Acknowledgments

Home , Agnes Martin, Earle Hyman, Maurice Berger, The Othello Syndrome

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

s Harry Berger has shown in his acknowledgments at the beginning of Making Trifles of A Terrors, the act of acknowledging is emotion- ally laden for Shakespeareans because of Stanley Cavell’s 1969 essay on King Lear called “The Avoidance of Love.” I do not want to avoid; therefore, I first acknowledge the inspiration of the late Tay Gavin Erickson, especially for my interest in the visual. I have received help from many directions, and I am particularly grateful to the Shakespeareans engaged in race studies who have built the intellectual realm in which I currently dwell. Scholars whose work has enabled me to feel the energizing sense of participating in this collective project include Dympna Callaghan, Kim Hall, Arthur Little, Ania Loomba, Joyce Green MacDonald, Patricia Parker, Francesca Royster, and Ayanna Thompson. I could not have made it this far without the support of Jean Howard, Coppélia Kahn, and Virginia Vaughan. During the final stages of completing this book, I greatly benefited from three-month research fellowships at the Clark Art Institute, whose visiting scholars program is led by Michael Holly, and at the Folger Shakespeare Library, directed by Gail Kern Paster. The rich intellectual and social mix at each institution has been a special pleasure. Marathon critic Harry Berger has kept me going with the extraordinary example of his staying power—from him I have gleaned what it means to be committed for the 172 Acknowledgments long haul, to go the distance. Now dispersed in distant locations and fields, my three children continue to be my mainstays and I greet them from within the pages of this book. Though I met Lisa Graziose Corrin after completing the manuscript for this book, my subsequent discovery of her writing in Mining the Museum, Going for Baroque, Loose Threads, and Give & Take has sustained and strengthened the excitement I feel about cross-historical connections between the cultural past and contemporary art. I thank Lisa not only for seeing me through the book’s production phase but also for changing my life. Previously published articles have all been revised for inclusion here. Chapter 2 is a slightly altered version of “Rita Dove’s Shakespeares” in Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women’s Re-Visions in Literature and Performance, ed. Marianne Novy (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 87–101, and used with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. I appreciate Rita Dove’s generosity in again granting permission to quote from her poetry. Different versions of chapters 4 and 6 appeared as “‘Yet you can quote Shakespeare, at the drop of a pin’: The Function of Shakespearean Riffs in Leon Forrest’s Divine Days,” Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal 22 (2002): 41–49 and “Contextualizing Othello in Reed and Phillips,” Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal 17 (1997): 101—07, respectively. I have added new sections on Forrest’s Meteor in the Madhouse and on Djanet Sears’s Hamlet Duet. For the material as originally published in Upstart Crow, I acknowledge permission from Clemson University Digital Press. Acknowledgments 173

An earlier version of chapter 7, “Respeaking Othello in Fred Wilson’s Speak of Me as I Am,” published by the College Art Association in Art Journal 64, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 4–19, was based on the text of my Clark Fellows lecture at the Clark Art Institute on December 14, 2004. I am grateful to Evie Lincoln and Jonathan Weinberg for helpful comments on that initial occasion, to Patricia C. Phillips and Joe Hannan of Art Journal, and especially to Fred Wilson. The essay appears here in expanded form. Additional images of Wilson’s work can be seen in the original article. NOTES

Introduction 1. Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 1, 157. 2. John Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 279. 3. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973). 4. Harry Berger, Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 427–29. See also the related discussion of “intertextuality” at the level of canon in Berger’s Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations (New York: Fordham UP, 2005): “When viewed retrospectively or ‘preposter- ously,’ from the latest work backward, every new epic poet appears to invent his own version of the genre he ‘inherits’ (represents as inherited), and to do so in order to overthrow that paradigm” (37–38). “This implies a different relationship between the given text and its intertextual environment, one in which the lines of force and ‘moments of authority’ derive not from the series but from the text” (37). 5. Adrienne Rich’s “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971)—in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), 33–49—inspired the three-volume project edited by Marianne Novy: Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990), Cross- Cultural Performances: Differences in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993), and Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women’s Re- Visions in Literature and Performance (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). A full picture of black writers’ uses of Shakespeare can be completed only when male writers are taken into account. 176 Notes

6. Joanne Tompkins uses the term “re-playing” in “Re-Citing Shakespeare in Post-Colonial Drama,” Essays in Theatre/Études théâtrales 15, no. 1 (1996): 15–22. Although Tompkins’s analysis is deliberately restricted to the genre of drama, my goal is to show that the concept of re-citing as re-siting or “re-situating” extends across the range of contemporary genres. 7. Citations of Shakespeare here, and throughout this book, are from The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997). 8. For Yeats’s poetry, I use The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats Definitive ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1956). 9. Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966), 184, 188. The title of Brown’s book con- denses John Donne’s lines “Love’s mysteries in souls do grow/But yet the body is his book.” Brown’s vivid compression makes us think all the more of the missing third term—book—that mediates between love and body. However, Brown’s use of the Yeats poem complicates not only Donne’s image of the body but also the concept of a book. 10. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963). 11. The latter appears in Derek Walcott’s The Castaway and Other Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965) and is included in Walcott’s Collected Poems, 1948–1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 83–84. 12. In T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), Christopher Ricks notes “the melodramatized (i.e., irresponsibly diffused) animus” of Eliot’s poem (33). Eliot’s approach to Othello in “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (in Selected Essays, 1917–1932 [New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932], 110–11) is dismissive, while his seemingly generous accolade “universal” in describing Othello’s account of his plight in the final speech does not acknowledge, and therefore effectively blocks, consideration of the play’s racial issues. For an overview of Eliot’s allusions, see James Longenbach, “‘Mature poets steal’: Eliot’s Notes 177

Allusive Practice,” in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. A. David Moody (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 176–88. 13. In the chapter “Some Versions of Tradition,” in Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991), I give a critical account of why the conception of ongoing change in T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is inadequate to the scope of change undertaken in post-1960s revisions of the canon. Additional background is supplied in my essays from the early 1990s: “Rather than Reject a Common Culture, Multiculturalism Advocates a More Complicated Route by Which to Achieve It,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 26, 1991, B1–B3; “Multiculturalism and the Problem of Liberalism,” Reconstruction 2, no. 1 (1992): 97–101; “What Multiculturalism Means,” Transition 55 (1992): 105–14; and “Singing America: From Walt Whitman to Adrienne Rich,” Kenyon Review n.s. 17, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 103–19. 14. Rita Dove, “‘Either I’m Nobody, or I’m a Nation,’” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 14, no. 1 (1987): 49–76; quotations from 49, 52, 54. See also Dove’s comments on Walcott in Therese Steffen, Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 172–73, and in Malin Pereira, Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003), 171–72.

Chapter 1 1. Nadine Gordimer, My Son’s Story (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990). 2. Michael Neill, “Post-Colonial Shakespeare?: Writing away from the Centre,” in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 164–85; Neill’s discussion of My Son’s Story appears on 176–78. 178 Notes

3. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 9–18, especially 13–15. 4. Lars Engle and Thomas Cartelli speak to this sense of disjunction through more complicated, qualified images of Shakespeare but, in the end, revert to Neill’s notion of mastery and hence confirm Shakespearean continuity. In “Western Classics in the South African State of Emergency: Gordimer’s My Son’s Story and Coetzee’s Age of Iron,” in Thresholds of Western Culture: Identity, Postcoloniality, Transnationalism, ed. John Burt Foster, Jr., and Wayne Jeffrey Froman (New York: Continuum, 2002), 114–30, Engle associates Shakespeare with “ambivalence” (120), which he then uses to justify Shakespeare’s “mastery” (122). In Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999), 169–80, Cartelli begins with candid admission of Shakespeare’s “diminished status” (170) but reinstates Shakespeare’s mastery when he concludes by characterizing Will “as incapable of compassing anything close to Shakespeare’s achievement” (180). 5. “The Essential Gesture” (1984), in Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, ed. Stephen Clingman (New York: Knopf, 1988), 285–300, and “That Other World That Was the World” (1994), in Nadine Gordimer, Writing and Being (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), 114–34. The phrase “essential gesture” occurs in the latter on 132. 6. When the line is subsequently quoted in full by a “third person” traveling between Hannah and Sonny, Sonny experiences it as a betrayal not only of their private code but also of their intimacy (162, 164, 172). 7. Pastoral sentimentality aside, the imagined utopian com- munity dramatized in the play is politically structured in differential power, as I show in “Sexual Politics and Social Structure in As You Like It,” in Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985), 15–38. Notes 179

