has been haunting his rest. Iago recognizes Brabanzio’s fear of the erasure of his own patriarchal privilege and guesses at the racial element undergirding it. He summons Brabanzio’s anxieties from the realm of dreams into the real world, imposing them over the implausible romantic truth. A more complex example of this faulty reproduction of love’s mystery occurs when Cassio asks Bianca to copy the “work” (3.4.186) on the strawberry-embroidered handkerchief. He lies about his reasons for asking the favor—he just likes the pattern, he says—and tells her to get to it quickly, before Othello sees him “womaned” (3.4.192) in her company. Of course, Cassio is lying about his reasons for wanting a personal copy of the handkerchief, but because of the toxic power masculinity bears in the play, he is probably telling the truth about how being seen with a woman who loves him, and being presumed to be in love with her as well, would damage his reputation. He can’t just say this plainly; stepping gingerly around his distaste for being thought to be in love (and in love with Bianca to boot), he awkwardly assures her that his reluctance to be seen with her is “Not that I love you not” (3.4.193). But Bianca cuts through his syntactic tangle, recognizing that his behavior stems from the simple fact “that you do not love me” (3.4.193). Asking her to copy the handkerchief’s embroidery—what does he plan to do with his copy?—attempts to create a literal reproduction of an

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existing thing that he plans to endow with new meanings. Cassio moves beyond Desdemona’s displacement of Barbary’s original song as he animates surrogation’s potential for active emotional cruelty. Acting out Bianca’s desperate affection for him to amuse Iago, “She was here even now,” he tells him. “She haunts me in every place. I was the other day talking on the sea-bank with certain Venetians, and thither comes the bauble, and falls me thus about my neck.” The text invites us to imagine him demonstrating how she “hangs and lolls and weeps upon me…shakes and pulls me” (4.1.130–133, 136–137). If Desdemona’s inability to remember all the words to Barbary’s song or the right order for all its words point us to Roach’s deficit in surrogacy, Cassio’s cruel mockery of Bianca’s unrequited love for him marks its surplus, as he debases her feelings for him into the punchline for a misogynist joke. All Cassio wants is to proclaim himself one of the boys and not the pampered fortunate son Iago thinks he is, but his impromptu performance has a completely different effect on Othello, who was not born to the contempt for women’s love that marks these Venetians. The contempt Cassio offers up as proof that he does indeed belong to the same masculine tribe as the other soldiers strikes Othello as bitter evidence of his worst fears about love’s fragility. The surplus, unintended effects of Cassio’s performance on Othello push his joke toward tragedy. Brabanzio’s fears of secret “charms” unwittingly gesture at the love spell on the handkerchief, and make him misrecognize the truth about his daughter’s romantic and sexual agency. Cassio mocks a woman whose love he doesn’t return, even though he is willing to exploit her labor and apparently to use her sexually. Desdemona tries and fails to capture the performance of a woman’s song of heartbreak, but cannot entirely resist the suspicion that innate female whorishness is the real story it tells. All three of these cases show how deeply entrenched Venetian values shape these characters’ view of the world, and overwrite alternative interpretations. “Venetian” here means white as well as patriarchal; Brabanzio would probably not be so quick to play the sorcery card if Desdemona’s unsanctioned suitor had been another white Venetian, for example. Their imitations and reproductions point us precisely to the gap between original and re-enactment that Roach emphasizes. The qualities of surplus and excess that surface as the emotions of sexual disgust and white supremacy that Othello must arouse under dominant constructions of racial and sexual identity repeatedly manifest themselves in the performance history of the play. Because of the convictions of the

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fearfulness of miscegenation that had accreted around Othello through its post-Renaissance history of transatlantic and circum-Atlantic circulation, it early began demonstrating what Julie Hankey calls the ability to burst “the limit between reality and fiction,” sometimes in violent and irrational ways.6 Jonathan Bate records an anecdote about the white male soldier on security duty at an 1822 performance in Baltimore who shot the actor playing Othello in the arm, declaring that ”It will never be said in my presence a confounded Negro has killed a white woman.”7 Celia Daileader has suggested that the play’s more recent performance history has continued to reproduce what she calls “Othellophilia,” so that Brabanzio’s uneasy dream of miscegenation is highlighted, while Othello’s blackness in the play struggles to achieve signification from any other viewing point than one assumed to be white and masculine.8 As Daileader points out, theatre audiences participate crucially in determining any meaning a particular production can have; audiences and critics whose identification with whiteness is reflexive can hardly help but see Othello and Desdemona’s love affair as scandalous, illicit, and doomed. The play must be a tragedy because of what its audience already “remembers” about this sort of story—not because of what it sees unfolding in front of it. Of course, this mistaking of the workings of white privilege for the truth is not the only way in which audiences can come to Othello with memories and knowledge that dictate what they can take away. Memory consciously devoted to recalling a set of historical and cultural meanings that run counter to those dredged up and created in the performance history that Pechter and Daileader describe can be observed at work in a play like C.  Bernard Jackson’s Iago (1979). As part of his work as founding director of Los Angeles’ Inner City Cultural Center, Jackson rewrote Shakespeare’s play by reimagining Iago as a Moor like Othello, loyal to the general as he tries to save him from the racist machinations of Cassio, and who dies by his side as the Turks overrun Cyprus. In Jackson’s play, Othello and Iago are both displaced heroes from a race of African warriors—distinct from the “Turks” who blur into the othered self-loathing of Shakespeare’s Moor—who have found professional place in Venice. His Iago decides to stay by Othello’s side rather than return home to Africa after Spain expels the Moors. Countering Othello’s terrible isolation in Shakespeare’s play, Jackson excavates a story of male racial solidarity from it, and feels free to blur chronological time in order to do so; that expulsion historically happened in 1492, while Othello is dated 1603. His reimagined Iago-Othello relationship allows him to dramatize a black cultural

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and national solidarity that pre-existed the absorption of black subjects into European society and that emerges as a counter to white racist responses to the character. As it blurs the historical timeline, Iago also sets out to expose the tortured prurient interest that promotes reactions to Othello such as the one Bate reports. The first female speaker in Jackson’s play, suspicious that its onstage audience has been deceived by the influence of Shakespeare’s telling of Othello’s story, accuses its audience of being interested only “in peeking beneath the sheets to catch a glimpse of the naked flesh of the past.”9 Jackson thus reimagines Othello as a play about love—of nation, of race, between men—instead of the play about hysterical responses to the spectacle of sex between a black man and a white woman that it has so often devolved into on Atlantic stages. His work acknowledges its status as a consciously reconstructed new view of the Othello materials, opening with a group of university students in a museum theatre whose tour is interrupted by a mysterious woman—his Emilia—who wonders whether they are capable of understanding the real story that first Geraldi Cinthio and then “[t]he Englishman” (14) chose to rewrite in terms that would be more palatable to western audiences. Sears’ Harlem Duet builds on the interest of a play like Iago in reconstructing an historical past that restores black people to agency, with the difference that she is specifically interested in recovering a history of black women. As we have seen, women’s acts and stories emerge in Othello in incomplete and distorted forms. Desdemona’s fragmentary memory of Barbary’s song is repurposed to fit the play’s larger conviction of female sexual perfidy by the time she finishes singing it; the Egyptian sorceress’ magic devolves to the level of an unscrupulous seducer’s trick; Cassio acts out Bianca’s attempt to hold onto him in order to make his friends laugh, and Othello himself mistakes that burlesque for real evidence of his wife’s infidelity.10 But Sears’ Harlem Duet sets out both to return these distorted and forgotten stories to the control of the black women who authored them, and to establish these hitherto spectral black female characters as narrators and actors in the play she inherits from Shakespeare. In Harlem Duet, Sears crosses personal with cultural and political memory as her heroine Billie, living through the collapse of her nine-year relationship with her lover “Othe,” imagines what could have been between them. Billie tells us that they moved into their small apartment on “the day Nelson and Winnie came to Harlem.”11 While she and Othe were trying to convince the police to let them through the barricades at 125th

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Street, a bystander took a picture of them as she held her brother Andrew’s baby: “‘The perfect Black family’. That’s what he called us. ‘The perfect Black family’” (296). Nelson and Winnie Mandela finally divorced in 1996, the year before the premiere of Sears’ play, and the sadness of that broken marriage—in which the Mandelas spent more years forced apart than they did living together—provides not only personal but a kind of historical context for Billie’s heartbreak over the end of things with Othe. What Billie chooses to remember is that Winnie Mandela was at her husband’s side when he walked out of prison, after 27 years. And yet, as the real Winnie Madikizela-­ Mandela once remarked, “I had so little time to love him…Life with him was a life without him.”12 The fugitive quality of this description of the Mandelas’ intimacy, and the stature they nevertheless achieve in Billie’s memory as a pair of black lovers whose emotional connection was crucial in materializing their and her own place in history, returns me to my original remarks on the connections between personal histories, public and national histories, and memory in Shakespeare’s play. The way that Billie remembers the Mandelas on that triumphant day is more important than what had actually happened, or would happen, to them. In Sears’ play, the personal, the intimate, the private are political, and political history unfolds within a firm grasp on personal memory. The intimate and the civic come together to create the dream of a usable, vital past whose power could have led Billie and Othe into their own future as a couple—but as we shall see, in the play’s present, with her lover gone, memory itself loses its power to shape or dictate future events. Remembering, Paul Ricouer suggests, is an act that revives “forgotten possibilities, aborted potentialities, repressed endeavours.” We learn history so as to be led “back to those moments of the past where the future is not yet decided, where the past was itself a space of experience open to a horizon of expectation.”13 As we remember, we insert ourselves into history as an interpreter, an organizer, a conscious narrator of events; indeed, as I note above, we have already seen this triumph of selected and misunderstood memories in Shakespeare’s play. This kind of conscious “emplotment” is a tool of the historian, who reassembles our pasts for us in the larger service of “collective memory,” the shared recollections that connect individuals’ memories to each other so as to create communal stories that bind us to our fellows and can help narrate the history of a people.14

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For Billie, this collective memory hinges not only on her love for Othe but also on Harlem as the backdrop for romance, an outpost of memory that is communal and not merely private. The personal connection she remembers provides deep ballast for the collective history of a whole race, a history in which romantic love plays a shaping part. The image of Nelson and Winnie Mandela walking free together in Harlem after 27 years—after everything—led Billie to imagine the bond between them as a foundational part of the birth of a new nation. Her personal story and her reaction to the historical events of that day blur together to create something like Ricouer’s “horizon of expectation,” in which her and Othe’s appearance as the apparently “perfect black family” in conjunction with the iconic image of the Mandelas allowed her to see that moment as the seedtime of a glorious future. She experienced that moment as announcing the role of a love that endured apartheid and prison in writing the public, political history of a whole people. The Mandelas’ coupledom reiterated and amplified hers and Othe’s, so that they themselves entered community and history—or so Billie thought. As the play begins, however, Othe has left Billie for Mona, his white colleague at Columbia University. Othe’s breaking of the romantic and cultural contract between him and Billie emerges as a very specific kind of the historical forgetting that Ricouer warns is built into the process of retrieving and assembling the memories that help constitute an historical past.15 Some literary critics working on the operations of memory in early modern drama build on this sense of the role of forgetting by arguing that memory is shaped by moments of rupture and even trauma that make coherent recollection impossible, so that we can never quite fully manage to recover either a universal story of a national past, or even our true personal histories.16 One way in which Harlem Duet indicates its sense of the difficulty of recapturing and assigning stable meaning to the past is through its discontinuous timeline, as Sears’ story of broken intimacy unfolds in two earlier time periods besides Billie and Othe’s present: in 1928 as one woman realizes her lover is about to leave her for a white woman (the stage directions note that the female character in the 1928 scenes and Billie in the play’s present should be played by the same actress), and in 1860 as a black couple first remembers a friend who has been lynched and mutilated, and then declares their mutual passion.17 As Billie looks backward from present grief to the hopeful day she and Othe moved in together, Harlem Duet looks backward in time—both in black American history and toward Othello—to establish a diasporic backstory for its own framing of romantic

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and cultural desertion. But if Billie wants to return to her memories of the past in order to stake a claim on a particular kind of future, then her way back is complicated by the play’s own sense of linear disruption. Stage directions tell us that the soundtrack for the first 1928 scene includes parts of Martin Luther King’s speech at the 1963 March on Washington, set to “a heaving melancholic blues” (289), for example, both “a melodious urban blues” and parts of an address from Marcus Garvey urging American blacks to return to Africa back the second scene in Billie and Othe’s present (294). Billie and Othe’s move to Harlem is a key part of her attempt to impose narrative order on these shifting and even competing myths of collective and private origin so as to dictate the future she can generate for herself and her lover. At first, their shared blackness seemed enough: “When we lived in the Village, sometimes, I’d be on the subway and I’d miss my stop. And I’d just sit there, past midtown, past the upper west side, and somehow I’d end up here. And I’d just walk. I love seeing all these brown faces” (300). Harlem, then, carries a powerful, if uneven, mnemonic charge in Sears’ play. Billie must navigate and reconcile these uncertainties as she attempts to enchant the possibility of a future for her and Othe into being through her commitment to Harlem and everything it represents in her mind. The title of this chapter refers to Duke Ellington’s moody, evocative “Echoes of Harlem” from 1936, written to highlight the playing of Cootie Williams, which was only one of several compositions across his career inspired by the vibrancy and cultural richness of his adopted community. Referring to another of these pieces, 1940’s “Harlem Air Shaft,” Ellington remarked in an interview that “You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An airshaft is one great big loudspeaker.”18 The city serves as a similar kind of multi-directional loudspeaker for Billie and for her friend and landlady Magi, who declares that when she goes outside, “I see all the beauty of my Blackness reflected all around me” (303)—summoning and returning the district’s allure, refracting it through the experiences and responses of all the members of the community. Harlem also echoes for Djanet Sears, who imagines it as “a central location in the psyches of black people. Harlem is almost mythological.…It has an extraordinary history, a rich culture and my relationship to it is borderless, very much like my relationship to Blackness. Harlem feels like another country, not exactly the USA, a country unto itself that I am part of as well.”19 To remember Harlem—what it was, what

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it stood for—is to embrace a vision of a communal, borderless past and of a collective future. Billie’s very name invokes the history of Othello’s prophetic sibyl, asking us to remember the moment in the play where she hallowed the handkerchief as a memory object and bringing that knowledge with us as we follow it through its new travels in Harlem Duet: drifting to the floor in 1928 as a black man admits to his black wife that he has fallen in love with a white woman, given by a black man to his wife in 1860 as he urges her to flee to Canada with him but before he tells her that his master’s daughter “needs” (302) him in a way that his slave wife does not. It ends not as “an antique token of” an “ancient love” (294), but as a putative murder weapon. After Othe’s desertion, Billie intends to soak the handkerchief— an heirloom that has come down to him through his mother’s side of the family—in ancient Egyptian poisons whose composition she believes she has discovered in her studies and give it back to him so it can kill him. Is Harlem’s mnemonic charge, however aesthetically compelling the notion of the neighborhood as “one great big loudspeaker” might be, finally just as uneven and subject to change as the meanings invested in the handkerchief? Certainly, the play implies that traveling the backward path of memory to a moment of cultural origin carries its own dangers. Besides Shakespeare’s sibyl who originally sewed the handkerchief, Sears also associates Billie’s name with the Cumaean sibyl from the Aeneid, who assured Aeneas that glory awaited him even if the heartbreak of abandoning African Dido was the price he had to pay for it. The sibyl, who presides over the Caves of Avernus that were the entrance to the underworld, also warned him that his obsessive “yearning”20 to see his father again and to receive some assurance that Dido still loves him even though she has crossed over can only be realized at great and dangerous cost. When Billie’s father Canada reappears after several years to try and reconnect with her and her brother, she tells him she always hated her name even if she was named after her grandmother. “It means prophetess. Sorceress. Seer of the future,” he tells her, but she responds that it “[s]ounds like some old woman living in a cave” (307). Indeed, after the impact of Othe’s desertion begins to weigh on her fully and she collapses beneath the weight of her grief, she imagines speaking to Drew’s daughter Jenny on the telephone: “It’s Sybil…Auntie Sybil…The woman who lives in the cave” (314).21 Clearly, then, summoning the power of the past in order to inform the meaning of the present and the future is no straightforward task. We recall

