ACKNOWLEDGMENTS - Springer LINK

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As Harry Berger has shown in his acknowledg-ments at the beginning of Making Trifles ofTerrors, the act of acknowledging is emotion-

ally laden for Shakespeareans because of Stanley Cavell’s1969 essay on King Lear called “The Avoidance of Love.”I do not want to avoid; therefore, I first acknowledge theinspiration of the late Tay Gavin Erickson, especially for myinterest in the visual.

I have received help from many directions, and I amparticularly grateful to the Shakespeareans engaged in racestudies who have built the intellectual realm in which Icurrently dwell. Scholars whose work has enabled me tofeel the energizing sense of participating in this collectiveproject include Dympna Callaghan, Kim Hall, ArthurLittle, Ania Loomba, Joyce Green MacDonald, PatriciaParker, Francesca Royster, and Ayanna Thompson. I couldnot have made it this far without the support of JeanHoward, Coppélia Kahn, and Virginia Vaughan. Duringthe final stages of completing this book, I greatly benefitedfrom three-month research fellowships at the Clark ArtInstitute, whose visiting scholars program is led by MichaelHolly, and at the Folger Shakespeare Library, directed byGail Kern Paster. The rich intellectual and social mix ateach institution has been a special pleasure.

Marathon critic Harry Berger has kept me going withthe extraordinary example of his staying power—from himI have gleaned what it means to be committed for the

172 Acknowledgments

long haul, to go the distance. Now dispersed in distantlocations and fields, my three children continue to be mymainstays and I greet them from within the pages of thisbook.

Though I met Lisa Graziose Corrin after completing themanuscript for this book, my subsequent discovery of herwriting in Mining the Museum, Going for Baroque, LooseThreads, and Give & Take has sustained and strengthenedthe excitement I feel about cross-historical connectionsbetween the cultural past and contemporary art. I thankLisa not only for seeing me through the book’s productionphase but also for changing my life.

Previously published articles have all been revised forinclusion here. Chapter 2 is a slightly altered version of“Rita Dove’s Shakespeares” in Transforming Shakespeare:Contemporary Women’s Re-Visions in Literature andPerformance, ed. Marianne Novy (New York: St. Martin’s,1999), 87–101, and used with permission of PalgraveMacmillan. I appreciate Rita Dove’s generosity in againgranting permission to quote from her poetry.

Different versions of chapters 4 and 6 appeared as “‘Yetyou can quote Shakespeare, at the drop of a pin’: TheFunction of Shakespearean Riffs in Leon Forrest’s DivineDays,” 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 Meteorin the Madhouse and on Djanet Sears’s Hamlet Duet. Forthe material as originally published in Upstart Crow, Iacknowledge permission from Clemson University DigitalPress.

An earlier version of chapter 7, “Respeaking Othello inFred Wilson’s Speak of Me as I Am,” published by theCollege Art Association in Art Journal 64, no. 2 (Summer2005): 4–19, was based on the text of my Clark Fellowslecture at the Clark Art Institute on December 14, 2004.I am grateful to Evie Lincoln and Jonathan Weinberg forhelpful comments on that initial occasion, to Patricia C.Phillips and Joe Hannan of Art Journal, and especially toFred Wilson. The essay appears here in expanded form.Additional images of Wilson’s work can be seen in theoriginal article.

Acknowledgments 173

NOTES

Introduction1. 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: FordhamUP, 2005): “When viewed retrospectively or ‘preposter-ously,’ from the latest work backward, every new epicpoet appears to invent his own version of the genre he‘inherits’ (represents as inherited), and to do so in orderto overthrow that paradigm” (37–38). “This implies adifferent relationship between the given text and itsintertextual environment, one in which the lines of forceand ‘moments of authority’ derive not from the seriesbut from the text” (37).

5. Adrienne Rich’s “When We Dead Awaken: Writing asRe-Vision” (1971)—in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (NewYork: Norton, 1979), 33–49—inspired the three-volumeproject edited by Marianne Novy: Women’s Re-Visions ofShakespeare (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990), Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women’s Re-Visionsof Shakespeare (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993), andTransforming 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 malewriters are taken into account.