8. Rosa Luxemburg’s letter of 1904, addressed to Karl Kautsky, is variously translated, but this precise English phrasing can be seen in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, 2 vols. (London: Oxford UP, 1996), 198. 9. In Stephen Eric Bronner’s Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary for Our Times (London: Pluto, 1981), Shakespeare sustains her in prison: “At night, she recited passages from Shakespeare, Goethe, and Mörike to relieve her loneliness” (73). The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner (Boulder: Westview, 1978), includes a letter to Hans Diefenbach, in which Luxemburg specifi- cally celebrates As You Like It (195–98). 10. In The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside, 2nd ed. (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1992), Stephen Clingman observes that in My Son’s Story, “Gordimer has returned to the origins of her own writing” and makes the specific connection to The Lying Days with “a young white woman who, as the product of her experience, found that she had written a novel” (xxxi). The respective codas of The Lying Days (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953) and My Son’s Story each begin by expressing the consciousness of “story” (339; 275) as a constructed form. Also, the former’s “phoenix illusion” (340) reappears in Sonny’s appeal to the phoenix (274). 11. Clingman discusses the limitations of this unpublished novel (24–27) and correlates it with his critical assessment of The Lying Days: “At this point Gordimer’s terms of analysis revert back to those we found in her unfinished novel of 1946” (43). 12. “Turning the Page: African Writers and the Twenty-first Century,” in Nadine Gordimer, Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 30–37. The original date of this essay in 1992 puts it in the same period with My Son’s Story, published two years earlier. Gordimer’s “We have sought the fingerprint of flesh on history” (30) overlaps with the fingerprint motif attributed to Will: “Each is a fingerprint of life” (275). 180 Notes

Chapter 2

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: Norton, 1999), 74. 2. James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village,” Notes of a Native Son (New York: Dial, 1955), 148. The signal importance of the passage on Shakespeare is emphasized by Baldwin’s eloquent reiteration in the “Autobiographical Notes” (10) that introduce this volume. 3. Rita Dove, Museum (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon UP, 1983) and Selected Poems (New York: Pantheon, 1993). See also Dove’s reference to Shakespeare in the introduction to Selected Poems, xix–xx. 4. A brief account of Dupree’s career is provided by the obituary in the New York Times, January 22, 1992, A19. See Dove’s comments on Champion Jack in the interview with Malin Periera, in Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003), 184–85. 5. Discussions of “In the Old Neighborhood” include those by Therese Steffen in Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 40–44, and by Pereira in Cosmopolitanism, 110–13. 6. “Richard Wright’s Blues” (1945) in Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 89–104; quotation from 90. 7. June Jordan, “Poem about My Rights,” Passion: New Poems, 1977–1980 (Boston: Beacon, 1980). 8. In “On Voice”—in Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry, ed. Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997), 111–15—Dove describes Europe and home as two points in her own overall trajectory: “In Museum (1983) I was very con- cerned with presenting a type of antimuseum, a collection of totems that would not be considered ‘essential’ to the canon of Western culture—and to that end I adopted a voice that was distanced, cool, ironic; of all my books, this is the most ‘European.’ After Museum I felt I had gone away from home and was now able to return, like a prodigal daughter” (111). Notes 181

9. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dial, 1972), 47–48. In a short piece chronologically midway between “Stranger in the Village” and No Name in the Street—“‘This Nettle, Danger’” (1964), in James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 687–91—Baldwin defined the terms that enabled his return to Shakespeare: “Every man writes about his own Shakespeare—and his Shakespeare changes as he himself changes, grows as he grows—and the Shakespeare that I am reading at this stage of my life testifies, for me, to this effort” (688). Baldwin’s title quotes Hotspur’s words— “out of this nettle danger we pluck this flower safety” (1 Henry 4, 2.4.8–9)—as though Baldwin himself finds “this flower safety” in Shakespeare. However, Baldwin’s new acceptance goes so far as to remove Shylock and Othello from critical scrutiny; in my view, this reaction goes too far in the other direction. 10. For further discussion of this decontextualization, see the section on Du Bois (58–60) in my essay “The Two Renaissances and Shakespeare’s Canonical Position,” Kenyon Review n.s. 14, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 56–70. 11. The Rich quotation that Dove chooses belongs to the same moment as Rich’s critical shift in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971), in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), 33–49. I discuss Rich’s responses to Shakespeare in “Adrienne Rich’s Re-Vision of Shakespeare,” in Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991), 146–66, and in “Start Misquoting Him Now: The Difference a Word Makes in Adrienne Rich’s ‘Inscriptions,’” Shakespeare and the Classroom 5, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 55–56. 12. In the final “Autobiography” section of The Poet’s World (Washington: Library of Congress, 1995), Dove locates a source for the father’s despair in the racial discrimination that thwarted his career, despite his university degree (75–76), while in poignant contrast, the recording of her own career landmarks demonstrates the expanded possi- bilities for black Americans in the very next generation. The encounter with her father at the poem’s center negotiates the emotional terrain of this generational shift. 182 Notes

13. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Sympathy,” in Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Negro Poets, ed. Countee Cullen (New York: Harper, 1927), 8–9. 14. Countee Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel,” Caroling Dusk, 182. Vendler’s work on Dove consists of six items: “Louise Glück, Stephen Dunn, Brad Leithauser, Rita Dove,” in The Music of What Happens (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988), 437–54; “An Interview with Rita Dove,” in Reading Black, Reading Feminist, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1990), 481–91; “A Dissonant Triad: Henri Cole, Rita Dove, and August Kleinzahler” and “The Black Dove: Rita Dove, Poet Laureate,” in Soul Says (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), 141–55 and 156–66; “Rita Dove: Identity Markers,” in The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), 59–88; and “Twentieth-Century Demeter,” The New Yorker, May 15, 1995, 90–92. Dove herself provides ample testimony to her rejection of a purist Black Aesthetic mode in favor of a stance open to multiple, hybrid influences. See, especially, her extraordinary comprehensive historical survey of black poetry co-authored with Marilyn Nelson Waniek—“A Black Rainbow: Modern Afro-American Poetry,” in Poetry After Modernism, ed. Robert McDowell (Brownsville, OR: Story Line, 1991), 217–75—as well as her revealing commentaries on two individual poets in “Telling It Like It I-S IS: Narrative Techniques in Melvin Tolson’s Harlem Gallery,” New England Review 8 (1985): 109–17, and “‘Either I’m Nobody, or I’m a Nation,’” Parnassus 14, no. 1 (1987): 49–76. On the other hand, we must also note Dove’s equally strong dismissal of the traditionalist pos- turing represented by Harold Bloom in “Screaming Fire,” Boston Review 23, nos. 3–4 (Summer 1998): 31. 15. The brilliant recent work on blackface—the chapter on “Blackface Minstrelsy” in Alexander Saxton’s The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (London: Verso, 1990), the chapter on “White Skins, Black Masks: Minstrelsy and White Working Class Formations before the Civil Notes 183

War” in David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1991), and Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford UP, 1993)—pays virtually no attention to Shakespeare. The extremely important exception is Joyce Green MacDonald’s “Acting Black: Othello, Othello Burlesques, and the Performance of Blackness,” Theatre Journal 46 (1994): 231–49. 16. In “William Shakespeare in America,” in Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988). Lawrence W. Levine emphasizes the continuity between Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespeare burlesques: “It is difficult to take familiarities with that which is not already familiar; one cannot parody that which is not well known” (15–16). However, burlesque transformations frequently have a parodic bite that pays no respect to the original; hence Levine underestimates the extent to which familiarity with Shakespeare is employed to register a characteristi- cally American form of contempt. 17. Jim’s partial derivation from blackface roles is noted both by Ralph Ellison—“Jim is flawed by his relationship to the minstrel tradition” (The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan [New York: Modern Library, 1995], 731)—and by Toni Morrison—“the over- the-top minstrelization of Jim” (Introduction to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [New York: Oxford UP, 1996], xxxv). See also Eric Lott, “Mr. Clemens and Jim Crow: Twain, Race, and Blackface,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 129–52. 18. Anthony J. Berret is unconvincing when he argues in Mark Twain and Shakespeare (Lanham: UP of America, 1993) that “it is probable that Twain thought of Othello while composing” Huckleberry Finn (176). The link to Othello represents a critical fantasy of what we would like to have happened in Twain’s novel but does not in fact occur. The connection between Shakespeare burlesque and blackface minstrelsy that could have been illuminating 184 Notes

is never actually made. The novel’s lack of resolution has produced an ongoing debate exemplified by Jane Smiley’s “Say It Ain’t So, Huck,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1996, 61–67.