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the past differently, partially, in opposition to the recollections of others. What Billie describes as their apartment’s “balcony” or its “deck” Othe is compelled to name its “fire escape” (300). “Every time someone mentions traditional values or the good old days,” Billie pointedly asks Magi, “who exactly were those days good for?” (313). Recent theorists of memory in early modern culture have emphasized the degree to which memory was seen as existing somehow independently of the mind, subject to and even apparently requiring the exercise of specific kinds of mnemonic practices before it could be organized and made useful. Memory arts based on images or places asked one to associate the thing he wished to recall fully with some particular physical location, so that that place would itself become invested with the power to spur recollection. Places and images could thus achieve a kind of power and imaginative animation in themselves, a capacity to speak particular common meanings that Jonathan Baldo sees as entering crisis after the Reformation, when the memories invested in places that embodied the authority of Catholicism were challenged and erased. The relation of the material present to the historical past was suddenly no longer clear.22 Billie’s romantic memories of the day the Mandelas came to Harlem yearn backward to an idealized point in the past that seemed to guarantee that she and Othe could build the kind of life they wanted, together. How could that moment, adjacent to such greatness, come to nothing?23 The play opens as Billie is losing her belief that her Harlem still retains sufficient memorial power to shape her life with Othe in the present, preserving the fragile bonds between memory and meaning. As she originally thought of it, the neighborhood itself operated as one of Pierre Nora’s “lieux de mémoire,” a symbolic site of memory that substitutes for the actual environments and relationships that have disappeared in the passage of time and within changes in cultures. For Nora, “memory crystallizes and secretes itself” at points where the actual environment which generated specific memories in the first place and the “sense of historical continuities” these environments sustained “has been torn.”24 Thus, multiple possible histories exist, all predicated on the existence of multiple strands and locations of memory. One common critique of Nora’s attempt to account for the roles played by history and memory in the construction of a modern notion of France is that the work he oversaw nevertheless resulted in producing the single, unified, even commemorative kind of history that such a programmatic dedication to multiplicity and fullness would tend to deny. It has been read as particularly downplaying or even

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ignoring certain kinds of national memories, particularly those of France’s colonial past,25 in effect sustaining a kind of history whose full range of memory has been erased, or which accepts without analyzing why some strands of the past may simply be absent. Poet Melvin Dixon is among those participating in this critique of Nora’s project, describing how his residence in Harlem revealed to him his neighbors’ will to anchor history in recovered and recirculated memories that can “ultimately rewrite[s] history” so as to produce themselves as its authors and narrators: Entering my part of Manhattan…there are two nightclubs, one called the Zanzi-bar, the other called the Lagos Bar. Farther south Lenox Avenue becomes Malcolm X Boulevard. At the intersection of 125th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard street vendors have for many years kept an open-air market for fruits, vegetables, North Carolina pecans, cassette tapes, and dungarees. The street sign above this corner says African Market Square. A short walk… brings you in contact with black people of every shade and texture, living on numbered streets and on streets that have changed their names to Frederick Douglass Boulevard, Johnny Hartman Plaza, Marcus Garvey Park, and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard.26

The history that Dixon’s Harlem neighbors have built into their urban environment is recent and distant, canonical and popular, simultaneously African, Pan-African, and African-American. Their streets and squares and places of entertainment proclaim the conscious establishment of Nora’s “historical continuities” across time, place, and registers of discourse, in defiance of the economic and demographic forces that may be conspiring to break them apart. Billie also reads her surroundings as an index to a heroic black history that she and Othe entered by loving each other in this particular location, grounding her understanding of herself as an historical subject in affect and desire. The neighborhood’s familiar landmarks contained her urbanized pastoral dream of Home, as well as of the private home she yearned to build with Othe: “Since they knocked down the old projects, I can see the Schomburg Museum from here. You still can’t make out Harlem Hospital. I love that I can see the Apollo from our—from my balcony” (300). The mnemonic places which might generate the meanings that would invest their future life as lovers derive their power from a rich past whose felt meanings she yearns to revive and share with him: “that old building across the street…used to be the Hotel Theresa. That’s where Castro stayed when he came to New York.…Ron Brown’s father

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used to run that hotel” (300). When Billie chooses to anchor herself to Harlem, she is choosing the emotional charge that she feels it possesses. But the anchoring pride she takes in Harlem exists as much in her nostalgic yearning for the past as it does in the present-day community. The projects have been demolished and the people they housed dispersed; the building that used to be the Hotel Theresa now houses another, less symbolically charged, business. Built landscapes inevitably change. The affective work she calls on her Harlem to do for her, even as its physical setting changes around her, is infused with what Svetlana Boym calls “reflective nostalgia,” “a yearning for a home that no longer exists, or has never existed.”27 But what happens when an historical subject is somehow immune to the memories and stories that once inhabited those landscapes and that inspire his or her fellows? Othe has never really heard the echoes of Harlem that shaped Billie’s hopes for the kind of lovers they could be. “Sometimes when we make love…every moment lines up into one moment. And I’m holding you. And I can’t tell where I end, or you begin. I see everything. All my ancestors lined up below me,” she tells him after they make love for what turns out to be the last time. His response is less historically serious: “Sounds crowded to me” (301). He has eagerly relocated himself to the emotional place that Magi mockingly calls “Harlumbia” (303)—physically adjacent to Harlem, but emotionally informed by the white-racist infighting of his home department at Columbia. Far from being inspired by what Magi stoutly calls “the beauty of my Blackness reflected in the world around me” (303), he admits that he and his family had difficulty identifying themselves as black even during the “time of black pride” in which he grew up: “My family would say we’re Cuban” (300). A longing for the past like Billie’s “is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory.”28 To discount this connection between oneself and one’s memory community is a potentially serious matter, since misremembering or entirely forgetting the significance your community attached to its own sites of memory might be a sign of something greater than merely not understanding the past. It might also mean that a person had lost his place in the present, his ability to remember who he is and where he fits into an ordered society of like-minded friends, neighbors, and citizens.29 Othe has just found out that he’s going to be heading the department’s summer course offerings in Cyprus, and “a whole bunch” of his white colleagues, led by Chris Yago, are going to challenge the

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university’s affirmative action rules, which they assume are the only reason he got the appointment. Billie dismisses his white colleagues as “[r]ednecks in academia” (299) and defends affirmative action, but he tells her that even though he knows they don’t respect him and don’t believe he can do his job, he finds the policy to be discriminatory. At least Mona understands him. Forgetting everything that Harlem means for Billie—and that she had thought meant for them both, when they were still in love—and jettisoning his identification as black, Othe forgets himself. During their relationship’s unraveling, he tells Billie that he’s “tired of this race shit,” that he sees himself as “a member of the human race” rather than as a black man (300). Later, wishing to hurt her, he tells her that their relationship broke apart beneath the stress of her hostility toward her estranged father, which he claims she transferred to him, and that he came to prefer white women to black ones: “Yes, I prefer White women. They are easier—before and after sex. They wanted me and I wanted them. They weren’t filled with hostility about the unequal treatment they were getting at their jobs. We’d make love and I’d fall asleep not having to beware being mistaken for someone’s inattentive father. I’d explain that I wasn’t interested in a committed relationship right now, and not be confused with every lousy lover, or husband that had ever left them lying in a gutter of unresolved emotions” (305). He rejects Billie’s version of their story where love is the hinge that links them to the flow of a broader black history. Her attempts to reclaim that lost intersection between personal hope and collective memory, to re-enchant love into living presence, drive her toward murder and madness. Shakespeare’s Othello itself demonstrates the difficulties of keeping memory objects firmly attached to the memories and shared references they are supposed to guarantee when Desdemona lets the strawberry-­ embroidered handkerchief simply slip away. This supreme mnemonic object is drenched in a feminine-authored erotic magic whose potency to assure a man’s love disappears when it does, just as Othello’s mother told him it would.30 Harlem Duet seems to reinforce this certainty as it reimagines the handkerchief as a token of love that is destined to be lost over and over again. Clearly, Othe’s leaving her for a white woman he plans to marry—he and Billie were together for nine years, without marrying—is particularly painful for Billie, given this history. But, in addition to this repeated train of broken loves, the memories with which Billie intends to imbue the handkerchief through her sorcery also call on a bigger kind of

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history whose import Othe denies in the present, a history whose impact he and his family have worked hard to deny. Giving it to him, she will be giving him “the emotions of all” his “ancestors” (306): the one who helped dig roadbeds in Virginia and was whipped when he stopped to use the handkerchief to wipe his brow, his female slave ancestor who covered her face with it and wept when she learned that her pubescent daughter was being sold across the state for breeding stock, the one who was holding it in his hand when he leapt for joy on hearing—fifteen years late— about the Emancipation Proclamation.31 The amplified meanings Harlem Duet attaches to its use of the handkerchief here dramatize a kind of struggle over the range and nature of memories themselves and over the objects and places that can reanimate them. The magic Billie attempts to work on “forgotten possibilities, aborted potentialities, repressed endeavours” loses a single anchoring place. The handkerchief’s status as a traveling object stubbornly resistant to being re-hallowed and brought into a mutual present through the operations of memory emphasizes the role of migration and the complications attending the notion of “home” in Sears’ play. Billie and her brother Andrew, though they now live in Harlem, were born in the Bronx, but they grew up in Nova Scotia, their father’s home, where he took them when their mother died.32 Amah, Drew’s wife, knows that Nova Scotia was a destination for escaped American slaves “way before the underground railroad” (296) which delights her; Drew and Billie grew up in a place that offered a model of black collective identity and progress as powerful, if not as well-known, as the idea of Harlem. But for Billie, any historical memories Nova Scotia might animate are overshadowed by the bitterness of her dislocated childhood and her memories of her father’s drinking. Now that their father—whose name is Canada—has sobered up and come to Harlem to try to reconnect with his children and to build a relationship with Drew’s daughter Jenny, Billie remains skeptical that any such reunion can take place. Billie’s belief that personal memories and national and racial histories mutually inform each other is helpless before the resentment she still feels toward her father. Stuck in memories of her humiliation—she remembers the time Canada, drunk, climbed up on the banquet table at her high school graduation to sing to her—she is barred from entering a more generative collective memory of her ancestors’ free lives in Nova Scotia. Even though Drew and Amah welcome him to their apartment, Billie remains distant. Canada’s return and the possibility of reconciliation tentatively suggests that renewed connections with her

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father and the place she grew up could provide an affective launching place into a future that grows organically out of her past. Striving to “connect what [they] remember with the memories of others” 33 and thus conjure a vision of an emotionally sustainable common past and common set of origins into being, at least Drew and Canada try to make a future that can heal the rupture of their past. Harlem Duet’s nostalgic yearning to stabilize and materialize the meanings of Harlem’s past and the implicit belief of its three chronologically separated Billies that such memorial reconstruction can sustain their love and carry it into the future is only one way in which the play asserts the significance of a lost or suppressed history of black knowledge and desire, a history in whose shadow Sears sees Shakespeare’s Othello unfolding. Besides the secret Egyptian alchemical knowledge that Billie applies to re-­ enchant the handkerchief, for example, the play is also full of folkways about attracting or keeping a man in comic rescensions of Billie’s tragedy. Magi, who yearns for a husband and children, knows that “If you want to keep a man…you rub his backside with margarine.” Sadly, though, she says she “could never figure out how to get from the bed to the refrigerator” (292). Amah, knowing that Drew was the one for her, buried his socks under a berry bush near her front door, and “[s]ure enough, he always finds his way back home.” By the end of the play it seems that Magi will finally achieve romantic success after she secretly follows up on a method “a Jamaican lady” once passed on to Amah: “You rinse your underwear and use the dirty water to cook the meal” (292). The man she cooks for is Canada who, returning to watch Billie after her breakdown, sits down at a makeshift table at her and Othe’s now-empty apartment to share a meal Magi has cooked. He can’t get enough of her greens and remarks that when he was little, he “used to love to sop the pot liquor.” “It’s nearly the best part,” she assures him (311). This comic folklore aimed at making a love that lasts counterpoises the fateful magic in the web of the strawberry-embroidered handkerchief that first appears in Sears’ prologue, set in 1928, when the woman who knows she’s losing her lover asks him if he remembered when he gave it to her: “Your mother’s handkerchief.…Little strawberries. It’s so beautiful—delicate. You kissed my fingers and with each kiss a new promise you made…swore yourself to me…for all eternity.…Remember?” (289). The loss of the handkerchief’s power to defeat the forces of time and change force Billie to recognize her failure to imbue her memories with the ability to forge a permanent bond between her and Othe in the present: “I used

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to pray that he was calling to say he’s sorry,” she tells Amah. “To say how he’d discovered a deep confusion in himself. But now…I have nothing to say to him” (296). Speaking objects like the handkerchief, like Harlem itself, are supposed to remind us of what remains true and vital in Billie’s memories of the past. And yet, as they point to what may have been forgotten in Billie and Othe’s breakup, or in Othello’s transit from the arms of the dark women who loved him first to his cruel death in Cyprus, they fall desperately short of bringing the affective promise of those origins to present fruition. Sears’ play embodies this failure to make the ideal of the past live now in Billie’s two lost pregnancies—one an abortion she had earlier in the relationship when Othe made it clear he didn’t want a child, and one a miscarriage whose remains Magi tells Amah she has preserved in her freezer, along with her vial of homemade poison. The story about the preserved fetus may or may not be true. In Act 1, after the exchange about how to keep a man, Magi tells Amah about the frozen remains and acts as though she is about to show her but when Billie unexpectedly enters she says it was only a joke: “[M]aybe I lied! Gotcha!” (293). But after Billie’s hospitalization, when Canada is cleaning out her freezer, he tells Othe—who has come to pick up the little red box containing the handkerchief, the box in which Canada had brought his late wife’s ring to give to Billie—that some of the things he found there were so old and forgotten that the contents of one bag “had actually grown little feet” (316). The handkerchief, the vial of poison, and the contents of the freezer bag, these several “forgotten possibilities,” outlast Billie’s grief and her madness, surviving in the shadow of the breach that history has forced between her yearning for a nurturing set of black origins and her memories of loss, estrangement, and displacement, memories that bar her way back to an imagined past.

Notes 1. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2. I will provide future citations parenthetically in my text. 2. Joyce Green MacDonald, “Black Ram, White Ewe: Shakespeare, Race and Women,” in The Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 194. 3. This is the thesis of Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women.