6. Joanne Tompkins uses the term “re-playing” in“Re-Citing Shakespeare in Post-Colonial Drama,” Essays inTheatre/Études théâtrales 15, no. 1 (1996): 15–22.Although Tompkins’s analysis is deliberately restricted tothe genre of drama, my goal is to show that the conceptof re-citing as re-siting or “re-situating” extends across therange of contemporary genres.

7. Citations of Shakespeare here, and throughout this book,are from The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. StephenGreenblatt (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: RandomHouse, 1966), 184, 188. The title of Brown’s book con-denses John Donne’s lines “Love’s mysteries in souls dogrow/But yet the body is his book.” Brown’s vividcompression makes us think all the more of the missingthird term—book—that mediates between love and body.However, Brown’s use of the Yeats poem complicatesnot only Donne’s image of the body but also the con-cept 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 Castawayand Other Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965) andis 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 andthe Stoicism of Seneca” (in Selected Essays, 1917–1932[New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932],110–11) is dismissive, while his seemingly generousaccolade “universal” in describing Othello’s account ofhis plight in the final speech does not acknowledge,and therefore effectively blocks, consideration of theplay’s racial issues. For an overview of Eliot’s allusions,see James Longenbach, “‘Mature poets steal’: Eliot’s

176 Notes

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,” inRewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley: Uof California P, 1991), I give a critical account of whythe conception of ongoing change in T. S. Eliot’s“Tradition and the Individual Talent” is inadequate tothe scope of change undertaken in post-1960s revisionsof the canon. Additional background is supplied in myessays from the early 1990s: “Rather than Reject aCommon Culture, Multiculturalism Advocates a MoreComplicated Route by Which to Achieve It,” Chronicleof Higher Education, June 26, 1991, B1–B3;“Multiculturalism and the Problem of Liberalism,”Reconstruction 2, no. 1 (1992): 97–101; “WhatMulticulturalism Means,” Transition 55 (1992): 105–14;and “Singing America: From Walt Whitman to AdrienneRich,” 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 commentson 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’sCosmopolitanism (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003),171–72.

Chapter 11. 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. AniaLoomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998),164–85; Neill’s discussion of My Son’s Story appears on176–78.

Notes 177

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 ofdisjunction through more complicated, qualified imagesof Shakespeare but, in the end, revert to Neill’s notionof mastery and hence confirm Shakespearean continuity.In “Western Classics in the South African State ofEmergency: Gordimer’s My Son’s Story and Coetzee’sAge 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 justifyShakespeare’s “mastery” (122). In RepositioningShakespeare: National Formations, PostcolonialAppropriations (London: Routledge, 1999), 169–80,Cartelli begins with candid admission of Shakespeare’s“diminished status” (170) but reinstates Shakespeare’smastery when he concludes by characterizing Will “asincapable of compassing anything close to Shakespeare’sachievement” (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), inNadine Gordimer, Writing and Being (Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1995), 114–34. The phrase “essential ges-ture” occurs in the latter on 132.

6. When the line is subsequently quoted in full by a “thirdperson” traveling between Hannah and Sonny, Sonnyexperiences it as a betrayal not only of their private codebut also of their intimacy (162, 164, 172).

7. Pastoral sentimentality aside, the imagined utopian com-munity dramatized in the play is politically structured indifferential power, as I show in “Sexual Politics andSocial Structure in As You Like It,” in PatriarchalStructures in Shakespeare’s Drama (Berkeley: U ofCalifornia P, 1985), 15–38.

178 Notes

8. Rosa Luxemburg’s letter of 1904, addressed to KarlKautsky, is variously translated, but this precise Englishphrasing can be seen in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, 2vols. (London: Oxford UP, 1996), 198.