Chapter 3 1. Derek Walcott, “A Frowsty Fragrance,” New York Review of Books 47, no. 10 (June 15, 2000): 57–61. 2. Bruce King gives 1956 as the original date of publication for “A Far Cry from Africa” in Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 110; I cite the poem from Walcott’s Collected Poems, 1948–1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 17–18. 3. Derek Walcott, Midsummer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). 4. Derek Walcott, Tiepolo’s Hound (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). 5. I use the term “Caribbean identity” in the sense of the complex, multiple, and metaphorical identity described in Stuart Hall’s essays “Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” New Left Review 209 (1995): 3–14 and “Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad,” Small Axe 6 (1999): 1–18, and summarized in the former: “Identity is not in the past to be found, but in the future to be constructed” (14). 6. Paul Breslin, Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001), 62. 7. Rita Dove, “‘Either I’m Nobody, or I’m a Nation,’” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 14, no. 1 (1987): 49–76; quotations from 54, 68. 8. Leon Forrest, Divine Days (New York: Norton, 1993), 1007. 9. Countee Cullen, “Heritage,” Color (New York: Harper, 1925), 36–41. 10. Walcott, “Ruins of a Great House,” Collected Poems, 19–21. 11. Interview with Adrienne Rich, in David Montenegro, Points of Departure: International Writers on Writing and Notes 185

Politics (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1991), 5–25; quotation from 19. 12. The Brixton riots and the official report on them are discussed in Scarman and After: Essays Reflecting on Lord Scarman’s Report, the Riots and Their Aftermath, ed. John Benyon (Oxford: Pergamon, 1984) and in Stuart Hall’s “From Scarman to Stephen Lawrence,” History Workshop Journal 48 (1999): 187–97. In chapter 38 of Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), Walcott subsequently makes an unusually angry indict- ment in which “whitewashing the walls of Brixton” points to “Dark future down darker street” (5.38.3; 197). 13. In Walcott’s 1983 play A Branch of the Blue Nile, in Three Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), the black actors rehearsing Antony and Cleopatra make a bitter joke—“Can’t talk Shakespeare, though” (229)— that resonates with the blunt prejudice articulated in poem 23: “‘But the blacks can’t do Shakespeare.’” Even if the accusation is manifestly false, it nonetheless enforces its tragic cost, as Joyce Green MacDonald bril- liantly demonstrates in “Bodies, Race, and Performance in Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile,” Theatre Journal 57 (2005): 54–71. As in poem 23, the play places Walcott in an uncomfortable position between the Shakespearean artistic ideal and the damaging reality of black exclusion, as experienced by the character Sheila in the play or by Brixton rioters in the poem. The drama’s “if” in Phil’s wish—“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” (300)—seems to express both Walcott’s desire and his inability to fulfill it. 14. “On Hemingway” (113) and “The Road Taken: Robert Frost” (210) in What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). 15. On the paternal grandfather, see King, Derek Walcott, 7–8. 16. In his interview with Montenegro, Walcott provides the following gloss on the phrase “No language is neutral” from poem 52: “So language is not a place of retreat, 186 Notes

it’s not a place of escape, it’s not even a place of resolution. It’s a place of struggle” (Points of Departure, 86). The uncertainty about the Shakespearean proliferation that ends poem 52 is how it bears on this question of struggle: Does the multiple and confused recourse to Shakespeare mean that Walcott in effect capitulates and loses the struggle in this particular moment? 17. For detailed discussion of Pissarro and Tiepolo as exem- plars of European cultural heritage, see my article “Artists’ Self-Portraiture and Self-Exploration in Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound,” Callaloo 28, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 224–35. 18. My citations to Tiepolo’s Hound have a double format referring to book, section, and stanza and to page number. Walcott confirms the medium of his father’s self-portrait as “a self-portrait in water colour” (28) in the account of his father’s art in “Leaving School” (1965), in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, ed. Robert D. Hamner (Washington: Three Continents, 1993), 24–32. 19. On The Fighting Téméraire, see Judy Egerton, Turner, The Fighting Temeraire (London: National Gallery, 1995). With regard to the racial implications of empire, it is worth noting the chronological proximity of this painting, exhibited in 1839, to Turner’s Slave Ship of 1840 described in John McCoubrey, “Turner’s Slave Ship: Abolition, Ruskin, and Reception,” Word & Image 14 (1998): 319–53. The principle of paired paintings— indicated in James Hamilton’s linking of Slave Ship with Rockets and Blue Lights in Turner: The Late Seascapes (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003), 43–49—might be usefully expanded beyond those pairings expressly designated by Turner himself. 20. Bruce King provides evidence that Walcott shares his father’s devotion to Turner: “The Turners upstairs at the Tate were Walcott’s main interest” (Derek Walcott, 586). 21. The ways in which Turner’s paintings produce an idea of the British empire are shown in the complementary essays by Elizabeth Helsinger, “Turner and the Representation of England,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, 2nd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, Notes 187

2002), 103–25, and K. Dian Kriz, “Dido versus the Pirates: Turner’s Carthaginian Paintings and the Sublimation of Colonial Desire,” Oxford Art Journal 18, no. 1 (1995): 116–32, with their respective emphases on national and international contexts. 22. King, Derek Walcott, 10, 20. 23. Sharon L. Ciccarelli, “Reflections before and after Carnival: An Interview with Derek Walcott,” in Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, ed. Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979), 296–309; quotations from 302–03. 24. Walcott, “Magic Industry: Joseph Brodsky,” in What the Twilight Says, 134–52, quotations from 140–41, and “The Muse of History,” 36–64, quotations from 36–37.

Chapter 4 1. In chronological order, the novels are: There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden (New York: Random House, 1973), The Bloodworth Orphans (New York: Random House, 1977), Two Wings to Veil My Face (New York: Random House, 1983), and, first published in 1992, Divine Days (New York: Norton, 1993). The fifth book of fiction is the posthumous collection of novellas, Meteor in the Madhouse, ed. John G. Cawelti and Merle Drown (Evanston: Triquarterly Books/Northwestern UP, 2001). Dana A. Williams’s “In the Light of Likeness—Transformed”: The Literary Art of Leon Forrest (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2005) provides a biograph- ical summary (1–6); Forrest’s obituary appears in the New York Times, November 10, 1997, A35. 2. Stanley Crouch, The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It, 1990–1994 (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 24. Crouch’s reviews of Divine Days and Meteor in the Madhouse both take note of Forrest’s use of Shakespeare: “Beyond American Tribalism,” in All-American Skin Game, 113–18, and 188 Notes

“A Moral History of Chicago,” New York Times Book Review, September 9, 2001, 34. 3. On the distinction between access as an initial step and critical response as the end goal, see my discussion of Anthony Appiah in “The Moment of Race in Renaissance Studies,” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1988): 27–29. 4. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: Norton, 1999), 74. 5. James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village,” in Notes of a Native Son (New York: Dial, 1955), 148. 6. Leon Forrest, “Evidences of Jimmy Baldwin,” in Relocations of the Spirit: Essays (Wakefield, RI: Asphodel/Moyer Bell, 1994), 267-75. 7. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dial, 1972), 47. 8. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, xxiii–xxv. Also see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001), 362–64. 9. Keith Byerman, “Angularity: An Interview with Leon Forrest,” African American Review 33 (1999): 439–50; quotation from 446. 10. Leon Forrest: Introductions and Interpretations (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1997), 13, 282. 11. Charles H. Rowell, “‘Beyond the Hard Work and Discipline’: An Interview with Leon Forrest,” Callaloo 20 (1997): 342–56. 12. James A. Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Methuen, 1984), 59–79; quotation from 68.