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4. Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S.  Drama and Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 3. 5. Arthur Little, Jr., discusses the play’s racial displacements in Shakespeare Jungle Fever, 78–86. 6. Othello: Plays in Production, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4. 7. The anecdote appears in Stendahl’s 1823 pamphlet Racine and Shakespeare. Bate includes it in his edition of The Romantics on Shakespeare (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992), 222. For more accounts of wild audience reactions to Othello, see Edward Pechter, ‘Othello’ and Interpretive Traditions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 11–29. 8. “Casting Black Actors: Beyond Othellophilia,” in Shakespeare and Race, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 177–202. 9. C. Bernard Jackson, Iago, in Black Drama, 2nd ed., 7. 10. On the play’s visual misapprehensions, see Jonathan Baldo, The Unmasking of Drama: Contested Representation in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 174–176. 11. I cite Harlem Duet in Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (London: Routledge, 2000); here, 295. I will provide subsequent references parenthetically in my text. 12. Quoted in David Smith, “Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s Marriage Ended, but the Bond Was Never Broken,” The Guardian.Com 6 December 2013. 13. Time and Narrative, vol. 3, tr. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 227. 14. In Memory, History, Forgetting tr. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), Ricouer compares the narrative process of emplotting history, of making sense out of an otherwise shapeless mass of events, to an architect’s plans for organizing the interior space of a house, or to urban planners’ giving shape to a city over space and across time: “A city brings together in the same space different ages, offering to our gaze a sedimented history of tastes and cultural forms. The city gives itself as both to be seen and to be read. In it, narrated time and inhabited space are more closely associated than they are in an isolated building” (151). 15. “A vigilant epistemology will guard here against the illusion of believing that what we call a fact coincides with what really happened, or with the living memory of eyewitnesses, as if the facts lay sleeping in the documents until the historians extracted them” (Memory, History, Forgetting, 178). 16. See, for example, Thomas P. Anderson, Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

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17. Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, discusses the play’s timeline as evidence of the way in which it simultaneously declares its independence from Othello, and proceeds as though Shakespeare’s play is inextricably part of its own history and production, 70–79. 18. Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made it (New York: Dover Books, 1966), 224–225. 19. http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/i_dsears.cfm. 20. Aeneid 1–6, tr. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. ed. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 543. 21. The Cumaean sibyl who tells Aeneas how to cross into the underworld to find the shades of Anchises and Dido lived in one of the Euboean caves near Avernus. 22. Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2012), 39–46. In this section, I also drew on Lina Perkins Wilder, “Shakespeare and Memory,” Literature Compass 9.8 (2012): 549–559. 23. Here, I am thinking of Lauren Berlant, whose work often focuses on the ways in which we often draw on the structures of private, emotional life to structure public, civic engagements. As she writes in her essay “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998), the longing for personal connection works to build “a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way” (281). Billie’s problem is that after Othe leaves her they no longer have that sense of shared story, and—given Othe’s ambivalence about his blackness—they may never have had it. 24. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989), 7. This essay is a much reduced version of the arguments in Nora’s monumental three-volume Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 25. See Michael Rothberg, “Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de Mémoire to Nœuds de Mémoire,” YFS 118/119 (2010): 3–12. 26. “The Black Writer’s Use of Memory,” in History and Memory in African-­ American Culture, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 20. Fabre and O’Meally write in their introduction to the volume that the application of Nora’s work to African-­ American culture inspired the conference that produced the papers. 27. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xiii. See her pp. 49–56 for a fuller discussion of reflective nostalgia, under whose terms “the past opens up a multitude of potentialities…reflective nostalgia has a capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness” (50).

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28. Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents,” Hedgehog Review 9.2 (2007), 9. 29. See Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 36–43. 30. On the handkerchief’s vagrancy, see Harry Berger, Jr., “Impertinent Trifling: Desdemona’s Handkerchief,” SQ 47, no. 3 (1996): 235–250; Lina Perkins Wilder, Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties and Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 140–155; and Dympna Callaghan, “Beguiling Fictions,” in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception, and Performance, ed. Gordon McMullen, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 13–23. 31. I mean my discussion here to augment Lynda Boose’s analysis of the sexual meanings attached to the handkerchief for Desdemona in “Othello’s Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love’,” ELR 5 (1975): 360–374. 32. Sears herself was born in London to a Guyanese father and a Jamaican mother; her family emigrated to Saskatchewan when she was 15 and then eastward across Canada to Ontario. 33. Dennis Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory (London: Routledge, 2011), 14.

References Anderson, Thomas P. Performing Early Modern Trauma From Shakespeare to Milton. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Baldo, Jonathan. Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England. New York: Routledge, 2012. Baldo, Jonathan. The Unmasking of Drama: Contested Representation in Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. Bate, Jonathan. The Romantics on Shakespeare. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992. Berger, Harry, Jr. “Impertinent Trifling: Desdemona’s Handkerchief.” SQ 47, no. 3 (1996): 235–250. Berlant, Lauren. “Intimacy: A Special Issue.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 281–288. Boose, Lynda. “Othello’s Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love’”. ELR 5 (1975): 360–374. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Boym, Svetlana. “Nostalgia and its Discontents.” Hedgehog Review 9, no. 2 (2007): 7–18.

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Callaghan, Dympna. “Beguiling Fictions.” In Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception, and Performance, edited by Gordon McMullen, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Virginia Mason Vaughan, 13–23. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Daileader, Celia. “Casting Black Actors: Beyond Othellophilia.” In Shakespeare and Race, edited by Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells, 177–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Dixon, Melvin. The Black Writer’s Use of Memory.” In History and Memory in African-American Culture, edited by Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally, 18–27. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Fairclough, H. Rushton, tr. Aeneid 1–6. Rev. ed. G.P. Goold. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Hankey, Julie, ed. Othello. Plays in Performance Series. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987. http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/i_dsears.cfm. Jackson, C. Bernard. Iago. In Black Drama, 1850 to the Present. 2nd ed. Alexandria: Alexander Street Press, 2018. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. New  York: Routledge, 2009. Little, Arthur, Jr. Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. MacDonald, Joyce Green. “Black Ram, White Ewe: Shakespeare, Race and Women.” In A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Dympna Callaghan, 188–207. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. Nora, Pierre. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, tr. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Paulin, Diana. Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S.  Drama and Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Pechter, Edward. ‘Othello’ and Interpretive Traditions. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012. Ricouer, Paul. Time and Narrative, vol. 3. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Ricouer, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New  York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Rothberg, Michael. “Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de Mémoire to Nœuds de Mémoire.” Yale French Studies 118/119 (2010): 3–12. Sears, Djanet. Harlem Duet. In Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, 288–313. London: Routledge, 2000.

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Shapiro, Nat, and Nat Hentoff. Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made it. New York: Dover Books, 1966. Smith, David. “Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s Marriage Ended, but the Bond was Never Broken.” The Guardian.com, 6 December 2013. Sullivan, Garrett A.  Jr. Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Walder, Dennis. Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory. London: Routledge, 2011. Wilder, Lina Perkins. “Shakespeare and Memory.” Literature Compass 9, no. 8 (2012): 549–559. Wilder, Lina Perkins. Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties and Character. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

CHAPTER 6

‘The Right Foundation’: Re-racing Romance from The Taming of the Shrew to Deliver Us from Eva

As Harlem Duet ends, we know both that Billie has slipped away into madness, and that she may have managed to kill Othe with the poisoned handkerchief. The play implies that the lasting black love she attempted to build with him was one of the “repressed endeavours” whose chances of success disappeared in the face of an affective history virtually organized to ensure the separation of black men and black women, as the 1860 and 1928 love stories suggest to us. Drew and Amah’s bond flourishes, and Magi and Canada might well end up together, but the historically grounded, emotionally rich great love Billie sought for herself vanishes—if its possibility ever existed at all. Othello is probably not the most promising starting point for reimagining endings that Shakespeare makes us believe are predestined and inescapable. Too cruel to be overcome, the initiating text must eventually swallow the heroine’s efforts to affirm a way of seeing history and of placing love within it that answers her own needs. Othe remains fatally isolated, largely through his own self-delusion, even though Billie has been right there with her arms open. But although it doesn’t help, its tragic genre is not necessarily the reason why Othello so resists remaking; after all, Mississippi Masala finds a way around Romeo and Juliet and its assumption that love cannot be. Even though Nair’s film emphasizes that its lovers emerge from particular racial histories and contexts, they do still choose each other and refuse the power of the ways in which their individual and racial pasts have been weaponized against them in Greenwood. But Billie’s © The Author(s) 2020 J. Green MacDonald, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World, Palgrave Shakespeare Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3_6

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dream of a specifically black love cannot be realized. Venice and Cyprus and the prior histories of those earlier ill-fated black couples cast a desperate spell that even Sears’ idealized Harlem cannot undo. The last adaptation I discuss here, Gary Hardwick’s 2003 film Deliver Us from Eva and its relation to The Taming of the Shrew, is much more successful in its attempt to break the spell cast by Shakespearean genre and Shakespearean story.1 Part of what I see as Eva’s success at undoing the terms of its original may stem from the fact that it addresses a comedy instead of a brutal tragedy; its task of imagining a sustaining black love is undoubtedly simplified by the fact that it’s working from a play where no one has to die. While the rigid rules governing Padua’s patriarchal social life don’t kill anyone, they do compel unquestioned obedience from the play’s characters: obedience to the rule of fathers there governs access to desirable women and to the means of preserving social status. But centering blackness produces a version of The Taming of the Shrew that revalues the original’s preoccupation with material success and social prestige, and displaces its normalization of male privilege. Eva sets aside Shrew’s patriarchal notion of family life, where fathers sell their daughters to the highest bidders, by imagining a female household where women own themselves and freely give themselves to the men they love. Earlier, I held that a certain political suspicion of romantic love and sexual pleasure marked the reception of Mississippi Masala, with several readers viewing the film’s portrait of Meena’s desire for Demetrius as a sexy distraction from what they felt should properly have been its antiracist and anticolonialist core. I hope I made clear why such a conclusion about the film is possible only if viewers insist on imagining that its portrayal of gender, female sexuality, and romantic love are somehow completely separated from the racist and colonialist mindsets of Greenwood’s various communities. On the contrary, the declaration that without money Meena is too dark for a rich man like Harry Patel or the assumption that a black man like Demetrius is aggressing against Indian men by sleeping with her are both clearly political stances which turn on controlling her body and her desire, as anti-black racism and patriarchy work hand in hand. Romantic love has a history and a politics. It is where we can see ideas about racial hierarchies and social controls over women’s erotic choice come to life. Adaptation, in many of the cases I’ve discussed here, embodies a kind of yearning to undo and reform histories that have erased and suppressed black women’s presence. It wants to seize control of the politics that a Shakespearean text can impose on its audiences and make them

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work to the advantage of spectators and consumers who have not seen themselves there, or who want to contest the stories about themselves that Shakespeare has been understood to circulate. The lively stage history of The Taming of the Shrew, both in “straight” versions and in wildly creative adapted forms, speaks to the ways in which the play—with its matter-of-­ fact look at the mechanics that drive the formation of socially acceptable kinds of intimacy between men and women—compels us to comment on its conclusions.2 But a sense that there’s something wrong with the way it treats gender and intimacy becomes visible early on in its theatrical history. John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize (first performed about 1611), challenges The Taming of the Shrew head-on as it tells the story of Petruchio’s second marriage to Maria, a young woman determined to impose the same taming tactics on him that he inflicted on his late first wife. Vowing to withhold sex until she has rendered Petruchio “easie as a child,” she also mocks her sister Livia, whom she wrongly assumes is planning to go through with her arranged marriage to the old but rich Moroso—a dried­up “Cork” from whose bed she is bound to “rise sport-starv’d.”3 Driven by its mockery of the notion of taming women, Fletcher’s play also departs from Shakespeare’s Shrew by acknowledging that women experience desire and seek sexual pleasure, as we can see in Maria’s prediction of what Livia’s life with Moroso would be like. Reassuring Rowland, the man she really loves, that she has no intention of going along with her father’s plans, Livia asserts that Moroso’s money can’t “kisse” her from “Behind, / Laid out upon a Petticote; or graspe me / While I cry, O good thank you” (98). However pointedly its marriage plot objects to Shakespeare and to the tropes and conventions of the shrew-taming tradition, The Woman’s Prize still ends with Maria vowing to be Petruchio’s “servant” (122) after he publicly acknowledges the error of his bombastic ways. Discovering that Rowland and Livia have already consummated their secret marriage and thus that “he must have the wench” (122) regardless of Moroso’s prior legal claim, her father Petronius has the last word, containing his daughter’s runaway passion within the familiar fold of his economic control: if she doesn’t make him a grandfather within a year, he’ll cut her and Rowland’s settlement by half. Readers’ discomfort with The Taming of the Shrew finds a less knockabout and less sexually aware expression in David Garrick’s 1754 adaptation Catharine and Petruchio. Garrick compresses and streamlines the plot, as we might expect, but more interestingly gives some of Kate’s lines in her final speech of submission to Petruchio, so it is he who declares that

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“Such Duty as the Subject owes the Prince, / Even such a Woman oweth to her Husband.” But before this final assertion of normal gender order, Garrick’s Petruchio speaks new lines rejecting excessive exercise of husbandly authority as inimical to what married life should be: Kiss me, my Kate; and since thou art become So prudent, kind, and dutiful a Wife, Petruchio here shall doff the lordly Husband; An honest Mask, which I throw off with Pleasure.4

He doesn’t have to pretend to be a domestic tyrant anymore because she now truly demonstrates the sweetness of a proper wife. Both The Woman’s Prize and Catharine and Petruchio are early examples from the play’s modern life of how much of a problem Petruchio’s behavior created for the play’s reception, and of how adapters wanted to make the terms of Kate’s surrender seem less harsh and more reciprocal than they do in Shakespeare. For 90 years after its premiere, Catharine and Petruchio was performed far more often than the Shakespeare play it set out to correct, so that the awful patriarchal truth about The Taming of the Shrew was discreetly, but firmly, withheld from audiences.5 Shakespeare’s Shrew takes for granted that it is normal to exchange women in order to demonstrate and reinforce familial and community order, and for the maintenance of these external structures to take precedence over the marital happiness of both men and women. Although Fletcher’s Maria and Livia get away with more romantic and marital self-­ assertion, and Garrick’s Petruchio is sad that he has to resort to crude shrew-taming (but does it anyway), both these later responses to Shakespeare also firmly place their married couples’ happy resolutions within the context of perceived social and civic necessity. Late twentieth century productions of the play, however, can display more ambiguity about the insistence that husbands’ dominion over wives and fathers’ rights over daughters are the foundation of the social compact. After Katharina delivered her final speech in Michael Bogdanov’s 1978 Shrew at the Royal Shakespeare Company, her gathered friends and family barely acknowledged the significance of what had just occurred. Finding it completely unremarkable that she would submit to her husband and encourage other women to do the same, the guests at the reception immediately went back to their after-dinner gambling, while Kate and Petruchio walked