9. In Stephen Eric Bronner’s Rosa Luxemburg: ARevolutionary for Our Times (London: Pluto, 1981),Shakespeare sustains her in prison: “At night, she recitedpassages from Shakespeare, Goethe, and Mörike to relieveher loneliness” (73). The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed.Stephen Eric Bronner (Boulder: Westview, 1978), includesa 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), StephenClingman observes that in My Son’s Story, “Gordimer hasreturned to the origins of her own writing” and makesthe specific connection to The Lying Days with “a youngwhite woman who, as the product of her experience,found that she had written a novel” (xxxi). The respectivecodas of The Lying Days (New York: Simon and Schuster,1953) and My Son’s Story each begin by expressing theconsciousness of “story” (339; 275) as a constructedform. Also, the former’s “phoenix illusion” (340) reap-pears in Sonny’s appeal to the phoenix (274).

11. Clingman discusses the limitations of this unpublishednovel (24–27) and correlates it with his critical assessmentof The Lying Days: “At this point Gordimer’s terms ofanalysis revert back to those we found in her unfinishednovel of 1946” (43).

12. “Turning the Page: African Writers and the Twenty-firstCentury,” in Nadine Gordimer, Living in Hope andHistory: Notes from Our Century (New York: Farrar, Strausand Giroux, 1999), 30–37. The original date of this essayin 1992 puts it in the same period with My Son’s Story,published two years earlier. Gordimer’s “We have soughtthe fingerprint of flesh on history” (30) overlaps with thefingerprint motif attributed to Will: “Each is a fingerprintof life” (275).

Notes 179

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 aNative Son (New York: Dial, 1955), 148. The signalimportance of the passage on Shakespeare is emphasizedby Baldwin’s eloquent reiteration in the “AutobiographicalNotes” (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 intro-duction to Selected Poems, xix–xx.

4. A brief account of Dupree’s career is provided by theobituary in the New York Times, January 22, 1992, A19.See Dove’s comments on Champion Jack in the inter-view with Malin Periera, in Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism(Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003), 184–85.

5. Discussions of “In the Old Neighborhood” include thoseby Therese Steffen in Crossing Color: Transcultural Spaceand Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 40–44, and by Pereira inCosmopolitanism, 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: NewPoems, 1977–1980 (Boston: Beacon, 1980).

8. In “On Voice”—in Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poetsand Critics on Poetry, ed. Yopie Prins and MaeeraShreiber (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997), 111–15—Dovedescribes Europe and home as two points in her ownoverall trajectory: “In Museum (1983) I was very con-cerned with presenting a type of antimuseum, a collec-tion of totems that would not be considered ‘essential’to the canon of Western culture—and to that end Iadopted a voice that was distanced, cool, ironic; of allmy books, this is the most ‘European.’ After Museum Ifelt I had gone away from home and was now able toreturn, like a prodigal daughter” (111).

180 Notes

9. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dial,1972), 47–48. In a short piece chronologically midwaybetween “Stranger in the Village” and No Name in theStreet—“‘This Nettle, Danger’” (1964), in James Baldwin:Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998),687–91—Baldwin defined the terms that enabled hisreturn to Shakespeare: “Every man writes about his ownShakespeare—and his Shakespeare changes as he himselfchanges, grows as he grows—and the Shakespeare that Iam reading at this stage of my life testifies, for me, to thiseffort” (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’snew acceptance goes so far as to remove Shylock andOthello from critical scrutiny; in my view, this reactiongoes too far in the other direction.

10. For further discussion of this decontextualization, see thesection on Du Bois (58–60) in my essay “The TwoRenaissances 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 thesame moment as Rich’s critical shift in “When We DeadAwaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971), in On Lies,Secrets, and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), 33–49. Idiscuss Rich’s responses to Shakespeare in “AdrienneRich’s Re-Vision of Shakespeare,” in RewritingShakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley: U ofCalifornia P, 1991), 146–66, and in “Start MisquotingHim Now: The Difference a Word Makes in AdrienneRich’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 asource for the father’s despair in the racial discriminationthat thwarted his career, despite his university degree(75–76), while in poignant contrast, the recording of herown career landmarks demonstrates the expanded possi-bilities for black Americans in the very next generation.The encounter with her father at the poem’s centernegotiates the emotional terrain of this generational shift.