Chapter 5 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver Notes 189

(New York: Norton, 1999), 74. In Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999), Thomas Cartelli links Robeson to Du Bois through the naming of Du Bois’s grandfather after Othello (147–48). 2. Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1988), 137; Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 192; Michael Neill, “Othello and Race,” in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello, ed. Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt (New York: Modern Language Association, 2005), 37–52; quotation on 40. 3. Coppélia Kahn, “Caliban at the Stadium: Shakespeare and the Making of Americans,” Massachusetts Review 41 (2000): 256–84. 4. Comprehensive performance histories, including black actors in the role of Othello, are Errol Hill, Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1984), and Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch, A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). The latter’s emphasis on progress is epitomized by the summary statement: “It would be another fifty years before the powerful interpretations of Paul Robeson, Gordon Heath, James Earl Jones, and Earle Hyman would force Whites to relinquish Othello. Blacks were able to cap- ture these roles because their portrayals were equal or superior” (229). 5. Earle Hyman, “Othello: Or Ego in Love, Sex, and War,” in Othello: New Essays by Black Writers, ed. Mythili Kaul (Washington, D.C.: Howard UP, 1997), 23–28; quotation from 23. Bill Schwartz’s “Black Metropolis, White England” (in Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, ed. Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea [London: Routledge, 1996], 176–207) begins his contrast of Paul Robeson and C. L. R. James with an anecdote concerning Robeson’s anxiety about relations with white women. Describing his physical discomfort about onstage proximity to a 190 Notes

white woman in Othello, Robeson himself testified to the ingrained fear about the danger of cross-racial sexual expression (Duberman 135, 138). Robeson’s off- stage affairs with Peggy Ashcroft during the 1930 performance in London and with Uta Hagen at the time of the subsequent New York performance have a direct parallel with the Othello–Desdemona relationship that adds to the sense of sexual liberation acted out on stage. 6. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia UP, 2005). 7. Howard Taubman, “Theater: ‘Othello’ in Park,” New York Times, July 15, 1964, 29. The subhead “James Earl Jones Is Cast as the Moor” positions Jones in the narrative of potential black advancement, whose triumph is confirmed within the review. 8. Marlies K. Danziger, “Shakespeare in New York, 1964,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 419–22; quotation from 421. 9. Lois Potter’s Othello (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002) puts the best face on the Robeson model by observing that the “Robeson influence may at times seem oppressive, but it has given black actors the sense of professional continuity that white Shakespearean actors have taken for granted” (158). But this statement, while true, avoids the deeper question about the negative repercussions of Robeson’s influence: if no significant innovation can occur beyond Robeson’s initial breakthrough, substantial further progress is blocked. In “Slammin’ Shakespeare In Accidents Yet Unknown: Liveness, Cinem(edi)a, and Racial Dis- integration,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53 (2003): 201–26, Richard Burt’s formulation of the network of relations among Robeson as precursor and Earle Hyman and James Earl Jones as successors provides a necessary cor- rective to Potter’s point of view: “A black actor playing Othello participates in a tradition of black actors that, when pressed, is seen to have its own (derivative) inauthenticity” (220). Notes 191

10. Edith Oliver, “The Moor Indoors,” New Yorker, October 24, 1964, 93–95; quotation from 95. It is worth noting that an iconic SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) button in this period showed an image of two clasped hands, one black and one white. 11. James Earl Jones and Penelope Niven, James Earl Jones: Voices and Silences (New York: Scribner’s, 1993), 158. 12. The gap between Robeson’s Othello-driven identity and Jones’s primary Verizon identity is humorously crystal- lized in a recent cartoon in which the ubiquity of Jones’s commercial voice is played off against the dilemma of his diminished theatrical career: Carolita Johnson, New Yorker, June 27, 2005, 52. 13. My source for the Bell Atlantic advertisement is Richard Burt’s section on “Black Stars and Authenticity in Shakespeare Advertising” (26–27) in his “Shakespeare, ‘Glo-cali-zation,’ Race, and the Small Screens of Post- popular Culture,” in Shakespeare, The Movie, II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD, ed. Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose (London: Routledge, 2003): 14–36. Burt points out the parallel between the substitution of J. J. Walker for Jones in the part of Othello in the advertisement and the similar motif in the 1991 film True Identity, in which Lenny Henry’s character Miles Pope replaces Jones in the role of Othello; Burt’s full discussion of the film appears in “Slammin’ Shakespeare,” 218–23. 14. The phrase is from Ralph Ellison’s “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” (1958), in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 45–59. 15. The observation about the cloak is Richard Burt’s in “Black Stars and Authenticity in Shakespeare Advertising,” 27. 16. Jones and Niven, James Earl Jones: Voices and Silences, 315–16. 17. I am indebted to Arthur L. Little, Jr.’s overview of the film in “Remembering the American Self: Hamlet, Africa, and Disney’s The Lion King ” for Francesca Royster’s seminar on “Apocalyptic Shakespeares: Shakespeare, Film, 192 Notes

and Cultural Change in the New Millennium” at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in April 2004. 18. The cast list for Fences appears in August Wilson, Three Plays (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1991), 98–99. 19. Steichen’s Legacy: Photographs, 1895–1973, ed. Joanna Steichen (New York: Knopf, 2000), Plate 276, [327]. On Robeson as Emperor Jones, see Charles Musser, “Troubled Relations: Paul Robeson, Eugene O’Neill, and Oscar Micheaux,” in Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen, ed. Jeffrey C. Stewart (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1998), 80–103. 20. Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) appears in Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnick, High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1991), 78. It is important to note Fred Wilson’s opposition to the deployment of the concepts of “high and low” and “primitivism” in this and the related exhibition in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, ed. William Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). As the title of his 1991 alternative exhibition Primitivism: High and Low indicates, Wilson challenges these terms as used in the MoMA exhibitions. However, a link between Duchamp and Wilson is made by Martha Buskirk in The Duchamp Effect, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 187; and Wilson acknowledges his own connection to Duchamp in the interview with Maurice Berger in Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979–2000 (Baltimore, MD: Center for Art and Visual Culture, 2001), 38. 21. Kathleen Goncharov and Fred Wilson, “Interview,” in Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am (Cambridge: List Visual Arts Center, 2003), 20–25; references to Peru on 21–22. Maurice Berger’s catalog essay in Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979–2000 notes as one of Wilson’s “earliest artistic projects, a series of black- and-white photographs that meticulously documented archeological sites in Egypt and Peru” (16). Notes 193

22. Robert Morris, “Aligned with Nazca,” Artforum 14, no. 2 (October 1975): 26–39. In his e-mail to me on September 10, 2005, Wilson comments: “Though I was interested in Nazca as early as 1975, I believe I only met Morris in 1979 when I was studying with him at Hunter. However, I didn’t know that he wrote about the Nazca lines.” Of his later contact with Morris during this period, Wilson comments: “I liked how Morris thought expansively about art; ideas were important” (Goncharov interview 21). 23. In Maurice Berger’s catalog of the Wilson retrospective, Wilson describes his general approach in the first half of the entry on Portrait of Audubon in 1988 (153). The emphasis on the face is noted in the Goncharov interview (21). 24. Fred Wilson, e-mail communication, February 15, 2005. 25. In the September 10, 2005, e-mail, Wilson notes that his use of the grid was influenced by Robert Smithson and Agnes Martin. 26. Image and texts can be seen at www.crownpoint.com/ artists/wilson/index.html. 27. To my knowledge there has been no detailed analysis of either set of images. Edward Steichen, “Photographing Paul Robeson as Emperor Jones,” U.S. Camera Magazine 1, no. 6 (October 1939), shows all twenty-six shots. There are twenty-nine different Van Vechten photographs of Robeson as Othello in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. 28. Critical reservations about Suzman’s production are registered by Ania Loomba (148) and Michael Neill (175) in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998). 29. Gordon Heath, “The Othello Syndrome,” in Deep Are the Roots: Memoirs of a Black Expatriate (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1992), 134–48; quotation from 148. 30. Ben Okri, “Leaping out of Shakespeare’s Terror: Five Meditations on Othello,” in A Way of Being Free (London: Phoenix House, 1997), 71–87; quotation from 86. 194 Notes

31. Hugh Quarshie, Second Thoughts about Othello, International Shakespeare Association Occasional Paper no. 7 (Chipping Camden: Clouds Hill Printers, 1999); quotations from 3, 21. The original title when given as a lecture was “Hesitations on Othello”; the change from “Hesitations” to the stronger “Second Thoughts” appro- priately stresses the decisiveness of Quarshie’s remarks. 32. Celia R. Daileader, “Casting Black Actors: Beyond Othellophilia,” in Shakespeare and Race, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 177–202; quotation from 185. For a detailed case study consistent with Daileader’s approach, see Lisa S. Starks’s “The Veiled (Hot) Bed of Race and Desire: Parker’s Othello and the Stereotype as Screen Fetish,” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 17, no. 1 (1998): 64–78. The theatrical staging of the black male body in Shakespearean contexts is a specific instance of the more general phenomenon that Stuart Hall describes as “excessive visuality” (41) in “Aspiration and Attitude: Reflections on Black Britain in the Nineties,” New Formations 33 (Spring 1998): 38–46. Daileader greatly expands her argument in Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005). 33. For a detailed analysis of Othello’s entanglement in lin- guistic structures of whiteness, see my essay “Images of White Identity in Othello,” in Othello: New Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Routledge, 2002), 133–45. 34. Susan Spector, “Margaret Webster’s Othello: The Principal Players Versus the Director,” Theatre History Studies 6 (1986): 93–108; quotation from 103. 35. Spector 105; Duberman 277; and Milly S. Barranger, Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004), 145. 36. Richard Dyer, “Paul Robeson: Crossing Over” (1986), in Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 64–136. Notes 195