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offstage: “The last image was of two very lonely people. The lights went down as we left—I following him, the others hardly noticing we’d gone.”6 In contrast to this matter-of-fact acceptance of a stifling status quo that finds love or mutuality between married people completely beside the point in the society the play depicts, some productions have gone out of their way to endorse and even celebrate the taming at the play’s core. Just as Othello can work to affirm audiences’ conviction—sometimes unconscious, sometimes overt—that it’s a bad idea for white women to marry black men, Shrew in performance can operate to uphold audiences’ belief that patriarchy is ultimately a good thing that is necessary not only for an orderly society but for women’s happiness as well. In this way, the portrayal of a romantic love-at-first-sight that can pleasurably save audiences from having to come to grips with “the barbaric ideology that the play works on”7 is appropriated to the purposes of an ultimately politically conservative reading of the text that, far from attempting to qualify its patriarchal conclusions as Garrick or Fletcher do, actually endorses them.8 Jonathan Miller’s 1987 Shrew for the Royal Shakespeare Company used its largely intact text, Renaissance costumes, and historically minded program notes to identify the play as an artifact from another time to which a contemporary ideological critique of its presentation of gender was completely inapplicable.9 The success of the production depended in large part on the persuasive performances of his leads, Brian Cox and Fiona Shaw, who were able to trace the growth of an instant attraction on Petruchio’s part through a slow recognition on Kate’s that they could be deeply meant for each other. Shaw felt Kate’s isolation and lack of options. Even despite finding personal happiness with the one man in the world who understood her, Shaw’s Kate knew the system that raised them both remained in force, “a system of patriarchy that is so strong it is unchangeable even for its own good.”10 I saw Miller’s Shrew and I still remember being utterly convinced by Cox and Shaw’s long kiss after “Come on and kiss me, Kate.” It gets in the way sometimes when I’m trying to teach a more gender-skeptical Shrew to my undergraduates, just as glimpses of the “barbaric” gender ideology that limits what can be possible between its lovers have a way of breaking through in performance. In Keith Digby’s 1980 Edmonton production, the comic tone of Petruchio’s arrival at his wedding—the last scene before the intermission—was sharply broken when he led Kate off to his house with his sword at her throat. Digby explained that he regarded Petruchio’s treatment of Kate as “brutality in a concerted application to destroy Kate’s

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individuality through her total subjugation.”11 Conall Morrison’s 2008 Shrew for the Royal Shakespeare Company took the coercion that he read in the induction as a keynote for the entire production, whose main plot took place as a show put on for the enjoyment of a female aristocrat (instead of the nameless Lord of Shakespeare’s induction) and her party. The traveling actors enlisted Christopher Sly to play Petruchio in a production full of physical violence—slapping people, smashing his servants’ heads into walls, getting kneed in the crotch by Kate. The production’s violence effectively played a class critique of the power Shakespeare’s Lord has to “practise on” (Ind. 1.34) the drunken Christopher Sly: this is the way rich people believe poor people act, exaggerated by the actors so as to guarantee a generous wage from a pleased primary auditor. But the class politics of Sly-as-Petruchio, with its potential to force recognition of the way the play naturalizes its endorsement of the economic underpinnings of marriage in Padua, seems to have broken in encounter with the text’s gender politics. After hearing Kate deliver her final speech with absolute sincerity, Petruchio raises her from the floor at his feet to kiss her—only to end by throwing her down again and raping her. This is too much even for the aristocratic lady and the company that pulled Sly into their show, and they all leave without him, abandoning him to his previous state. Many modern Shrews, with their emphasis on compulsion and violence—sometimes slapstick, sometimes earnest—may be understood as following in the wake of Charles Marowitz’s 1973 adaptation The Shrew, which rejected Renaissance comedy’s trajectory toward marriage as the happy ending that could unite true lovers and bind up all social wounds. Marowitz instead began from the conviction that marriage was a “hoked­up, endlessly spoofed Magic Ritual” that supposedly “could transform a grubby reality,” and chopped up and rearranged the Folio text in order to make “contact with” its “essence.”12 In Marowitz, after Kate agrees that the sun is the moon if Petruchio says it is, she repeats the excuse that the pageboy disguised as Sly’s wife offers in Shakespeare’s Induction, and asks to be excused from her lord’s bed in accordance with her doctor’s advice. Her father, previously beaming at her new obedience, immediately condemns her polite demurral as “monstrous arrogance” (76) and helps the servants hold her down while Petruchio bends her over a table and rapes her. The next time we see her, she is dressed like a patient in a mental hospital and delivers Kate’s final speech of submission in a flat, halting monotone, her father prodding her awake as she seems ready to lose consciousness. She is accompanied by a young couple dressed for their

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wedding, who smile broadly on either side of her as they are all photographed for posterity. Marowitz’s scorn for the notion that marriage can resolve ills so deeply woven into the fabric of a hypocritical society lends credence to Stevie Davies’ assertion near the end of the twentieth century that the steady flow of productions of The Taming of the Shrew is little more than an effort “to save Shakespeare’s face.” For her, the play’s apparently permanent place in the modern repertory is evidence of a compulsion to prove that he “cannot have meant what he seems to be saying,” because what the play seems to be saying is in fact as reactionary as we think it is.13 And yet, the sneaking suspicion remains that he did mean exactly that. He promulgated views of gender, sex, and the marital foundations of an orderly society that fill us with ill-ease, and did so in a comedy that at times doesn’t seem that funny at all. Ironically, the first two acts of the love tragedies Romeo and Juliet and Othello may be more full of romantic feeling than Shrew, a comedy ostensibly about marriage. Shakespeare’s Shrew does offer us a bit of this same kind of pleasure in breaking arbitrary but rigid custom when Lucentio exchanges identities with his man Tranio so as to gain access to Bianca; a young gentleman pretends to be a servant in order to steal a few minutes with the girl he loves. (In Fletcher, Livia is the one who escapes, with help from her cousin Byancha and Petruchio’s friend Tranio.) Strikingly, though, lovers’ joyous impulse to break the rules stifling expression of their desire doesn’t work here either, even though this is a comedy. Instead, Lucentio’s infatuation with Bianca blows up in his face when, after their wedding, she feels free to display the contempt and indifference she has apparently harbored all along. Her final, public rejection—“The more fool you for laying on my duty” (5.2.134)—seems to indicate that she chose him only because he was a more palatable partner than the dull Gremio or elderly Hortensio. Love had nothing to do with it. The troubling Lucentio-Bianca plot is always silently ignored by viewers who want to see the play simply as a lusty, muscular comedy about a bright young fellow whose intentions are indeed to wed wealthily in Padua but to do it honorably and to have a ripsnorting good time in his marriage.…Gender aside, Petruchio did his Kate a favor, and Shakespeare’s closing scene of mock-subservience on Kate’s part is merely a happy device—a joke on the company for a merry ending.14

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The italics above are the original reviewer’s, suggesting that when you knock gender out of the equation, Petruchio’s taming methods make sense and work to everyone’s advantage. The problem with this line of reasoning, of course, is that it’s hard to act as if gender difference doesn’t really matter in a Renaissance play about marriage, or in a modern production of such a play, reading and viewing as we must through our own histories as well as through the web of the play’s textual history. The current political moment, in which misogyny seems to have gained new credence in public discourse at least in the United States, makes it all the more difficult merely to set gender aside as we read The Taming of the Shrew. If its subplot suggests romantic love is not much more than a trick young women play on gullible men so they can escape their fathers’ control, the main plot of The Taming of the Shrew even more unsettlingly suggests that following proper gender scripts is more important to building a happy marriage than romance. Borrowing from a long tradition of shrew-­ taming tales, Shakespeare revels in having an unruly woman’s behavior subdued into more acceptable patterns through being deprived of food, water, and sleep, until she is willing to say that day is night just to make her husband stop harassing her. To be sure, the taming methods in Shrew aren’t as violent as those in A Merry Jeste of a Shrewde and Curste Wyfe, Lapped in Morrelles Skin, For Her Good Behavyour (c.1580), a major source for the main action of the play. There, the elder daughter’s husband beats her with rods until she bleeds and forcibly wraps her in the salted hide of his favorite horse, which he has killed, until she agrees to obey him in all things. Her mother berates him for his violence against her child, but he threatens to give her the same treatment, to the approval of his guests, and she is forced to withdraw.15 Like Shakespeare, John Lacey’s Restoration adaptation Sauny the Scott (performed 1663, published 1698) is less physically violent than Merry Jeste, but is even more insistent than Shrew on a public display of a husband’s power to compel his wife’s submissiveness. Margaret, the Restoration play’s Kate figure, has refused to speak to Petruchio because of his domineering behavior. He claims to take her rebellious silence to mean that she’s dead and vows a funeral procession that will carry her mute body “through the Strand as far as St. James’,” presumably on the way to burying her alive, until she finally breaks and swears complete obedience to him: “[H]enceforth I will not dare to think a thought shall Cross your Pleasure, set me at Liberty, and on my knees I’ll make my Recantation.”16 Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize anticipates Lacey’s

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device of a fake death, when Petruchio gives it out that Maria’s cruelty has killed him. She reacts before the assembled company in a completely unsentimental manner—“He was a foole”—but when he miraculously rises from his coffin declaring his “misery,” her father harshly berates her: “Go to him whore—If he perish, / I’ll see thee hang’d my selfe” (122). Though the genders of the presumably dead people are different, both Lacey’s and Fletcher’s scenes end as Shakespeare’s does, with the female character’s surrender to husbandly authority. Perhaps we should be grateful for small gifts. It’s true that Lacey’s Margaret gives her husband the right to control her thoughts as well as her speech and actions in front of a gathered city audience, but at least Petruchio isn’t beating her with sticks until they break, beating her some more, and then wrapping her bleeding body in a salted horsehide. Neither does Kate’s father call her a whore or threaten her life. Still, despite the fact that no one is getting physically brutalized (except perhaps for Hortensio), The Taming of the Shrew is not an easy play for modern viewers to accept. We know what happens in those taming narratives and we know the weight of social condemnation arrayed against women who are labeled as insufficiently feminine, quiet, or submissive.17 Samantha Spiro’s Kate in the 2012 production at Shakespeare’s Globe knew, too, as she seemed to direct much of her final speech at women in the audience, challenging them to judge her submission not by their yearning for a companionate partnership but by what they knew from their own experiences was likelier.18 The 2016 Globe Shrew was transposed to early twentieth-­century Ireland and punctuated with passages from Yeats’ “Easter 1916,” as though Kate’s struggle against Petruchio bore relationship to the doomed struggle of “MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse” against the British empire; she succeeds in proclaiming her dignity, even if she knows that her marriage will entail her necessary surrender. Presumably Shakespeare’s Bianca also knows, which is why she waits until after she has her own household and access to some money of her own to reveal her true attitudes. Contemporary productions can be more direct in addressing Shrew’s gender trouble, as the play has emerged as a rich site for theatrical experimentation with the text’s rigid divisions of identity and experience. In the spring of 2016, Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre staged an all-­ male production and New York’s Public Theatre mounted an all-female Shrew, for example, while the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre followed with a 2017 production with an all-female cast and a new induction identifying

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the performance as a production by a suffragists’ club in 1919.19 All these Shrews, with the attention they forced onto the play’s construction of masculinity and femininity and onto the inescapably historical and political nature of the battle between Kate and Petruchio, were deemed appropriate for observation of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death: watching Shakespeare now means reading his presentation of gender, and reading gender in Shrew has increasingly come to mean reading and playing against the “ideological toxicity”20 that inheres in its text. Perhaps we would all be less theatrically stressed if we just let the play fade out of the active repertory, but we don’t seem to be able to let it go. Luckily, new information about women’s domestic authority, liberties of speech, and relations to money and property continue to add dimension to what we see and are alienated from on Shakespeare’s page.21 The history through which we can see the play now is more detailed and more internally varied than what supported Miller’s Thatcherite Shrew in 1987. But entirely apart from our more detailed sense of what the play can mean, we must still recognize a certain kind of brusqueness built into it. If our ideals of romantic love can be ideologically marshaled against us to mystify the economic and gendered functions of bourgeois marriage, Shrew doesn’t even bother to mystify them. Petruchio gets the money and social credit he’s always sought and Kate gets to emerge as a normal woman, one who refuses to claim the “supremacy” (5.2.168) in marriage that rightfully belongs to husbands. Her final assertion of the self-evident correctness of wifely obedience is her ticket to social respectability. As she drives the froward wives back into the whole company, she performs her achievement of proper womanhood, just as Petruchio has been acting like a properly socially ambitious man throughout the play and is finally publicly rewarded for it. Their community performances of correctly gendered behavior amplify the interest in pretending to high status that Christopher Sly takes up so easily in the Induction. He quickly figures out the forms of gentility that he must follow in order to have sexual access to the young page dressed as his wife: “What must I call her?… Al’ce Madam or Joan Madam?” (Ind. 2, 106–107). Indeed, in the play proper, community-approved forms of masculinity and femininity are the gateway into the increased social standing that can result from successful navigation of the Paduan marriage market, as we see in the conventionally feminine Bianca’s inundation by interested suitors. The instrumentalities governing love are the public face of the rules that simultaneously regulate access to money and secure social

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standing as well. Petruchio decides to marry—and to marry well—after his father’s death: financial security and social credit can materially assuage his loss.22 But what would happen to Shrew if it decided to alter the grounds on which it bases its notions of gender, family, and love’s relationship to them both? Deliver Us from Eva does just that, using its characters’ blackness as its lever. Looking at race in Deliver Us from Eva suggests that blackness can offer a way of shifting the register of the play’s implicit acknowledgment that its great goals of courtship and marriage are about the continuation of society rather than about the personal satisfaction of those social actors who must play their gendered parts. The film celebrates the value of sexual pleasure. And, by setting the play’s coupling conflicts within a family of black women seeking to balance their romantic relationships with their loyalty to each other and to their female-headed household, Deliver Us from Eva critically decenters patriarchal authority and allows its partners to maintain their affectionate bonds as they see fit. With a focus on a group of sisters instead of on two young women under the authority of their father, Hardwick’s film allows us to imagine family as a unit defined by care and mutuality instead of, or at least in addition to, authority and money. Its black riff on The Taming of the Shrew advances alternative models of family, femininity, and love. One way of understanding the difference that reframing Shrew’s story in the terms of black popular culture might make is to look at its opening credits sequence. A group of men and women perform Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson’s “You’re All I Need to Get By,” which was originally recorded by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell in 1968 and stayed at number one on the Billboard R & B charts for five weeks. The song declares that romantic love is all that matters: “There’s no, no looking back for us, / We got love and sure ‘nough, that’s enough, / You’re all, all I need to get by.” At the end of the credit sequence, the performers go over to a book on a lectern, open its front cover, and the film begins—with those same singers and dancers revealed to be the actors in the film. Does this opening lead us to believe that somehow, Ashford and Simpson’s joyous assertion of complete mutuality between emotional equals will carry over into the story that book apparently contained, the story we’re about to see? The Shrew’s Induction, with its nameless Lord who decides to “practise” on a “drunken man” (Ind. 1.34) and see if he can lead him into behaving even a bit less brutishly, is almost completely segregated from the action that follows (except for a few lines at the end of 1.1). Sly’s

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disappearance leaves us to wonder—perhaps with increasing ill-ease—what exactly the Induction has to do with the rest of the play. The idea that the mood and content of the prefatory material will somehow carry over into the main action, as we are invited to assume that the “love and determination” Ashford and Simpson celebrate might, can be seen, in a very different register, in A Pleasant Conceited Historie, Called the Taming of a Shrew, the 1594 play commonly thought to bear some kind of textual relationship to Shakespeare’s The Shrew until Edmund Malone flatly rejected that assumption in his 1790 edition. In A Shrew, Christopher “Slie” remains visible to us on the upper stage, making his drunken observations on the Kate-Petruchio main action until he passes out. His cockeyed commentary on the main action invites us to see it as a performance of reality, rather than as reality itself; we can never entirely forget that we’re watching a version of what might have to happen in order to get the proper roles in a marriage straightened out. His final comments also imply that there’s nothing benevolent about taming; it’s not for a shrewish woman’s own good. Rather, he boasts that I know now how to tame a shrew, I dreamt vpon it all this night till now, And thou hast wakt me out of the best dreame That euer I had in my life, but Ile to my Wife presently and tame her too And if she anger me.23

Slie’s big takeaway from the play is that it empowers him to beat women in his own real life. There’s none of this threat of aggression in Shakespeare’s incomplete Induction, but his opening does depart from A Shrew by regendering his Sly’s argument. While Slie enters his play drunk and arguing with a male Tapster, Shakespeare has his Sly argue with a female Hostess whose authority to call the watch on him he denies by telling her his family “came in with Richard Conqueror” (Ind. 1.4). This distinctly lower-class brawler claims he’s better than an exasperated businesswoman whose inn he wrecked, thus neatly intimating the play proper’s conviction that social status and male superiority are supporting members of the same social structure. “Go to thy cold bed and warm thee” (Ind. 1. 7–8), he sneers at her, falling back on a sexual insult after first proclaiming his own superior origins, to deflect her legitimate anger at him for breaking her glassware.

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An accommodationist approach to Shrew’s gender rigidities—rigidities which are related to characters’ class standing in such a way as to strengthen the foundations of Padua’s formidably entrenched social order—might clear out enough space to allow a pair of singularly well-matched individuals to find happiness together. In this reading, Kate’s problems are personal, and Petruchio has just the right medicine to help her see the error of her ways.24 But if Padua’s problems are systemic—both sexual and class insults against a woman are weapons available even to a falling-down male drunk like Christopher Sly—and Kate is not merely a maladjusted individual, then a whole social order has to change if romantic love, and the genre that’s supposed to be devoted to unfolding its course, are going to be able to work at all. Under a closed social system such as the one in The Taming of the Shrew, heterosexual pairing-off may only exist to serve the purposes of that system itself; but that so many black characters we have seen encounter so many roadblocks in the pursuit of love suggests that their race additionally disqualifies them from romance, just as we have seen marriage regulated by the requirements of class and patriarchal privilege. A sexually frustrated racist calls the police to roust Demetrius and Meena out of bed, and the police arrest them. This sense that affectionate bonds between people of color are under surveillance grows from the way that black female characters are socially disqualified in the works I’ve discussed. At least in part because black women have been made to seem less vulnerable, less feminine, less desirable, the black men in Harlem Duet’s three time periods yearn after white intimate partners instead, condemning themselves to death. Despite her recognition that she has the talent, Sheila in A Branch of the Blue Nile is still convinced that she is too lower-­ class and that her sexuality as a black woman carries so much negative baggage that adding what she perceives as the burden of Cleopatra’s allure would be fatal for her. Tall, dark Mosquito doesn’t even look “American,” much less like the kind of woman who can attract a lover as devoted as Father Ray. Black bodies—especially black female bodies—are insecurely moored to narratives of family structure and continuance, implicated in the decline of morality, regarded as emblems of sexual excess, defect, and even danger to the state. Black women’s general out-of-placeness extends to the Deliver Us from Eva’s genre of romantic comedy. We might think of the female stars of romantic comedy as modern descendants of Shakespeare’s Kate (if we can forget that last scene): bossy, talkative, energetic, self-absorbed, and somewhat off-center.25 But whether these romantic comedy movie heroines are

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embodied as they were in their first classic Hollywood iterations by actresses like Clara Bow, Carole Lombard, and Barbara Stanwyck, or from the late 1980s past the turn of the twenty-first century by a Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Kate Hudson, or Katherine Heigl, they were white. Their characters’ comically domineering qualities were tempered by the love they always found, but were also representationally associated with their conventionally attractive (thin and usually blonde and blue-eyed) looks. The homogenized whiteness of Hollywood’s fin-de-siècle romantic comedies, even when set in big cities which are filled off-screen with people of many different racial and cultural backgrounds, worked to define the genre as much as did its frequent propagation of disturbing convictions about the nature and progress of true heterosexual love.26 Representationally, romantic comedy’s persistent whiteness worked to associate its carefully curated heroines with the notion of romance itself, moving beyond the people who populated these films and the whitened neighborhoods they haunted to colonize the genre and its narrative matter as well. In this way, we might see these films’ containment of their mouthy, determined, energetic heroines within marriage as part of the process of this imposition of whiteness, a racial reiteration of Shrew’s efforts to naturalize its conservative gender and class politics. “Marriage is for white people,” according to some cynical observers of black women’s exile from pop culture depictions of love and courtship.27 When black women did appear in these Hollywood rom-coms, they were usually sidekicks or office buddies, sometimes even complete strangers, but rarely truly integrated into the action of the main plot. Black people’s phantom or ancillary presence in movies about white people serves to make the romantic dilemmas of these white people, as well as—paradoxically—the otherwise unmarked whiteness that structures and valorizes their heroism, beauty, and readiness for love, visible.28 But several romantic comedies with all- or nearly all-black casts were released in the fifteen or so years before Deliver Us from Eva, running happily parallel along the strictly white grounds that supported ideas about love and marriage in medium-to-large budget Hollywood romantic comedies.29 In the best of these films, focusing on black would-be lovers and shifting the terrain of romantic comedy’s imagined communities to black spaces went beyond merely transposing the genre’s tropes to engage in a kind of world-­ building—based on existing ways of being, but heightened, intensified, re-imagined. Mounting these love stories against the grain of an order of representation that tended to erase black women constituted a way of

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writing a new origin story—laying what Ashford and Simpson celebrate as “the right foundation”—for romantic comedy. Deliver Us from Eva’s re-­ setting of The Taming of the Shrew oppositionally re-reads the history of black women’s erasure from representation—particularly from representation in love stories—to invoke a kind of “counter-memory”30 capable of serving as the incubator of a new present and of pointing toward the possibility of a more fully loving romantic future for all. The film focuses on the four beautiful Dandridge sisters peacefully living together in the same house in Los Angeles. The three younger sisters are happily partnered, the two of them who are married living in the family home with their husbands, but the eldest daughter Eva—who took over leadership of the family (and began accumulating a joint financial fund) at the age of eighteen after both parents were killed in a traffic accident— remains single. Her first love asked her to choose between him and her sisters, she explains, and when she chose her sisters, “he dumped me.” She has a lingering sadness over the rejection but she is not sorry she chose to stay and support her younger sisters: “They needed me.” Her life is busy and useful, with her career as a city health inspector, and volunteer activities leading her church choir and convening a book club. She is a little bossy—she corrects the pastor at her church when she misquotes the Bible and offers her suggestions for her next sermon—and disdainful of most of the men she meets, but she has both a life that works and a set of understandable motivations for her behavior. The Dandridge sisters’ female-oriented world whose loyalty is grounded in sorrow is comically replicated in the beauty salon where one of them works. Ormandy’s is “a female sanctuary…the way the whole world ought to be,” the owner declares.31 (Mike, the boyfriend who is trying to get Eva’s middle sister Bethany to let him move in without marriage, feels differently about Ormandy’s, calling it a “man hell”.) Her sisters’ partners find Eva so overbearing that they hatch a plan to pay a local lothario, Raymond, to woo her and get her to leave town with him. With Eva out of the way, we are given to suspect, the men hope to find it easier to get access to each individual sister’s share of the family’s joint estate. In an example of what Gérard Genette calls textual “transformation,” Deliver Us from Eva’s portrayal of an elder sister whose abrasive personality drives potential suitors away, thereby complicating other men’s access to her more conventionally desirable younger sisters, obviously recalls The Taming of the Shrew, even though it never directly mentions the Shakespeare play at all.32 But the film’s family dynamics operate very differently from

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the play’s. Here, there is no authoritative father exercising his unquestioned right to sell his daughters to the highest bidder. Ambitious, hardworking Eva has control over her own life, as well as a group of supportive sisters who love her and are proud of her accomplishments. Her sisters are happy to discover that she seems to be falling for a new man and eagerly welcome him into the family circle—a response that frustrates her brothers-­ in-­law’s plot to get her to leave. Reversing the pattern of The Taming of the Shrew, in which the newly married Kate leaves her father’s house and goes to a place where she knows no one—not even her new husband—the sisters in Deliver Us from Eva assume that their family can and will expand to contain another loved partner, and that this expanded community is expected and normal. After the affective starvation economy of Shakespeare’s play, Hardwick’s film portrays an emotional world where there is finally enough fully reciprocated love to go around: between Eva and her sisters, between her sisters and their lovers, and finally between Eva and Raymond, who ends by following her to Chicago and declaring his feelings for her. While such an ending reinforces Shrew’s heterosexual pair-bonding norm and will sadly work to reduce the sisters’ female community by removing Eva from it, the film’s resolution can only come about when Raymond lets go of his privilege as what the sisters’ partners call a “real man,” and admits he has fallen in love. Compared with Kate’s isolation in The Taming of the Shrew—from her sister, within her family, at her husband’s house—Eva and her sisters share deep emotional intimacy, and are part of a larger community of female friends at Ormandy’s, where they go for a weekly girls’ night out to drink and laugh and gossip about sex. In grief’s shadow the Dandridge sisters have built a life together as well as progressed individually: the second sister Kameelah is in medical school, the middle sister Bethany is a cosmetologist at Ormandy’s, and the youngest, Jackie, is a college undergraduate. They cherish the home they have built together, and their emotional bonds with each other, with their friends, and with their husbands. Their rich connectedness is what defines them, and what distinguishes them from Kate, whose experience of intimacy will—at best—extend only to her husband.33 Beyond its validation of both the men’s loving desire for their partners and the sisters’ love for Eva, the movie also gestures toward another context pointing to its interest in rewriting the racial as well as the patriarchal terms that drive The Taming of the Shrew. Eva and her sisters are surnamed “Dandridge,” the same name as the iconic black 1950s movie star Dorothy

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Dandridge, the first black performer to be nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress. As does its sideways glance at Shakespeare, the movie’s borrowing of Dorothy Dandridge’s name functions as an example of what Judith Butler calls “an appropriation that seeks to make over the terms of domination, a making over which is itself a kind of agency, a power in and as discourse, in and as performance which repeats in order to remake—and sometimes succeeds.”34 In recirculating Dorothy Dandridge’s name, the film subtly rejects the social suppression of black women by casually invoking a powerful counter-discourse of beauty, desirability, and fame.35 It appropriates aspects of The Taming of the Shrew’s plot outline without replicating them exactly, in ways that at least open the possibility of questioning the absoluteness of the Shrew’s imposition of patriarchal authority—and my other texts’ reiteration, in their various tenors, of black women’s exile from love and partnership—as normal.36 Butler supplemented her own earlier work on gender as performance (a notion whose applicability to The Taming of the Shrew is obvious) by acknowledging that sex and gender are structured through race as well as by the dictates of heterosexuality.37 In doing so, she joins discussion of the limits of how a Lacanian view that sees subjectivity as constructed in and by gender fails to account for how equally fundamental perceptions of race, and especially perceptions of racial identity that are produced through the gender of individual subjects, are to understanding the world.38 For my purposes here, while we have seen how race has structured notions of black women’s gender identity, we’ve done so in imaginative worlds that are shaped by their contact with manifestations of white authority: the border between the United States and Mexico, the American Deep South, “Harlumbia,” Shakespearean theatres and texts. In most of these spaces, black women are fugitives, emotional outlaws, objects of constant social surveillance. Eva reports to two white men at work, but her minister (who appreciates her service to her full congregation while she is also clearly annoyed by her bossiness) and Ormandy, who presides over a busy shop with only one or two white stylists or customers, are black women. The blackness that organizes Eva’s life works to support and nurture her in ways that Shakespeare’s Kate, isolated and subject to social strictures beyond her control, does not experience. If the happy sociability of Deliver Us from Eva’s black sisters and friends silently corrects Kate’s unhappy isolation in The Taming of the Shrew, the film does its most interesting work with the masculinity of Raymond and the men who solicit him to get Eva out of their lives. At first, he declines

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their offer—“I’m a lover, not a con man”—but once he sees her in action in her professional role, he is intrigued by the challenge she presents: “Man, if I can get that woman, I’ll go down in the player Hall of Fame.” In a characterization that may recall Petruchio’s rootlessness after his father’s death, Raymond is a loner who tends to bounce from job to job and place to place, getting by on his wit and formidable charm. He begins by poking at Eva’s class status, as Christopher Sly does in a more aggressive manner: he uses the refrigerated truck he drives for his job as a butcher’s deliveryman to take her on their first date, instead of the snazzy red vintage convertible he drives to her house. (“Saves wear and tear,” he explains with a smile.) At the restaurant he seeks to throw her further off-­ balance by pretending to choke on his food, and she is so embarrassed by the scene his supposed near-death creates that she wants them to leave immediately. The place they chose is one of the few places she feels safe patronizing; her reputation as a health inspector is so fearful, she tells him, that “Most places I won’t even go to—they try to poison me.” Back in the truck, she writes him off as yet another one in her string of awful dates with men who aren’t good enough for her, bluntly telling him, “My job pays more than yours does.” But because they are actually attracted to each other, and because Raymond is unusually skilled at reading her, she agrees to see him again. Slowly, they build a relationship and he finds that he’s falling for her, despite her occasional high-handedness, her out-of-­ tune singing along to Chaka Khan’s “Sweet Thing” on the radio, and her dorky inability to tell a joke. Still, he doesn’t defend her fully to her brothers-­in-law, partly because he knows how much they dislike her—“We didn’t say she was a bad person,” one of them explains; “we said she was an irritating person”—and partly because he is protecting the depth of his own feelings for her. They had pushed him to sleep with her quickly so as to speed up the process of getting her to agree to leave town with him. But Raymond hesitated, realizing that fulfilling their plan would be harder if he let himself become too deeply involved with her. Sex would make him vulnerable. What viewers and readers of The Taming of the Shrew have had to project into a play that would otherwise feel pretty emotionally bleak—the belief that Kate and Petruchio are sexually and emotionally connected to each other—Deliver Us from Eva makes an explicit part of the script. When Raymond and Eva finally do become lovers, after sharing their stories of loss and making do and moving forward, she offers him companionship as well as sex: “I could be your really good friend.” The next day, she strolls

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into Ormandy’s in a casual midriff-baring outfit instead of her usual neutral-­colored professional separates, uses slang instead of her typical sharply enunciated standard English, and exults—to her friends’ glee— that she and Raymond had “burned a hole through the floor!” Eva’s brothers-in-law are also emotionally connected to their wives, even as they plot against Eva; Tim, married to the second sister, wants to have a baby, while Dwayne loves holding his wife close as much as he loves having sex with her. (He resents being called away from home for an emergency meeting about Raymond’s early progress with Eva: “Me and my wife were cuddling!,” he tells the other men in some annoyance, then corrects himself for public consumption. “I mean, I was hitting it real manly and I didn’t get to finish!”) It seems, though, that they are connected to the three younger Dandridge sisters in a narrower way than the women are to each other, or than they can be to Raymond once they realize that he’s falling in love with Eva. The main advantage Tim sees in getting Raymond to lure Eva away is that he and the other men could more thoroughly privatize their relationships. “We can have all their love!,” one of them exclaims as they hatch the plot; they seem to believe that the sisters can be bound to each other, or to them, but not to both. But once the sisters realize that Eva has fallen in love with Raymond, their impulses are quite different. They want to welcome him into the family, to honor her by recommitting themselves to the work and study her sacrifices made possible for them, and to celebrate her happiness by signing over the entire family fund to her. One might compare their open-hearted gesture of delight and gratitude with Baptista’s gift of a second dowry to Petruchio, given in recognition of how successfully he had brought Kate into compliance with her role as obedient daughter and object of exchange. As the Dandridge sisters restage love, imagining it as elastic and inclusive, they also revalue money.39 But the brothers’ plot resists this remade notion of love. While Eva’s sisters are happy that she’s found someone who loves her and prepare to open their home to him, their lovers are enraged that she has given up the chance for the new job in Chicago in order to stay in Los Angeles with Raymond. Raymond is also delighted, so taken with Eva and with the idea of possibly making a permanent home that he starts his own Tupperware collection. The brothers’ farfetched solution to the derailment of their plans to get rid of Eva is to kidnap Raymond and tie him up in a warehouse long enough to convince Eva that he was killed and his body completely incinerated in a flaming car wreck. (Mike, the boyfriend of the