37. “At the time of the show’s closing, it was still playing to standees, had taken in nearly a million dollars at the box office, and had set an all-time Broadway record for a Shakespearean production with 296 performances” (Duberman 286); also, Spector 107 and Barranger 150. 38. Further discussion of Muray’s photographs of Robeson is available in Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998), 45–83, and Jeffrey C. Stewart, “The Black Body: Paul Robeson as a Work of Art and Politics,” in Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen, ed. Jeffrey C. Stewart (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1998), 134–63. So far as I am aware, a complete inventory of Muray’s photographic record of Robeson is lacking. Stewart’s essay contains four (nos. 88, 101–03), while additional images include: two in Susan Robeson, The Whole World in his Hands: A Pictorial Biography of Paul Robeson (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1981), 43–44; two in Paul Robeson, Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist’s Journey, 1898–1939 (New York: John Wiley, 2001), 121; and two in Sheila Tully Boyle and Andrew Bunie, Paul Robeson: The Years of Promise and Achievement (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2001), fac- ing 119. 39. James Smalls, “Public Face, Private Thoughts: Fetish, Interracialism, and the Homoerotic in Some Photographs by Carl Van Vechten,” Genders 25 (1997): 144–93. Related images in Van Vechten’s scrapbooks are discussed in Jonathan Weinberg, “Boy Crazy: Carl Van Vechten’s Queer Collection,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 25–49. 40. See especially Susan Robeson, 142–[151]. 41. Folger Shakespeare Library, call number ART 251518. This photograph appears on the cover of the paper- back edition of Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello. 42. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, call number LOT 12735, no. 983. The photograph can be seen in the Prints and Photographs online catalog: www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html. 196 Notes

43. On good characters’ cooperation in their own demise, see the theory of complicity in Harry Berger, Jr., Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997). 44. Paul Robeson, “Some Reflections on Othello and the Nature of Our Time,” American Scholar 14 (1945): 391–92. As Christy Desmet points out, Robeson’s recourse in this article to Theodore Spencer’s “universaliz- ing” Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1942) is self-defeating. Since Spencer’s inter- pretation of the play makes only highly oblique, euphemistic reference to Othello’s “remote origin” and “strangeness” (128), the issue of race never comes into focus. While this neutralization of race may be congenial for Robeson’s involvement with the play, it is a nonstarter for his political plea for the recognition of nonwhite pop- ulations. See Desmet’s introduction to Shakespeare and Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (London: Routledge, 1999), 7. 45. Martha Buskirk interview, The Duchamp Effect, 187–90; quotation from 189–90. 46. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (New York: Dial, 1976), 101–02. Because the passage on which I concen- trate here comes from the third and final section of The Devil Finds Work, I want to acknowledge Baldwin’s earlier tribute to Robeson at the end of part 1: “Canada Lee was Bigger Thomas, but he was also Canada Lee: his physical presence, like the physical presence of Paul Robeson, gave me the right to live” (33). The immediate context is the theater production of Native Son directed by Orson Welles, but the larger context is Welles’ all- black Macbeth, which frames the story (28–34), and hence the reference to Robeson is placed in proximity to Shakespeare. But Robeson’s connection to Shakespeare’s Othello does not arise. In the time frame of the story, Shakespeare has not registered for Baldwin at age 12 or 13: “I don’t think that the name, Shakespeare, meant very much to me in those years. I was not yet intimidated by the name—that was to come later” (28). 47. Desmet, introduction to Shakespeare and Appropriation, 9. Notes 197

Chapter 6

1. Ishmael Reed, Japanese by Spring (New York: Atheneum, 1993) and Caryl Phillips, The Nature of Blood (New York: Knopf, 1997). 2. Reed’s own tenure denial at Berkeley is discussed in Jon Ewing, “The Great Tenure Battle of 1977,” in Conversations with Ishmael Reed, ed. Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995), 111–27. 3. Reed’s commitment to this level of argument is indicated by the defense of his record in his own voice earlier in the novel: “Ringleader Ishmael Reed has never called anybody a traitor to anybody’s race and not only hasn’t opposed black women writing about black male misogyny but published some of it” (24). 4. Full citations are: MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace, ed. Ishmael Reed (New York: Viking, 1997), and Ishmael Reed, “Bigger and O.J.,” in Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case, ed. Toni Morrison and Claudia Brodsky Lacour (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 169–95. 5. Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging, ed. Caryl Phillips (London: Faber and Faber, 1997). Against “the mythology of homogeneity,” Phillips’s preface insists that “Britain has been forged in the crucible of fusion— of hybridity” and that “English literature has, for at least 200 years, been shaped and influenced by outsiders,” the reclaimed strangers of his title (x). 6. These two passages in the novel are consonant with Phillips’s statement in The European Tribe (London: Faber and Faber, 1987): “There is no evidence of Othello having any black friends, eating any African foods, speaking any language other than theirs. He makes no reference to any family. From what we are given it is clear that he denied, or at least did not cul- tivate his past” (51). In an interview in Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English, ed. Frank Birbalsingh (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), Phillips describes Othello as “a man who, whether he liked to or not, 198 Notes

continually made references to his origins through the imagery of his speeches” (191). At the same time, Phillips adds the complicating note in the final paragraph of The European Tribe that his own origins as a black raised virtually from birth in England are different from those of Othello: “Unlike Othello, I am culturally of the West” (128). 7. This conjunction of Othello and The Merchant of Venice is present in the two successive chapters, “A Black European Success” and “In the Ghetto,” in The European Tribe (45–51 and 52–55). In an interview with Maya Jaggi in Brick 49 (Summer 1994): 73–77, Phillips mentions that his “grandfather was a Jew” (77). 8. Sears makes this statement in “Notes of a Coloured Girl: 32 Short Reasons Why I Write for the Theatre,” in Harlem Duet (Winnipeg: Scirocco, 1997), 11–15; quotation from 14. It is worth noting that Sears’s introduction invokes Derek Walcott as a positive influence. 9. Citations of Harlem Duet are from the text conveniently available 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). References are given in two forms: the act and scene followed by the page number in this anthology. Relevant bibliography includes: Ric Knowles, “Othello in Three Times,” in Shakespeare in Canada: “A World Elsewhere”?, ed. Diana Brydon and Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002), 371–94, and Joyce Green MacDonald, “Finding Othello’s African Roots through Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet,” in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello, ed. Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt (New York: Modern Language Association, 2005), 202–08. 10. Sears’s comment is drawn from Ric Knowles, “The Nike Method: A Wide-Ranging Conversation between Djanet Sears and Alison Sealy Smith,” Canadian Theatre Review 97 (Winter 1998): 24–30; quotation from 29. Notes 199

Chapter 7

1. The show was organized by the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which published the exhibition catalog, Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am, The United States Pavilion, 50th International Exhibition of Art, The Venice Biennale (Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2003). 2. Kathleen Goncharov and Fred Wilson, “Interview,” in Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am, 20–25; quotation from 24. Hereafter cited as Goncharov interview. Goncharov selected Wilson’s exhibition to represent the United States at the 2003 Venice Biennale. I am indebted to her for many details that emerged in the extremely helpful and informative conversation during our meeting in New York on February 11, 2004. 3. In addition to Paul H. D. Kaplan’s catalog essay “Local Color: The Black Presence in Venetian Art and History,” in Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am, 8–19, relevant material on the international context of early modern Venice includes Patricia Fortini Brown, “Venezianità: The Otherness of the Venetians,” in Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (New York: Abrams, 1997), 9–37; Deborah Howard, Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture, 1100–1500 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000); Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797, ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000); and Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600 (Berkeley: U of California P, 2002). Particularly relevant for the present chapter is Kaplan’s work, because it not only traverses Southern and Northern Renaissances but also makes direct contact with Shakespeare studies, most prominently in “The Earliest Images of Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 171–86. 4. Othello studies have recently been expanded by a new emphasis on European Renaissance economic, cultural, 200 Notes

and ethnic interactions with Muslim countries of the eastern Mediterranean. Daniel J. Vitkus’s “Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 145–76, may be taken as the landmark moment when attention to Ottoman Turkey and the Levant as crucial interpretive contexts emerged as a highly visible trend. Nevertheless, it is important to underscore Othello’s African dimension as well. We need to take seriously the idea that Othello is from “everywhere” (1.1.138). As Ania Loomba points out in Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), Othello is a “composite figure” who encompasses multiple geographical locations: “It is impossible, but also unnecessary, to decide whether Othello is more or less ‘African’/‘black’ than ‘Turkish’/Muslim” (92). From the different vantage point of The Tempest, Jonathan Goldberg has noted how the new emphasis on the Mediterranean has led to an overreaction skewed toward the other extreme in neglecting Black Atlantic and New World perspectives. See The Generation of Caliban (Vancouver: Ronsdale, 2002), 31n2, and Tempest in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004), 4. 5. Othello’s passage encompassing the division between Venetian and Turk can be related to Bronwen Wilson’s analysis in “Reflecting on the Turk in Late Sixteenth- Century Venetian Portrait Books,” Word & Image 19, nos. 1–2 (Jan.–July 2003): 38–58. In the final section, “The Ambivalence of Admiration,” Wilson concludes that “portraits of Turks held up a mirror to Venetians” (52); when applied to Othello, this formulation suggests that because of his double identity, he contains the mirror within himself. 6. Reproductions of the Pesaro tomb are available in Giuseppe Cristinelli, Baldassare Longhena, Architetto del’ 600 a Venezia (Padua: Marsilio, 1972), 139; and Christian Theuerkauff, “Anmerkungen zu Melchior Barthel,” in Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für Notes 201