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third sister Bethany, is a policeman who falsifies the accident report.) This way, supposedly, she would realize that with no reason to stay home she might as well start over in Chicago. However, Raymond escapes and interrupts his own funeral service, where he confesses the original plot to Eva. He tells her that he’s sorry for what he did, but that he’s in love with her and is a changed man. Her reaction is to punch him and walk out of the church, and her sisters follow her. One can hardly blame her. Even though she knew her brothers-in-law had put him up to dating her, she had no idea about his acquiescence in the larger plot to drive her out of town, or even about the plot’s existence. At this point, we see how sharply the men’s interests actually diverge from the sisters’. It apparently never occurred to them that faking Raymond’s death was probably too high a price to pay for pushing Eva out of her role as de facto head of their blended household, or that the women they love would grieve with her for her loss and rage against them for their cruelty.40 The kind of masculine authority they admired in Raymond and sought in their own (ideally) newly atomized relationships is exposed as a brutal sham. At this point, Deliver Us from Eva could have veered off into a truly radical direction—having the sisters throw their partners out, say, and starting over with just the four of them. Instead, it backs down from its own demonstration that any legitimacy in the men’s desire to have more authority over their own households is overwhelmed by the thoughtless extremity with which they feel entitled to pursue it. Some weeks after the fake funeral, Eva’s brothers-in-law are still apologizing to her and her sisters, but she herself has let go of her anger. She apologizes to them for the times she was “a pain in the ass” and tells them that her sisters still love them. But not until they are sure that Eva has made her peace will the sisters take their lovers back and move forward in their relationships— Mike proposing to Bethany and Bethany accepting, Kameelah agreeing to try to get pregnant, Jackie promising to begin reading her textbooks to Dwayne again. They dissolve the family fund and split it equally among the sisters, and Eva leaves for Chicago still estranged from Raymond. The separation that had seemed so difficult to engineer and served as the pretext for the whole plot against her actually feels anticlimactic when it arrives. The film’s final scene opens with Eva in Chicago at her new job. She’s called down into the lobby of her building where she finds Raymond, trying to stay astride a white horse named Romeo. (Back in Los Angeles

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before her parents died, Eva had ridden regularly and wanted to be a trainer; Romeo was her regular mount at the stable she frequented.) He tells her he’s sold his house, quit his job, paid to board Romeo in the area for a year, and wants her to take him back. He has sacrificed his role as a man’s man and willingly disrupted his life in the same way he and the other men assumed Eva would give up her far more stable and comfortable life to follow him. She considers only a moment before kissing him, mounting Romeo—with him awkwardly swinging up behind her—and riding off up a broad metropolitan avenue, in front of a beaming audience of people from her office building. What they’re celebrating, in contrast with the final guests in The Taming of the Shrew, is a man’s gesture of fidelity and commitment. The film proper ends with this reversal of Shrew’s gender script; the man and not the woman is the one vowing devotion. Even so, as much pleasure as the sidewalk witnesses of Raymond’s declaration get from watching Eva forgive him and take him back, such extravagant romantic gestures are not for everyone. “Will you buy a horse for me?,” one older woman at the scene asks a man who is presumably her husband. “Nope,” he smiles down at her. Like Sauny the Scott’s performance of Margaret’s taming, Raymond’s oath takes place before a wide urban audience and so perhaps secures some social credit for him—at least in the eyes of Eva’s approving office mates— at the same time, he surrenders his authority as a skilled sexual game-­ player. Eva and Raymond ride away to the sounds of Stevie Wonder’s 1969 hit “My Cherie Amour.” With the song playing, the film freezes into a still photograph, the final image in the book from the opening credits, which now closes again with “The End” embossed on its back cover. The classic soul love songs that open and close the movie bracket Eva and Raymond’s story between sounds and sentiments that first entered popular culture almost 35 years before its release. (“Sweet Thing” is from 1975.) This stylistic belatedness serves as a kind of aural induction, completely containing the action as the induction in Shrew, with its disappearing Christopher Sly, does not. As we saw earlier, Shakespeare’s Induction has offered fertile material for contemporary remountings of the play, inviting modern adapters to use it to think again about the ways in which gender and class shape its main action. Hardwick’s invocation of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, however, doesn’t work by prompting us to see an old story in a new way. Rather, it asks us to see Eva and Raymond’s contemporary love story in terms of the historical and cultural past. The classic soundtrack, especially its opening and closing songs by titanic black

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figures in the history of popular music, functions as the same kind of institutional touchstone as the Sunday church services where we see Eva’s choir perform or the gossipy female space of Ormandy’s beauty shop. “You’re All I Need to Get By” and “My Cherie Amour” locate Eva and Raymond’s love inside a pre-integration urban, communal society that pulled black people of all classes together (Mike is a cop, Dwayne is a mailman, and Tim, whose wife Kameelah is a medical student, seems more securely middle-class than either) and united them behind the struggle for civil rights which formed so much of the backdrop for American soul music of the mid- to late-1960s.41 That is to say that the music that opens and closes the film remembers and revives a different kind of historical context than the ones called on to define black people’s sexuality for the purposes of white supremacy, and to bar black women from the social imaginary of romantic love. The shared intimacy it conjures is so powerful that it escapes the realm of memory, or the friends and family reception at the end of The Taming of the Shrew, and parades down an open avenue. Invoking black romance through recirculating the sounds of sweet soul music voices the kind of nostalgia that Svetlana Boym reminds us often crops up after revolution.42 The civil rights movement that made the Dandridges’ progress possible and hosted their loyalty to one another and to their community is in the characters’ past, more active during their late parents’ lifetimes than during their own. In hearkening back to a period whose activist politics had forced real structural changes designed to weaken the foundations of white supremacy—for example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the film succeeds in connecting the Dandridge sisters’ present to a collective, progressive time before, a time whose values and accomplishments boldly contradicted the stories that white people had told about black ones up to that time. But, in the present world of Deliver Us from Eva, white people aren’t the intended audience. Black people are, especially black women, as the film draws on the materials from a vast archive—institutions and cultural productions that include Chaka Khan as well as Shakespeare (and not only The Taming of the Shrew but that white horse named Romeo)—to generate and to praise a meaningful past of its own. To be honest, Deliver Us from Eva’s rewriting of the relations between gender, class, and romantic love is not as entirely utopian as I’d like it to be, much as The Woman’s Prize walks its gendered role reversal back to give Petruchio the last word and to identify Livia’s pregnancy as a function of her father’s economic power rather than as the outcome of her joyful

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sex life with Rowland. After the closing credits, the film includes a short scene where Telly, the one male hairdresser at Ormandy’s, is talking to his girlfriend on the phone. We have been led to believe that Telly is gay. Earlier in the film, when Mike comes into the shop to talk to Bethany, Telly flirts with him, but when Mike tells him that he doesn’t “go that way,” Telly says resignedly, “Damn, let me call headquarters,” and mimes picking up his phone: “Hello? Yeah, it’s me. Yeah. Take Mike off the list.” In the woman’s space of the salon, the coercive rules of male heterosexual dominance that Mike is trying to use against Eva are exposed as laughably irrelevant, as he’s pinched by a female customer and playfully regarded as a mark for secret gay recruitment strategies. Yet, even though it invokes female sexual aggression and male homosexuality to challenge the logical world that gives rise to the brothers-in-law’s plot against Eva, the film eventually steps back from Telly’s apparent refusal to comply with heterosexual norms. We learn that he’s only pretending to be gay, because “In L. A., a straight hairdresser is an unemployed hairdresser.” A truly sexually dissident space of gender performance capable of undermining the brothers’ simple-minded reading of Eva’s situation—she “just needs a man”—is revealed to be not quite so dissident after all, since at least one man remains capable of successfully manipulating women for his own economic advantage. The film finally leaves the notions of “real” black masculinity that attracted the brothers to Raymond and that Raymond rejected when he went after Eva intact.43 A partial induction of its own, half-bracketing the film’s complete enclosure by Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, Telly’s quick phone conversation reopens the door to the kind of masculine performance we have just seen exiled from the front of the movie’s mind. Men pretending to be something they’re not so they can get women to do what they want remain in force. We can lead The Taming of the Shrew to the water of gender equity, it seems, but we can’t make it drink—or at least drink the full trough.

Notes 1. Focus Features, USA.  Starring Gabrielle Union (Eva) and LL Cool J (Raymond). 2. On Shrew adaptations, see Barbara Hodgdon, “Katherina Bound: Or, Play(K)ating the Strictures of Everyday Life,” PMLA 107.3 (1992): 538–533; and Diana Henderson, Collaborations With the Past: Reshaping

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Shakespeare Across Time and Media (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2006), 155–201. 3. The Woman’s Prize: Or, The Tamer Tamed, in Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (London, 1647), 99, 98. I’ll provide subsequent references parenthetically in my text. 4. I cite the facsimile of the first 1756 edition (London: Cornmarket Press, 1969), 56. 5. On how Catharine and Petruchio smoothed out the harsh gender politics of the original as part of Garrick’s larger project of reproducing Shakespeare’s works as exemplars of British cultural value, see Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 195–198. 6. Paola Dionisotti, who played Katharina, is quoted in Carol Chillington Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today, ed. Faith Evans (London: Women’s Press, 1988), 23. 7. Graham Holderness, The Taming of the Shrew in the “Shakespeare in Performance” series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 34. 8. On the conservative potential of the text, see Holderness’ discussion of John Barton’s 1960 Shrew for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 26–48, and Penny Gay, As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women (London: Routledge, 1994), 86–119. 9. In his book Subsequent Performances (New York: Viking, 1986), Miller particularly blamed American theatre practitioners for refusing to produce Shakespeare in a properly historical manner, so that “a play like The Taming of the Shrew…suddenly becomes a test case for feminism. Petruchio is portrayed as a typical male chauvinist pig, and Katherina as a bullied victim” (119). 10. Rutter, Clamourous Voices, 24. 11. Samuel Leiter, Shakespeare Around the Globe: A Guide to Notable Postwar Revivals (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 677–678. 12. The Shrew: Freely Adapted from William Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ (London: Calder and Boyars, 1975), 19, 20, 11. 13. The Taming of the Shrew, Penguin Critical Studies (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995), 43. Gay shares Davies’ skepticism: “It is worth questioning whether The Taming of the Shrew would still be in the dramatic repertoire if it did not have the magic name ‘Shakespeare’ attached to it” (86). 14. Sylvie Drake, “Does Shakespeare Get a Fair Shake in ‘Shrew’?,” Los Angeles Times, 27 October 1986. Drake is reviewing the Ensemble Theatre Company’s production of Marowitz’s The Shrew. 15. Emily Detmer, “Civilizing Subordination: Domestic Violence and The Taming of the Shrew,” SQ 48.3 (1997): 273–294, argues that the differ-

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ence between Petruchio’s means of subduing Kate and the more physically violent means of enforcing husbands’ authority that we see in works like A Merry Jeste reflects greater social disapproval of wife-beating, but does not indicate the growth of a more egalitarian view of marriage or lesser acceptance of what modern readers would call domestic violence. On the larger shrew-taming tradition, see Jan Harold Brunvand, “The Folktale Origin of The Taming of the Shrew,” SQ 17.4 (1966): 345–359; David Wootton and Graham Holderness, eds., Gender and Power in Shrew-Taming Narratives, 1500–1700 (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2010); and Frances Dolan’s edition of the play (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), 8–14. 16. Sauny the Scott, or, The Taming of the Shrew: A Comedy (London, 1698), 44, 45. 17. The feeling of the final scene, with Petronius’ threats and Maria’s unequivocal submission, is what makes me doubt that the play is as protofeminist in mood as some modern critics have argued it is. Also see Lucy Munro’s introduction to her New Mermaids edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), xiv–xv. 18. Liz Schafer, “Let’s Play Master and Servant,” Times Higher Education Supplement, 25 July 2013, 30. Farah Karim-Cooper discusses Spiro’s performance in “Re-creating Katherina: The Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare’s Globe,” in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception, and Performance, ed. Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 303–312. 19. Here, I must thank Coppélia Kahn and Linda Woodbridge, who led a wonderfully lively seminar on “The Taming of the Shrew and its Afterlives” at the 2018 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, where I had the opportunity to circulate a version of some of the material in this chapter and to read other members’ papers on Shrews from around the world. 20. Mark Lawson, “The Taming of the Shrew—A Lovable Take on a Dislikable Play,” The Guardian.com, 6 June 2016. 21. For example, Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Pamela Brown, Better a Shrew Than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), and Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 22. Maddy Costa, “The Taming of the Shrew: ‘This Is Not a Woman Being Crushed,” The Guardian.com, 17 Jan. 2012, quotes David Farr, who directed the play in 2002 for the Nottingham Playhouse: “Here is a man

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in grief, who takes out his disaffection and anger on other people almost as an experiment.” 23. N. p. Leah S. Marcus discusses the relationship between The Shrew and A Shrew in Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton (London: Routledge, 1996), 101–131. Also see Dana Aspinall, “The Play and the Critics,” in her edited collection ‘The Taming of the Shrew’: Critical Essays (New York: Routledge, 2002), 17–21. 24. In Clamorous Voices, Fiona Shaw noted that her director Jonathan Miller “was translating the ‘taming’ of the shrew into ‘therapy’, the realignment of the delinquent” (6). 25. Critical histories of romantic comedy on film include Claire Mortimer, Romantic Comedy (London: Routledge, 2010); Cherry Potter, I Love You, But…: Romance, Comedy, and the Movies (London: Methuen, 2002), and Kathrina Glitre, Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934–1965 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). None is interested in race in romantic comedy, however. 26. On the whiteness of the genre, see Linda Mizejewski, “Queen Latifah, Unruly Women, and the Bodies of Romantic Comedy,” Genders 46 (2007); and Karen Bowdre, “Romantic Comedies and the Raced Body,” in Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Stacey Abbott and Deborah Jermyn (London: I.  B. Tauris, 2009), 105–116. On the generally flat and repetitive characterizations of women in romantic comedies, see Mindy Kaling, “Flick Chicks,” The New Yorker 87.30 (2011): 36–37. 27. This is the title of Joy Jones’ op-ed in the Washington Post, 26 March 2006. She quotes a skeptical middle-schooler in her after-school mentoring program, who was interested in hearing about what it took to be a good parent, but dismissed the worth of talking about marriage. 28. See Tania Modleski’s classic discussion, “Cinema and the Dark Continent: Race and Gender in Popular Film,” rpt. in Sue Thornham, ed. Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 321–335; and Janell Hobson, “Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach to Film,” WSQ 30.1–2 (2002), 46–48. On the social effects of accepting whiteness, “a subject that…seems not to be there as a subject at all,” as the “natural, inevitable, ordinary way of being human” (44) see Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29.4 (1988): 44–65. 29. For discussions of some of these films, see Grace Barber-Plantie, “Why 1992–2002 was the Golden Age of the Black Romantic Comedy,” http:// www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/boomerang-brownsugar-black-romantic-comedies, December 2016; Mia L.  Mask, “Buppy Love in an Urban World,” Cineaste 25.2 (2000): 41–45; Maryann Erigha, “Black Women Having it All: The Rise of Professional Women in African

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American Romance Films,” The Black Scholar, 48.1 (2018): 20–30; and Belinda Edmondson, “The Black Romance,” WSQ 35.1–2 (2007), 202–205. 30. bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 131. Hooks’ essay is a useful companion to Modleski and Hobson, note 28 above. 31. On the role of beauty shops as female refuges, see Jennifer Scanlon, “‘If My Husband Calls, Tell Him I’m Not Here’: The Beauty Parlor as Real and Representational Female Space,” Feminist Studies 33.2 (2007): 308–334. 32. In Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, tr. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), Genette characterizes “transformation” as the relationship between a text and one that has preceded it. The later text may not directly refer to its original at all, but is “unable to exist” without that original, and evokes it “more or less perceptibly without necessarily speaking of it or citing it” (5). 33. My thinking about the Dandridge sisters’ social connection is much informed by Terrion L. Williamson, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), which discusses how the experience of home has enabled black women in the United States to be makers of a social order in ways that are often invisible to society at large. 34. Bodies That Matter, 137. 35. The recirculation of Dandridge’s image continues in a 2013 song by Janelle Monáe, “Dorothy Dandridge Eyes”: “It’s too late, you’re hypnotized / She’s got Dorothy Dandridge eyes / And you love her, you love that girl.” On the racial dynamics of Dandridge’s tragically brief Hollywood career, see Marguerite H.  Rippy, “Commodity, Tragedy, Desire: Female Sexuality and Blackness in the Iconography of Dorothy Dandridge,” in Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, ed. Daniel Bernardi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 178–209. 36. As Hutcheon writes in A Theory of Adaptation, “Adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication” (7). 37. In Bodies That Matter, 167–186. 38. As noted in my previous brief discussion of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, his analysis of how colonialism and racism shaped subject formation had very little to say about black women. While he insisted that subjects were formed and granted access to language as much within race as they were within gender, his view of the colonial subject was most deeply engaged with its relation to masculinity, thus depoliticizing black women’s formation within a racialized public order.

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39. In another move toward refining his character, Garrick’s Petruchio declines Baptista’s offer of a second dowry. “My Fortune is sufficient,” he tells him, then presumably gestures toward Kate as he adds, “Here’s my Wealth” (56). 40. Unexpected female solidarity also appears in The Woman’s Prize, when women from the area march on Petronius’ house to defend Maria, who has locked herself inside as part of her plan to refuse to consummate her marriage until Petruchio changes his shrew-taming ways. “Arme, and be valiant,” one of these allies urges, while another reminds them all to “Think of our cause” (106). 41. On the history of soul music and its political implications, see Shana L. Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2013; Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Pantheon Press, 1988); and Joshua Clark Davis, “For the Records: How African American Consumers and Music Retailers Created Commercial Public Space in the 1960s and 1970s South,” Southern Cultures 17.4 (2011): 71–90. 42. In “Nostalgia and its Discontents,” Boym notes that the “political and cultural manifestations of longing” that so often follow political revolutions are not necessarily for the old orders they displaced—nostalgia for Jim Crow certainly doesn’t animate Deliver Us from Eva—but also yearn for “the unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that have become obsolete” (10). Critics like Nelson George, note 41 above, believe that the desegregation that was one practical result of the civil rights movement actually worked to erode black institutions and black sociality, not to preserve them into the future. 43. Kobena Mercer notes that just as a Fanon-derived analysis of the production of raced sexuality is mute on women, it also has virtually nothing to say about how a politics of race might shape same-sex desire in the essay “Decolonisation and Disappointment: Reading Fanon’s Sexual Politics,” in The Fact of Blackness, 114–131.

References Aspinall, Dana. “The Play and the Critics.” In ‘The Taming of the Shrew’: Critical Essays, edited by Dana Aspinall, 3–38. New York: Routledge, 2002. Barber-Plentie, Grace. “Why 1992–2002 Was the Golden Age of the Black Romantic Comedy.” bfi.org.uk, December 2016. https://www.bfi.org.uk/ news-opinion/news-bfi/featur es/boomerang-br own-sugar-blackromantic-comedies. Bowdre, Karen. “Romantic Comedies and the Raced Body.” In Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Stacey Abbott and Deborah Jermyn, 105–116. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009.

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Boym, Svetlana. “Nostalgia and its Discontents.” Hedgehog Review 9, no. 2 (2007): 7–18. Brown, Pamela. Better a Shrew Than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Brunvand, Jan Harold. “The Folktale Origin of The Taming of the Shrew.” SQ 17, no. 4 (1966): 345–359. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New  York: Routledge, 1993. Costa, Maddy. “‘This is Not a Woman Being Crushed.’.” The Guardian, 17. Jan. 2012. Davies, Stevie. The Taming of the Shrew. Penguin Critical Studies. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995. Davis, Joshua Clark. “For the Records: How African American Consumers and Music Retailers Created Commercial Public Space in the 1960s and 1970s South.” Southern Cultures 17, no. 4 (2011): 71–90. Detmer, Emily. “Civilizing Subordination: Domestic Violence and The Taming of the Shrew.” SQ 48, no. 3 (1997): 273–294. Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Dolan, Frances, ed. The Taming of the Shrew. Boston: Bedford Books, 1996. Drake, Sylvie. “Does Shakespeare Get a Fair Shake in ‘Shrew’?” Los Angeles Times, 27 October 1986. http://articles.latimes.com/1986-10-27/entertainment/ ca-7602_1_petruchio. Dyer, Richard. “White.” Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 44–65. Edmondson, Belinda. “The Black Romance.” Women Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1–2 (2007): 191–211. Erigha, Maryann. “Black Women Having It All: The Rise of Professional Women in African American Romance Films.” The Black Scholar 48, no. 1 (2018): 20–30. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Fletcher, John. The Woman’s Prize: Or, The Tamer Tamed. In Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, 97–123. London, 1647. Garrick, David. Catharine and Petruchio. Rpt. London: Cornmarket Press, 1969. Gay, Penny. As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women. London: Routledge, 1994. Glitre, Kathrina. Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934–1965. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm and Blues. New York: Pantheon Press, 1988.

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Henderson, Diana. Collaborations With the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media. Ithaca: Cornell University, 2006. Modleski, Tania. “Cinema and the Dark Continent: Race and Gender in Popular Film.” Rpt. in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, edited by Sue Thornham, 321–335. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Hobson, Janell. “Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach to Film.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1–2 (2002): 45–59. Hodgdon, Barbara. “Katherina Bound: Or, Play(K)ating the Strictures of Everyday Life.” PMLA 107.3 (1992): 538–533. Holderness, Graham. The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare in Performance series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Hutcheon, Linda with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Jones, Joy. “Marriage is for White People.” Washington Post, 26 March 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/ AR2006032500029.html. Kaling, Mindy. “Flick Chicks.” The New Yorker 87, no. 30 (2011): 36–37. Karim-Cooper, Farah. “Re-creating Katherina: The Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare’s Globe.” In Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception, and Performance, edited by Gordon McMullen, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Virginia Mason Vaughan, 303–312. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Korda, Natasha. Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Lacey, John. Sauny the Scott, or, The Taming of the Shrew: A Comedy. London, 1698. Lawson, Mark. “A Lovable Take on a Dislikable Play.” The Guardian.com, 6 June 2016. Leiter, Samuel. Shakespeare Around the Globe: A Guide to Notable Postwar Revivals. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Marcus, Leah S. Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton. London: Routledge, 1996. Marowitz, Charles. The Shrew: Freely Adapted from William Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’. London: Calder and Boyars, 1975. Mask, Mia. “Buppy Love in an Urban World.” Cineaste 25, no. 2 (2000): 41–45. Mercer, Kobena. “Decolonisation and Disappointment: Reading Fanon’s Sexual Politics.” In The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, edited by Alan Read, 114–131. Seattle: Bay Press for London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996. Mizejewski, Linda. “Queen Latifah, Unruly Women, and the Bodies of Romantic Comedy.” Genders 46 (2007). Miller, Jonathan. Subsequent Performances. New York: Viking, 1986.

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Modleski, Tania. “Cinema and the Dark Continent: Race and Gender in Popular Film.” Rpt. in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, edited by Sue Thornham, 321–335. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Mortimer, Claire. Romantic Comedy. London: Routledge, 2010. Munro, Lucy, ed. The Tamer Tamed. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Potter, Cherry. I Love You, But…: Romance, Comedy, and the Movies. London: Methuen, 2002. Redmond, Shana L. Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Rippy, Marguerite H. “Commodity, Tragedy, Desire: Female Sexuality and Blackness in the Iconography of Dorothy Dandridge.” In Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, edited by Daniel Bernardi, 178–209. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Rutter, Carol Chillington. Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today, edited by Faith Evans. London: Women’s Press, 1988. Scanlon, Jennifer. “‘If My Husband Calls, Tell Him I’m Not Here’: The Beauty Parlor as Real and Representational Space.” Feminist Studies 33, no. 2 (2007): 308–334. Schafer, Liz. “Let’s Play Master and Servant.” Times Higher Education Supplement, 25 July 2013, 30. Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Williamson, Terrion L. Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Wootton, David, and Graham Holderness, eds. Gender and Power in Shrew-­ Taming Narratives, 1500–1700. London: Palgrave Macmillan 2010.

CHAPTER 7

Afterword: Adapting Shakespeare, Forgetting Race in King Charles III—Future History?

One persistent theme in this book has been that intimacy inflects race. Familial intimacies—the connections we make with the ones we love, the bonds into which we are born and through which we are formed—become the proving ground where my characters first experience both their blackness and their womanhood. I hope I’ve made clear that adaptation can be a powerful means by which what has been forgotten, erased, or suppressed about these characters—characters formed in cultures whose interests were served by this suppression—can reappear. And yet adaptation itself, mounted without a conscious will to reimagine black women as historical actors and historical agents, holds out no automatic guarantee of re-presentation. We can find an example of this lost opportunity for reimagining race as it makes itself known through intimate connection—although not strictly a Shakespearean one—in the 2017 version of Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III that was broadcast on BBC Two and the Public Broadcasting System in the United States.1 I say not strictly Shakespearean because, although this imagined future history of the current royal family is not an adaptation of any one play in particular, it is written in blank verse and is deeply informed by characterizations and motifs from Shakespeare’s history plays; the form answers the subject. Forced to abdicate, Charles III (Tim Pigott-­ Smith) interrupts his son William’s coronation by seizing St. Edward’s Crown and putting it on his son’s head himself in a moment that recalls Richard II’s public capitulation to Bolingbroke. Like the ghosts of Richard © The Author(s) 2020 J. Green MacDonald, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World, Palgrave Shakespeare Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3_7

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III’s victims, the ghost of Princess Diana appears to her sons and her former husband, except that she tells both William and Charles that they will be “the greatest king England ever had.” Bartlett’s Duchess of Cambridge is conventionally attractive, far more serious and complex than the public realizes, and wholly committed to her son’s future—an English Margaret of Anjou whose grandfather was a coal miner in the north. His unmotivated and dissatisfied Prince Harry spends most of his time hanging out drinking with his friends, like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, waiting somehow to be saved. Where the television production departs both from the staging of its original and from the absence of black women in the Shakespearean materials it draws on is in its choice to cast two characters with women of color: the opposition leader Mrs. Stevens, played by Priyanga Burford (as “Mr. Stevens,” the role was played in the West End, on Broadway, on British tour and in Sydney by three white actors), and Jess Edwards, the woman Harry falls in love with. In the television film, Jess is played by black British actress Tamara Lawrance; the role was originated by white actress Tafline Steen and played on tour and in Sydney by Lucy Phelps. In the main action of the play, the new king is almost immediately confronted by Parliament’s passage of a new law designed to limit freedom of the press. All he has to do is sign it, but he feels he cannot. If he signs it, he fears, he will be sacrificing whatever individual moral prerogative he can still possess within the strictures of his largely ceremonial role in a constitutional monarchy: For if my name is given through routine And not because it represents my view, Then soon I’ll have no name, And nameless, I have not myself.

On top of his personal distaste for being expected to do something he doesn’t want to do, he also believes the law will make it too easy for politicians, ostensibly acting in the name of “public sensitivity,” to censor dissenting voices rather than “being held unto account” for the public actions they take. It’s difficult to say he’s wrong about this, but even so, Charles is a troublesome advocate. Driven partly by principle and partly by vanity (as well as by the long decades he spent “ling’ring for the throne”), he crucially lacks insight into the effects of his political self-assertion, and he is too stubborn to relent even if he did understand. Taking Mrs. Stevens’

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advice to read up on the example of William IV, who dissolved Parliament in 1831 in a worthy (but failed) attempt to force electoral reform, Charles follows William’s example and provokes a constitutional crisis that, in the wake of the old queen’s death, splits the anxious nation right down the middle and alarms his elder son and heir. As the King calls for a tank to be stationed on the grounds to defend Buckingham Palace from republican demonstrators furious that he has muzzled the House of Commons, the Duchess—afraid that the current crisis might result in the end of the monarchy and of her son’s chance to succeed to the throne—summons the Prime Minister to a private meeting and persuades her husband that he, as Prince of Wales and as the father to a future king, must intercede to reassure the public and put an end to his father’s obstinacy. After leading his father to believe that he will appear with him so as to present a united royal front, William smoothly takes the microphone to announce instead that with his wife’s help he will work to see that the new law is instituted and that breaches between crown and Parliament are healed. Charles’ abdication in his son’s favor, outwardly packaged as a soothing demonstration that the monarchy remains faithful to the needs of the people, follows shortly. This main plot thus does feel like a Shakespearean history play, even if it’s not: lots of intrigue, a personally flawed king confronting political challenges he is temperamentally unprepared to meet, fathers and sons whose emotional debt to each other complicates the fact that they must also live together in a state of constant, if sometimes muffled, conflict. Where King Charles III departs from this existing model is in the way that it marshals multiraciality in its imagination of the monarchy and the nation as a family in crisis. The film version begins with a somber racially mixed crowd—white, black, Asian—watching Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral procession through the streets of London. Much more than its original London staging, the television film emphasizes to us that the future history of Britain is multiracial. Alone at a late-night gyro shop after Jess breaks up with him due to a brewing blackmail scandal, Harry tells the black proprietor Paul (played by Zimbabwean-American actor Nyasha Hatendi, who also appeared in the original stage production), “I think I might quit my job.” Waiting to cash out and lock up, Paul offers some commiseration: “We all have shit jobs, don’t we?” But he can’t keep himself from acidly pointing out to the younger white man whom he apparently doesn’t recognize that he didn’t “want to be rude, but perhaps your mum and dad can help you out,”

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acknowledging the economic privilege that must protect anyone who can quit a job just because he doesn’t like it. When Harry tells him that his mother is dead, though, the proprietor’s wall of judgment falls: “Mine too.” The conversation easily moves from these personal losses to the nation’s recent loss of a queen who had been on the throne longer than most of her subjects had been alive. People are “terrified,” Paul says: They don’t know where they live. They don’t know what Britain is.