Kunstwissenschaft 41, no. 1/4 (1987): 71–117; see 105, fig. 34. 7. Paul Kaplan, “Local Color,” 15. 8. The use of the shroud as an emblem of mourning is greatly expanded in Wilson’s subsequent exhibition at the Hood Museum of Art, So Much Trouble in the World—Believe It or Not! (2005), where looking at the images of war in the final room requires lifting the black veils that cover them. 9. Fred Wilson, Fred Wilson: A Conversation with K. Anthony Appiah (New York: PaceWildenstein, 2006), 14, 16. 10. The pervasive holding motif in this exhibition looks back to the vivid earlier examples of Wilson’s play with the Atlas myth—Untitled (1992) and Atlas (1995)—shown on 30–31 of Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am. 11. Wilson’s quotation of the Shakespeare passage in relation to Drip Drop Plop occurred in his talk on Speak of Me as I Am at the New York Academy of Art on April 1, 2004. 12. Dympna Callaghan, “‘Othello Was a White Man’: Properties of Race on Shakespeare’s Stage,” in Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge, 2000), 73–96; quotation from 92. I explore the visual problematic of racial whiteness in “‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George’: British National Identity and the Emergence of White Self-Fashioning,” in Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England, ed. Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000), 315–45. 13. This passage comes from Wilson’s e-mail to me dated April 7, 2004. 14. Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Teaching Richard Burbage’s Othello,” in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello, ed. Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt (New York: Modern Language Association, 2005), 148–55. 202 Notes

15. Maurice Berger and Fred Wilson, “Collaboration, Museums, and the Politics of Display: A Conversation with Fred Wilson,” in Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979–2000, ed. Maurice Berger (Baltimore, MD: Center for Art and Visual Culture, 2001), 32–39; quotation from 34. Hereafter cited as Berger interview. 16. Holland Cotter, “Pumping Air into the Museum, So It’s as Big as the World Outside,” New York Times, April 30, 2004, B31. 17. I am grateful to Curtis Scott for a transcript of this talk. 18. Kathleen Goncharov, curator of Wilson’s exhibition, identified the four videos in an e-mail of June 27, 2003, as follows: the two versions of Shakespeare’s Othello are, in the upper left and right, respectively, the films directed by Orson Welles in 1952 and Stuart Burge (with Laurence Olivier) in 1965, while the versions of Verdi’s Otello are those of Franco Enriquez from 1958 (lower right) and of Franco Zeffirelli from 1986 (lower left). Lois Potter discusses Welles and Olivier in Othello (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002), 140–53. 19. Elsewhere in the exhibition the erectness of The Wanderer and Faith’s Fate is subjected to the bodily dis- tortions of kneeling in Helping Hands, in which the black figure holds up white hands, and in Love’s Blindness, in which the two black figures balance with one knee and one hand on the floor to support white busts. The holding motif is thus reiterated and further accentuated. 20. The displaced pillow here unsettles two previous uses of pillows: the pillows lodged on the heads of the black figures to cushion the weight of the Pesaro tomb they hold up, and the pillowlike tray resting on the arms held out in right-angle position by the globe-headed servant in the atrium. The pillow soon reappears as the means by which Othello smothers Desdemona in the video scene of Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith. 21. The mirrors can be seen in the image of this installa- tion on the CD-ROM that accompanies the exhibition catalog. Notes 203

22. Safe House II conveys the same connotation of refuge as the similar ceramic pot with interior bed in Safe Haven, depicted in the catalog for Speak of Me as I Am (27). 23. In Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000), 130–35, Kimberly W. Benston discusses Coltrane’s 1960 “revision” of Richard Rodgers as a “modernist intervention” exemplifying “the principles of citation, displacement, and reinvention” (130). In turn, Benston’s subsequent chapter on the Coltrane poem places the African American poet Michael S. Harper in reinventive relation to Coltrane. 24. Elizabeth Alexander, “‘I am; I’m a black man;/I am:’ Michael Harper’s ‘Black Aesthetic,’” in The Black Interior (Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2004), 59–89, especially 69–70. Kimberly W. Benston also focuses on Harper’s engage- ment with “I am” in relation to Coltrane (183–85). 25. See the concluding sentence in Steven Henry Madoff’s “How Do You Get to the Biennale? Apply, Apply,” New York Times, Arts and Leisure section, June 1, 2003, 35. 26. In “Othello’s African American Progeny,” South Atlantic Review 57, no. 4 (1992): 39–57, James R. Andreas describes Invisible Man as a revision of Othello. 27. I am grateful to Fred Wilson for supplying the text, quoted throughout this paragraph, from his presentation, with Paul Kaplan, at the College Art Association annual meeting in February 2004 entitled “Using History: The Role of an Art Historian in Fred Wilson’s ‘Speak of Me as I Am.’” See Abstracts 2004 (New York: College Art Association, 2004), 74–75. 28. Salah Hassan refers to “grouting that is punctuated with messages of confinement and freedom” in his catalog essay for Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am (40). According to Wilson’s New York Academy of Arts talk on April 1, 2004, the words in the grout between the tiles express feelings of “hope, safety, fear, escape.” 29. For purposes of this discussion, I consider Brown’s primary work to consist of three books published over the roughly thirty-year span from 1959 to 1991: Life Against 204 Notes

Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1959), Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966), and Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991). From my standpoint, this last book, a collection whose two final essays Brown describes as “the end of an era” (ix), is richer and more important than Closing Time (New York: Random House, 1973), whose title announces the official end of Brown’s monographic career. Brown’s obituary notice appeared in the New York Times, October 4, 2002, C20. 30. In the opening paragraph of Life Against Death, Brown cites “the superannuation of the political categories which informed liberal thought and action in the 1930’s” (ix), while part 6, entitled “The Way Out,” insists on the need for “utopian” exploration (305). In “Revisioning Historical Identities” (1990), in Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, 158–78, Brown specifies the defeat of Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1948 as the indication that a new approach to politics was necessary (158, 171). 31. Brown subsequently notes the centrality for Love’s Body of Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle” in “Revisioning Historical Identities,” 171. The essays “Metamorphoses II: Actaeon,” “The Prophetic Tradition,” and “The Apocalypse of Islam” are all collected in Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. 32. Fred Wilson, “When Europe Slept, It Dreamt of the World,” in Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading, ed. Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2001), 426–31; quotation from 427. 33. The six etchings, and the texts for each of the three etchings that contain quotations, can be seen online at http://www.crownpoint.com/artists/wilson/index.html. I am grateful to Barbara Thompson, the curator of African, Oceanic and Native American Collections at Hood Museum of Art, for bringing this new work to my attention. Thompson traced Wilson’s current use of ink spots to the inkwells in the floor of Turbulence II in the Venice Notes 205

Biennale exhibition; visitors touching the ink tracked blotches in the exhibition area. 34. Glen Helfand, “Six New Etchings by Fred Wilson,” Art on Paper 8, no. 6 (July/August 2004): 24. Kathan Brown uses the same terms in “Fred Wilson,” Crown Point Press Newsletter, May 2004, 1–5; see 4. 35. Kathan Brown, “Fred Wilson,” 5. 36. As David Carrier puts it in his chapter on “The Speech Balloon,” “The balloon thus is not just a neutral con- tainer but another element in the visual field” (The Aesthetics of Comics [University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2000], 44). 37. On Wilson’s references to The Boys in the Band, see Glen Helfand’s “Six New Etchings”. On male homoeroticism in Othello, see Nicholas F. Radel, “‘Your Own For Ever’: Revealing Masculine Desire in Othello,” in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello, 62–71. 38. Kathan Brown, “Fred Wilson,” 5.

Chapter 8 1. J. M. Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (New York: Viking, 1997) and Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (New York: Viking, 2002). 2. Coetzee, “Remembering Texas (1984),” in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992), 52–53. 3. Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg (New York: Viking, 1994). 4. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003). 5. Coetzee, “What Is a Classic?: A Lecture” (1991), in Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999 (New York: Viking, 2001), 1–16. 6. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin, 1982); originally published in 1980. 7. Coetzee, Age of Iron (New York: Random House, 1990). 8. Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 206 Notes

2004), 95n4. Though ambiguous, the blurry photograph on Vercueil’s identity card might also indicate an imagery of color: “He looks like a prisoner torn from the dark- ness of a cell,” “vague forms disappearing into the undergrowth that could be man or beast or merely a bad spot on the emulsion” (193). 9. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Viking, 1999). 10. Coetzee, “As a Woman Grows Older,” New York Review of Books 51, no. 1 (January 15, 2004): 11–14. 11. Overviews of Keats’s responses to King Lear are given in D. G. James’s “Keats and King Lear,” Shakespeare Survey 13 (1960): 58–68, and in the penultimate chapter on the play in R. S. White’s Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987). 12. Elizabeth Costello will again pick up Lear’s two telltale adjectives near the end of Coetzee’s subsequent novel Slow Man (New York: Viking, 2005), 233. 13. As a free-floating phrase, unconnected to King Lear, “the thing itself” occurs in Age of Iron, 8. 14. Helen Vendler’s detailed close analysis in The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983) reads “To Autumn” in relation to three Shakespeare sonnets (237), while William Flesch in “The Ambivalence of Generosity: Keats Reading Shakespeare,” ELH 62 (1995): 149–69, sees the poem as being in conversation with Antony and Cleopatra. 15. “Interview” and “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky (1985),” in Attwell, Doubling the Point, 243–50 and 251–93.

Epilogue 1. Charles H. Rowell, “‘Inscription at the City of Brass’: An Interview with Romare Bearden,” Callaloo 36 (Summer 1988): 428–46; quotation from 434. Another example of making changes—apt here because Adrienne Rich’s fore- word to Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2005) links Jordan to Romare Bearden (xxii)—is June Jordan’s alterations to Sonnet 116 in the trajectory from the early Notes 207

“Let Me Live with Marriage” (41) from Some Changes to the late “Shakespeare’s 116th Sonnet in Black English Translation” (587–88). 2. Glenn Ligon lecture, “Meet the Artist” series, Hirshhorn Museum, April 14, 2005. For an overview of Ligon’s work, see the catalog Glenn Ligon: Some Changes accom- panying the 2005 exhibition at the Power Plant, Toronto. 3. Kathan Brown, “Fred Wilson,” Crown Point Press Newsletter, May 2004; quotation from 5. 4. Derek Walcott, “Reflections on Omeros,” South Atlantic Quarterly 96, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 229–46; “referentiality” appears on 230. Subsequent quotations are from this text. INDEX

(Please note that page numbers in italics indicate an endnote.) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Burbage, Richard, 79 (Twain), 39, 183–84 “Burbank with a Baedeker” Age of Iron (Coetzee) (Eliot), 6 Disgrace and, 160 Byerman, Keith, 68, 72 Elizabeth Costello and, 162 Othello and, 10, 159 Callaghan, Dympna, 131 Shakespearean allusions in, Chandelier Mori (Wilson), 124, 155–56 126, 128 Aldridge, Ira, 78, 113 Civil Rights Movement, 81 Alexander, Elizabeth, 139 Clingman, Stephen, 18, 179 Arise! (Wilson), 147, 148–49 Coetzee, J. M., 4, 5–6, 10, “As a Woman Grows Older” 151–65 (Coetzee), 162 canonical inheritance, 152–53 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 11, Defoe and, 153 13–14, 16–17 Dostoevsky and, 153 Kafka and, 153 Baldwin, James Keats and, 162–63 Dove and, 21–24, 29–33 microallusion in early and later Du Bois and, 32–33, 63–64 works, 155–59 Forrest and, 63–64, 66–68 Othello and, 158–59 Shakespeare and, 21–23, rejection of Shakespeare, 63–64, 181 151–52 Bearden, Romare, 167 See also Age of Iron; “As a Berger, Harry, 3 Woman Grows Older”; Berger, Maurice, 133–34, 146 Boyhood; “Confession Bhabha, Homi, 12 and Double Thoughts”; “Bigger and O. J.” (Reed), 105, Disgrace; Elizabeth Costello; 106 Foe; Life and Times of Black Aesthetic, 28, 182 Michael K; Master of blackface, 38–39, 79, 112, 114, Petersburg, The; Waiting 182–83 for the Barbarians; “What Bloom, Harold, 2–3 Is a Classic?”; Youth Boyhood (Coetzee), 151–52 Collected Poems 1948–1984 Brixton riots, 47, 49, 56 (Walcott), 43 Brodsky, Joseph, 48, 59–60 Coltrane, John, 139 Brown, Norman O., 6, 144–46, “Confession and Double 176 Thoughts” (Coetzee), 164–65 210 Index

“Crazy Jane Talks to the Othello and, 77 Bishop” (Yeats), 5 Shakespeare and, 21–23, Crouch, Stanley, 62 63–64 Crowley, Mart, 149 Duberman, Martin, 86, 91–92, Cullen, Countee, 38, 43 96, 100 Duchamp, Marcel, 84, 192 Daileader, Celia, 89 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 37 Danziger, Marlies, 81 Dupree, Champion Jack, 24, Defoe, Daniel, 153 29 Desmet, Christy, 100, 196 Dyer, Richard, 92–96, 100 Disgrace (Coetzee), 160–62 Divine Days (Forrest), 28–29, Eliot, T. S., 6–8, 59–60 61–75 Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee) African-American access to absolution and, 164–65 Shakespeare and, 62–63 allusion and, 4–5, 154, Shakespearean allusions, 61–62 159–60, 164 Donne, John, 11, 16, 176 Keats and, 162–63 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 153, 164, “Sailing to Byzantium” and, 165 160 double consciousness, theory of, Ellington, Duke, 167 9, 65–66 Ellison, Ralph, 31, 61, 143 Dove, Rita, 1, 3–4, 8–9, 21–39 Emperor Jones, The (O’Neill) Black Aesthetic and, 28, 182 Exchange and, 86 on Du Bois, 23–24 reaction to, 88 on Dupree, 24–25 “Essential Gesture, The” on early reading of (Gordimer), 13 Shakespeare, 26 Exchange (Wilson), 147–50 Forrest and, 29 Extravagant Strangers (Phillips), on “In the Old 107 Neighborhood,” 27–28 poetic transformations, 29–37 “Far Cry from Africa, A” on Rich, 25 (Walcott), 41–44 Walcott and, 8, 43 Fences (A. Wilson), 84 See also “In the Old Fishburne, Laurence, 132 Neighborhood”; Museum; Foe (Coetzee), 153 “Shakespeare Say” For Lives and Cultures Lost Drip Drop Plop (Wilson), 126, (Wilson), 124 128–31, 147 For Pawns in a Larger Game grieving motif, 121 (Wilson), 124, 125, 138 teardrops, 130 Forrest, Leon, 9, 61–75 Du Bois, W. E. B. anti-Shakespeare phenomenon, Baldwin and, 32–33, 63–64 68–70 “double consciousness” and, 9, Baldwin and, 63–64, 65–66 66–68 Forrest and, 63–66, 68 Dove and, 28–29 “In the Old Neighborhood” Du Bois and, 63–66, 68 and, 29–30 reinvention, 71–75 Index 211