Like the enigmatic Mrs. Stevens, but without her political self-interest, Paul offers observation and perspective on the royal characters’ dilemma from the outside. Beginning by taking the nation’s class and racial distinctions for granted—he is polite but scornful of the white man who can afford to throw a job away—he ends by invoking a larger sense of the nation as a kind of family, with the queen as a loving matriarch who is now gone. The new king is a weak replacement precisely because he seems to lack family feeling: “His mother dies and he don’t even cry? What’s that about?” If Shakespeare imagined the ideal king as a careful gardener, as we see in Richard II, Paul more prosaically compares the late lamented queen to the “one core piece of steel” that holds a large cone of meat together on the vertical rotisserie in his shop. If you take the steel skewer away, the meat “all falls apart. Maybe she is what held it all together.” Paul’s acknowledgment of the operations of racial and class difference within a national family bound together in grief and fear of the future might seem to gain energy when the film adds sexual intimacy to these issues, with the film’s casting of a black Jess. When his friends first usher her into the VIP room at a club to meet Harry, she immediately tells him that she thinks the royal family is a waste of space, but the two are also clearly mutually attracted. They end up spending the night together— drinking, bowling, eating at Dans le Noir—and he wakes up in her bed the next morning, fully clothed. When she appears, he exclaims at “everything we did last night!” “This whole life,” he says, gesturing at her messy kitchen, his memories of the night before: “I want more.” He tells her that she’s beautiful, and even though she reminds him she hates everything he stands for, they kiss and she agrees that he can call her. Despite Paul’s acknowledgment that race and class are part of “what Britain is,” love cannot quite assimilate Jess into a modern civic order, as it did for Shakespeare’s Jessica (but could not do for her black maid,

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impregnated by Lancelot Gobbo). A malicious ex threatens to sell nude photos she once texted him to the tabloids unless she pays him off, and she asks Mr. Reiss, Harry’s unctuous Palace security man, for help. He refuses to give her money to prevent the texts’ publication, and tells her that the easiest way to protect Harry is to break up with him: “You don’t understand, miss. You’re not part of the family.” Not a member of the royal family, not even a monarchist, she also somehow stands outside the national family over which the monarchy is supposed to benevolently preside. Bartlett’s script seems to me to lose an opportunity at the beginning of this scene to take advantage of Lawrance’s casting as Jess. She tells Reiss that she supposes the Palace thinks “I’m quite an unusual match” for Harry “because of class.” He responds sourly, “Yes, well, that’s hardly a surprise.” Is the class difference between her and Harry all that matters in the public outcry against their relationship? Surely the fact that she is black is irrelevant to Charles, who warmly welcomes her into the family and offers her “the royal protection and respect” even after the tabloid publishes the cellphone photo she sent to her ex-boyfriend. Class doesn’t seem to have impeded the rise of the film’s Duchess of Cambridge, who is also a commoner with working-class roots, although a white one with apparently rich parents. At any rate, Harry is ready to defuse any controversy about his match with Jess by renouncing his title and living with her as a commoner. No longer a prince, he assures his father that nevertheless “I’ll be your son,” in a remark that suggests he believes that the compound phrase “royal family” can be neatly broken in two. The publication of Jess’ photo directly challenges Charles’ defense of a free press, connecting the lovers’ subplot to the main action. But the degree to which her exclusion from “the family” may be constituted in race as well as in class, as Jess assumes—which would add another layer to the play’s invocation of family as a principle of national as well as personal connection—is left unaddressed.2 To be sure, blackness and multiraciality do appear inside the film beyond the crowd observing the queen’s funeral procession. “Ronco Da Cuíca” (roughly “roar of the drum”), a song written in the Afro-Brazilian style of the London studio duo De Lata, plays in the background as Harry wakes up in Jess’ apartment, in a departure from the moody, measured choral pieces composer Jocelyn Pook wrote for the main action. Jamaican reggae star Sister Nancy’s 1982 classic “Bam Bam” is on the jukebox in the gyro shop where Paul muses on the crisis in the national family. Music by black

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people and in styles originated and popularized by black people underscores Harry’s recognition that there is a world elsewhere than the palace, and that he’s fallen in love with a woman who has made herself a home there. The film asks this music in the background to speak for blackness. Jess’ blackness also remains in the background, but is simultaneously inescapably present. Humiliated, she shows Harry the front page of the Sun on Sunday, which has published one of her nude photos on its front page with the caption “Leaked cheeky selfie of Harry’s bit on the side.” She’s a secret, “on the side,” but somehow still available to be broadcast as an instrument of public mockery. The tabloid’s use of her body distorts and denies the sexual self-authorization she exercised when she first took the photo and sent it to the ex who betrayed her, and it derides the possibility that she could ever be anything but an amusing secret to the man who, as it turns out, really loves her. Reading a black Jess’ front-page nudity in light of King Charles III’s convictions about who can become “a part of the family” points us to the ambient desire and derision surrounding black women and their bodies in popular culture, and to how this complex response can frame and ground white fictions of probity and order. In the film, Jess doesn’t find out until she arrives at Westminster Abbey for William’s coronation and discovers her name is not on the guest list that Harry intends to break up with her and remain royal. He loves her still, but says that continuing their relationship would be too threatening to the nation’s stability at this critical moment. Although he yearns for a meaningful private life with her, in which he could be more than “a ginger joke” trailing in his older brother’s wake, he feels bound by definitions of family that strictly limit his courses of action—an understanding which leaves him open to his brother’s manipulation. As their father’s political crisis begins to unfold, William—without revealing how troubled he is by the political implications of Charles’ intransigence for himself and his son—tells Harry that “I hope that I can turn, as I’ve always done, to you,” and reminds him of how their late mother made them swear always to stand together. At the moment of abdication, the two princes do stand firmly together, but in a way that threatens to shatter the human bonds their mother wanted them to preserve. While Harry tries to persuade Charles to abdicate, invoking the idea of a divided nation newly united in common purpose by telling him that “the people turn to William,” the elder prince speaks more harshly. If Charles refuses to sign the press law, William will see to it that he loses all contact with his sons—assuming the

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right to speak for Harry—and grandchildren. Without a steel core that binds it together despite its internal differences, family becomes a threat, a weapon of punishment and exclusion. Jess’ racialized fate suggests that perhaps the notion of family, whether national or in terms of blood, has always implied this potential for exile, as she walks away alone through the gathering crowds.

Notes 1. Bartlett’s play, directed by Rupert Goold, premiered at London’s Almeida Theatre in April 2014. 2. In “Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, and the New Play That is Tone Deaf to Diversity,” Globe and Mail.com 29–30 September 2017, theatre critic Kelly Nestruck found the play’s failure to cast a nonwhite actress as Jess when it began its run in Toronto in the fall of 2017 to be “a real failure of the theatrical imagination,” both because the real Prince Harry was in Canada at the time, going public with his relationship to the biracial American actress Markle, and because repeated stagings of Bartlett’s “daring and creative” play were proving themselves to be “still…quite boring, conventional, and even backwards when it comes to race.”

References Bartlett, Mike. King Charles III. Dir. Rupert Goold. PBS, 2017. Nestruck, Kelly. “Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, and the New Play That is Tone Deaf to Diversity,” Globe and Mail.com 29–30 September 2017.

Index

A A Branch of the Blue Nile, 77–98, 98n3, 99n14, 100n23 Adams, Abigail, 53, 54 Adaptation, 4, 62, 136, 158n5, 161n36, 167 Ahmed, Sara, 93 Akhimie, Patricia, 2 A Merry Jeste of a Shrewde and Curste Wyfe, 142 Antony and Cleopatra, 9, 78, 81, 84, 86, 89–91, 94, 101n30, 102n38, 102n40 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 19 A Pleasant Conceited Historie, called The Taming of A Shrew, 146 Archive, 3, 33, 41n45 Ashford, Nick, 145 B Baartman, Saartje, 30 See also Venus Hottentot Baker, Josephine, 30

Baldo, Jonathan, 122 Bastet, 30, 32 Bate, Jonathan, 116, 117 Black women, 2, 29, 89, 95, 112, 113, 117, 145, 147, 168 Blackness, 47, 48, 52–54, 58, 59, 67n1, 87, 88, 91, 116, 120, 130n23, 136, 145, 151, 171, 172 Bogdanov, Michael, 138 “Borders” school, 18 Boym, Svetlana, 124, 156 Bramen, Carrie Tirado, 18 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 79 Butler, Judith, 151 C Catharine and Petruchio, 137, 138, 158n5 Césaire, Aimé, 26, 82 Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, 143 Christopher “Slie”, 146 Christopher Sly, 144 See also Christopher “Slie”

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Green MacDonald, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World, Palgrave Shakespeare Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3

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INDEX

Cleopatra, 78, 84–87, 90–98, 100n22, 101n30, 101n31, 102n38, 102n39, 102n40, 147 Color consciousness, 87 Color, 59, 89 Colorblind casting, 91 Colorism, 58, 89 Corregidora, 17 Counter-memory, 149 Croll, Doña, 91 Cyprus, 23, 24, 38n27, 110, 116, 124, 128 D Daileader, Celia, 116 Dandridge, Dorothy, 150–151 Daughters of Nzingha (Mosquito), 31, 33 Davies, Stevie, 141 De Lata, 171 Deleuze, Gilles, 49 Deliver Us From Eva, 10, 136, 145, 147–149, 151, 152, 154, 156 Desdemona (Morrison), 23, 109–117, 125, 131n30, 131n31 Diaspora, 17, 19, 36n9, 62 Digby, Keith, 139 Dixon, Melvin, 123 Donne, John, 22, 23, 31, 33, 38n21, 38n23 E Egypt, 24 Egypt, Tobago, 92 Ellington, Duke, 120 Ethiope, 2 F Fairness, 1, 32, 48, 59

Fanon, Frantz, 88–91 Fuentes, Marisa, 3 G Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 18 Gaye, Marvin, 145, 155, 157 Genette, Gérard, 149 Gillies, John, 23 Greenwood, Mississippi, 49, 57, 64–66 H Haitian Revolution, 77, 86 Hall, Stuart, 26 Handkerchief, 111, 114, 115, 121, 125–128, 131n30, 131n31 Harlem Duet, 121, 125, 127, 128, 135 Othello, 5, 111, 113, 114, 125 Harlem Duet, 9, 109–128, 129n11, 135 Hardwick, Gary, 136 Holland, Sharon, 7 Hutcheon, Linda, 58 I Iago (C. Bernard Jackson), 6, 110, 113–117 Induction, 145 The Taming of the Shrew, 10, 140, 155 Deliver Us From Eva, 10, 140 Inheritance, 48 Interracial love, 53, 55 Interracial lovers, 54 Interracial or cross-ethnic casting, 53 Interracial relationships, 55 Interracial sex, 54, 60, 64 See also Miscegenation

 INDEX 

J James, C. L. R., 28 Jones, Eldred, 3 Jones, Gayl, 8, 17–35, 35n1, 35n3, 36n8 Jones, Lucille, 33 K Khan, Chaka, 152, 156 Kidnie, Margaret, 4 King Charles III (Mike Bartlett), 167 Kristeva, Julia, 51 L Lam, Wilfred, 29, 30 Lurhmann, Baz, 55 M Macready, William, 53 Mandela, Nelson, 119 Mandela, Winnie, 119 Marowitz, Charles, 140 Masculinity, 26, 30, 50, 102n40, 114, 144, 151, 157, 161n38 Memory, 77–80, 83, 86, 109–111, 113, 117–119, 121, 122, 124–126, 129n15 The Merchant of Venice, 2 Method acting, 85 Migration, 36n9, 49, 66, 126 Miller, Jonathan, 139 Miscegenation, 54, 55, 60, 116 Mississippi Masala, 8, 47–67, 70n31, 70n32, 71n37, 71n40, 71n42, 72n44, 72n45, 89, 135, 136 Morgan, Jennifer, 3 Morrison, Conall, 140 Morrison, Toni, 5

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Mosquito, 8, 17–35, 35n3, 36n8, 39n32, 40n35, 49 Multiraciality, 169, 171 Mustakeem, Sowandé, 3 N Nair, Mira, 49, 62, 71n42, 72n44 Négrophilie, 30 The New Confessions of Othello, 28, 35 Nora, Pierre, 122 O Omeros, 83, 97 Othello, 4, 9, 17–35, 37n19, 38n24, 38n26, 38n27, 39n28, 40n36, 40n42, 53–55, 63, 67n3, 68n13, 68n14, 109–128, 129n6, 129n7, 130n17, 131n31, 135, 139, 141 Ottoman Empire, 24 P Paris, 24, 29, 30, 32, 50, 51 Paulin, Diana, 112 Performance history, 115, 116 Performance, 82, 84, 86, 94 Pook, Jocelyn, 171 Price, Lloyd, 31 Primitivism, 30 Public Theatre, 143 R Race-mixing, 60 Ricouer, Paul, 118, 119 Roach, Joseph, 112 Roach, Joseph, 115 Romantic comedy, 147

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INDEX

Romeo and Juliet, 47–67, 67n1, 67n3, 68n8, 68n9, 68n10, 68n11, 68n12, 69n15, 141 S Sauny the Scott, 142 Sears, Djanet, 9, 113, 120 Sessions, Jeff, 20, 37n12 Seth, Roshan, 61 Shakespeare Theatre (Washington, D. C.), 143 Shakespeare’s Globe (London), 54, 143 Shakespeare, William, 1, 3–8, 10, 11, 21, 26, 28, 31, 34, 35, 47–49, 52, 54, 55, 77, 78, 81, 82, 84–87, 89, 90, 92, 94, 117, 135, 137, 138, 142, 144, 149, 151, 156, 167–173 Antony and Cleopatra, 9, 78, 81, 86, 89–91 As You Like It, 2 Merchant of Venice, The, 2 Othello, 4, 9, 17–35, 37n19, 38n24, 38n26, 38n27, 39n28, 40n36, 40n42, 53–55, 63, 67n3, 68n13, 68n14, 109–128, 129n6, 129n7, 130n17, 131n31, 135, 139, 141 Romeo and Juliet, 47–67, 67n1, 67n3, 68n8, 68n9, 68n10, 68n11, 68n12, 69n15, 141 Sonnets, 111 The Taming of the Shrew, 10, 135–157, 158n7, 158n9, 158n12, 158n13, 158n15, 159n16, 159n18, 159n19, 159n20, 159n22, 160n23 The Tempest, 26 The Winter’s Tale, 3, 66

Simpson, Valerie, 145 Sister Nancy, 171 Skin color, 87, 89, 94 Sonnets, 47–49, 54 Spillers, Hortense, 12n9, 12n10 Spiro, Samantha, 143 Surrogation, 112, 113, 115 T Tagore, Sharmila, 61, 62 Talawa Theatre Company, 91 The Taming of the Shrew, 10, 135–157, 158n7, 158n9, 158n12, 158n13, 158n15, 159n16, 159n18, 159n19, 159n20, 159n22, 160n23 Tempest, A (Césaire), 26 Terrell, Tammi, 145 Till, Emmett, 57, 60 V Venice, 23, 24, 28, 30, 38n24, 110, 112, 113, 116 Venus Hottentot, 30, 32 W Walcott, 82, 90, 91 Walcott, Derek, 8, 77–98, 99n6, 99n12, 99n13, 99n14, 99n15, 100n18, 100n23, 103n42, 103n46 “Egypt, Tobago,” 92 Henri Christophe, 77, 78, 80, 81, 84, 87 Omeros, 83, 97 “On Empire,” 81, 89 What the Twilight Says, 91

 INDEX 

Washington, Denzel, 21, 61 Whiteness, 116, 148 Willow Song, 110, 111 The Winter’s Tale, 3, 66

The Woman’s Prize, 137, 138, 142, 156, 158n3, 162n40 Wonder, Stevie, 155 Worthen, W. B., 86

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