Robeson and, 89–90, 97 The Lion King and, 84 Shakespearean allusion, 70–71 Othello and, 80–84 Walcott and, 43 Verizon and, 83–84, 191 Jordan, June, 31 Gilroy, Paul, 79 Joyce, James, 154 “Goats and Monkeys” (Walcott), Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 26 6–7 Goncharov, Kathleen, 85 Kafka, Franz, 153 “Good Morrow, The” (Donne), Kahn, Coppelia, 78 11, 16 Kaplan, Paul, 121 Gordimer, Nadine, 9, 11–19 Keats, John, 2, 3, 159–65 African literary tradition and, 19 King, Bruce, 186 Donne and, 11, 16 King Lear (Shakespeare), Luxemburg and, 11, 15–16, 19 4, 26 Shakespeare and, 11, 13–14, Coetzee and, 159, 163 16–17 Elizabeth Costello and, 4 Walcott and, 49, 58–59 Hagen, Uta, 78 Hamlet (Shakespeare) Levine, Lawrence W., 183 Coetzee and, 156–57, 165 Life and Times of Michael K Forrest and, 61, 70, 72–74 (Coetzee), 3 Gordimer and, 17–18 Ligon, Glenn, 167–68 Walcott and, 46, 57–58 Love’s Body (Brown), 6 Harlem Duet (Sears), 90, 111, Luxemburg, Rosa, 11, 115–16 15–16, 19 Harper, Michael S., 139 Lying Days, The (Gordimer), 18 Heath, Gordon, 88 Helfand, Glen, 148 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 26, 62, Henry V (Shakespeare), 44, 47, 54 152–53 “Heritage” (Cullen), 43 MacDonald, Joyce Green, 185 Hyman, Earle, 78, 87 Mandela, Nelson, 88 Master of Petersburg, The “In the Old Neighborhood” (Coetzee), 152, 153 (Dove), 21, 22 Merchant of Venice, The color imagery, 35–36 (Shakespeare), 106, 109 parenthetical stanzas, 26–27 Merry Wives of Windsor, The Rich and, 25 (Shakespeare), 51 “Shakespeare Say” and, 29–30, Meteor in the Madhouse (Forrest), 32, 33 61, 71–72, 74 Midsummer (Walcott), 42, 44 James, C. L. R., 189 Shakespeare and, 45, 48, Japanese by Spring (Reed), 103, 53–54, 59–60 105–6, 108 Tiepolo’s Hound and, 54–58 Jones, James Earl, 80–84, 132, Walcott’s dissatisfaction with, 190 45 as Darth Vader, 83–84 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Fences and, 84 (Shakespeare), 26, 48 212 Index

Mine/Yours (Wilson), 134 grieving with/for, 119–31 Mirsky, Marvin, 70 Japanese by Spring and, 103, Morris, Robert, 85, 193 105–6, 108 Morrison, Toni, 105 queer identity and, 149 MultiAmerica (Reed), 105 Venice Biennale and, 119–20, multiculturalism, Shakespeare 134, 147 and, 99–101 Walcott and, 46, 49–50 Muray, Nickolas, 93–94 whiteness and, 131–33 Museum (Dove), 22, 180 See also Olivier, Laurence; My Son’s Story (Gordimer) Robeson, Paul As You Like It and, 11, “Othello Syndrome, The” 13–14, 16–17 (Heath), 88 Donne and, 11, 16 “Other World That Was the Luxemburg and, 11, 15–16, 19 World, The” (Gordimer), 13 quotations, use of, 11 Papp, Joseph, 82 Nature of Blood, The (Phillips), Parker, Oliver, 132 103, 106–7, 108 “Paul Robeson: Crossing Over” Neill, Michael, 12, 178 (Dyer), 92 Nigger Heaven (Van Vechten), 97 Pesaro tomb, 121–24, 128, No Name in the Street (Baldwin), 130–31 63–64, 66–67 Phillips, Caryl, 103, 106–7, None to Accompany Me 109–11, 117 (Gordimer), 14 Othello and, 107 Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin), The Merchant of Venice and, 23 109 Sears and, 111, 117 Okri, Ben, 88 Pissarro, Camille, 55–56 Oliver, Edith, 81–82, 87 Postcolonial Melancholia (Gilroy), Olivier, Laurence 79 Crouch and, 62 Potter, Lois, 87, 190 Othello and, 111–12, 114 Robeson and, 112, 114 Quarshie, Hugh, 89 September Dream and, 131, quotations, use of 133, 140 Dove and, 35 O’Neill, Eugene, 84, 86, 88, 93, Forrest and, 62, 68, 70 97 Gordimer and, 11, 13–14, Othello (Shakespeare), 6–7, 9–10, 15–16 77–101 as transformation, 167–68 apocalyptic criticism and, Walcott and, 46, 59 144–47 Wilson and, 86, 121, 136, breaking and, 133–42 142–43, 147–48 Coetzee and, 158–59 Dove and, 25–26, 34, 36, 39 Reed, Ishmael, 104–6, 111, Exchange and, 147–50 117 “Goats and Monkeys” and, Othello and, 104 6–7 Schlesinger and, 106 Index 213

Sears and, 111, 117 Turbulence II and, 135, 136, Rich, Adrienne, 3, 25, 35 138–39, 142 Dove and, 25 “Shakespeare Say” (Dove), 22, Walcott and, 47 36 Ricks, Christopher, 1–3 Champion Jack and, 29–30, Robeson, Paul, 9, 77–101, 32 189–90 “In the Old Neighborhood” Baldwin and, 100 and, 29–30, 33 blackface, 79 origin of, 24 critical reaction to, 90–91 Shatter (Wilson), 128 Emperor Jones and, 84, 86, 97 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), Forrest and, 89–90, 97 9, 21, 23, 63, 65–66 Fred Wilson and, 84–86 South Africa, 87–88 interracial taboos, 78 Speak of Me as I Am (Wilson) James Earl Jones compared to, apocalyptic criticism and, 144 80–84 figure of artist in, 134 “multicultural” image of identity and, 134, 142–44 Shakespeare and, 79, plea of Africans, as, 132 100–1 Shakespeare’s role in, 148 politics and, 98–99 See also September Dream; Sears and, 89–90 Turbulence II Van Vechten and, 93–97 Sport of Nature, A (Gordimer), Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 14 26, 157 Star Wars, 83 “Ruins of a Great House” Steichen, Edward, 84–86, 93 (Walcott), 44 Stewart, Jeffrey C., 94 “Stranger in the Village” “Sailing to Byzantium” (Yeats), (Baldwin) 159–63 alienation and, 30 Schlesinger, Arthur, 106 Du Bois and, 21, 23 Sears, Djanet, 9, 90, 111–15, legacy and, 24 117 Shakespeare and, 32, 63 exorcism and, 112–13, “Shakespeare Say” and, 30 114–15 Suzman, Janet, 87–88 Olivier and, 111–12 performance history of Othello Taubman, Howard, 80 and, 111–15, 117 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 45, September 11, 2001, 120, 141 49–50, 52 September Dream (Wilson) There Is a Tree More Ancient continuous video looping, 139 than Eden (Forrest), 61 four-part configuration, 131 Tiepolo, Giambattista, 55 grid motif, 138 Tiepolo’s Hound (Walcott), 42, Olivier and, 133 44, 54–60 Othello videos in, 120, Tompkins, Joanne, 176 135–36 transformation September 11 and, 120, 141 Forrest and, 71 silence and, 135, 139, 141 Gordimer and, 13, 18 214 Index transformation—continued See also Collected Poems poetic, 29–37 1948–1984; “Far Cry from Walcott and, 53 Africa, A”; “Goats and Wilson and, 134 Monkeys”; Midsummer; True Identity, 83 “Ruins of a Great Turbulence II (Wilson) House”; Tiepolo’s Hound; cacophony in, 136 What the Twilight Says chessboard imagery, 138 Wallace, Henry, 91 confinement vs. freedom in, Wanderer, The (Wilson), 126, 144 127, 129, 138 inkwells, 131 Washington, Booker T., 64, 69 “pot with the bed in it,” 138 “Waste Land, The” (Eliot), 6 September Dream and, 135, Way of Being Free, A (Okri), 88 136, 138–39, 142 We Are All in the Gutter, But Turner, J. M. W., 49, 55–56 Some of Us Are Looking at “Turning the Page” (Gordimer), the Stars (Wilson), 147 19 Webster, Margaret, 90–91 Twain, Mark, 39, 183–84 Welles, Orson, 62 West, Paul, 4, 5 Ulysses (Joyce), 154 “What Is a Classic?” (Coetzee), Untitled (Wilson), 129 154–55 What the Twilight Says (Walcott), Van Vechten, Carl, 86, 93–95, 48 96–97 “When We Dead Awaken” Vendler, Helen, 38 (Rich), 3 Venice Biennale, 119–20, 134, Will to Change, The (Rich), 25 147 Wilson, August, 84–86, 88 Verizon, 83–84, 191 Wilson, Fred, 9–10, 80, 88, 99, Very Rich Hours of Count von 119–50, 168 Stauffenberg, The (West), 4 incorporation of Pesaro tomb in works, 121–24, 128, Waiting for the Barbarians 130–31 (Coetzee), 155 Othello and, 120–21, 124, Walcott, Derek, 6–9, 41–60, 126, 130–31 168–69 queer identity and, 149 Brixton riots and, 47, September 11, and, 119–20, 49, 56 141 Caribbean identity and, 42, Venice Biennale and, 119–20, 52, 56, 58–59 134, 147 Dove and, 8, 43 Forrest and, 43 Yeats, William Butler, 5–6, Hamlet and, 46, 57–58 159–65 King Lear and, 49, 58–59 Disgrace and, 160–61 Othello and, 46, 49–50 Elizabeth Costello and, 159–60, Shakespearean allusions, 45–54 163–64 use of quotations, 46, 59 Youth (Coetzee), 151