Notes 181

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: “LouiseGlück, Stephen Dunn, Brad Leithauser, Rita Dove,” inThe Music of What Happens (Cambridge: Harvard UP,1988), 437–54; “An Interview with Rita Dove,” inReading Black, Reading Feminist, ed. Henry Louis Gates,Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1990), 481–91; “A DissonantTriad: Henri Cole, Rita Dove, and August Kleinzahler”and “The Black Dove: Rita Dove, Poet Laureate,” in SoulSays (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), 141–55 and156–66; “Rita Dove: Identity Markers,” in The Given andthe Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition (Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1995), 59–88; and “Twentieth-CenturyDemeter,” The New Yorker, May 15, 1995, 90–92.

Dove herself provides ample testimony to her rejec-tion of a purist Black Aesthetic mode in favor of astance open to multiple, hybrid influences. See, espe-cially, her extraordinary comprehensive historical surveyof black poetry co-authored with Marilyn NelsonWaniek—“A Black Rainbow: Modern Afro-AmericanPoetry,” in Poetry After Modernism, ed. RobertMcDowell (Brownsville, OR: Story Line, 1991),217–75—as well as her revealing commentaries on twoindividual poets in “Telling It Like It I-S IS: NarrativeTechniques in Melvin Tolson’s Harlem Gallery,”New England Review 8 (1985): 109–17, and “‘EitherI’m Nobody, or I’m a Nation,’” Parnassus 14, no. 1(1987): 49–76. On the other hand, we must also noteDove’s equally strong dismissal of the traditionalist pos-turing represented by Harold Bloom in “ScreamingFire,” 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 Riseand Fall of the White Republic (London: Verso, 1990),the chapter on “White Skins, Black Masks: Minstrelsyand White Working Class Formations before the Civil

182 Notes

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 atten-tion to Shakespeare. The extremely important exceptionis 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 inAmerica (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988). Lawrence W.Levine emphasizes the continuity between Shakespeare’splays and Shakespeare burlesques: “It is difficult to takefamiliarities with that which is not already familiar; onecannot parody that which is not well known” (15–16).However, burlesque transformations frequently have aparodic bite that pays no respect to the original; henceLevine underestimates the extent to which familiaritywith Shakespeare is employed to register a characteristi-cally American form of contempt.

17. Jim’s partial derivation from blackface roles is noted bothby Ralph Ellison—“Jim is flawed by his relationship tothe minstrel tradition” (The Collected Essays of RalphEllison, ed. John F. Callahan [New York: ModernLibrary, 1995], 731)—and by Toni Morrison—“the over-the-top minstrelization of Jim” (Introduction toAdventures of Huckleberry Finn [New York: Oxford UP,1996], xxxv). See also Eric Lott, “Mr. Clemens and JimCrow: Twain, Race, and Blackface,” in The CambridgeCompanion to Mark Twain, ed. Forrest G. Robinson(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 129–52.

18. Anthony J. Berret is unconvincing when he argues inMark Twain and Shakespeare (Lanham: UP of America,1993) that “it is probable that Twain thought of Othellowhile composing” Huckleberry Finn (176). The link toOthello represents a critical fantasy of what we would liketo have happened in Twain’s novel but does not in factoccur. The connection between Shakespeare burlesqueand blackface minstrelsy that could have been illuminating

Notes 183

is never actually made. The novel’s lack of resolution hasproduced an ongoing debate exemplified by Jane Smiley’s“Say It Ain’t So, Huck,” Harper’s Magazine, January1996, 61–67.

Chapter 31. 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: ACaribbean Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 110; I citethe poem from Walcott’s Collected Poems, 1948–1984(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 17–18.

3. Derek Walcott, Midsummer (New York: Farrar, Strausand 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 thecomplex, multiple, and metaphorical identity described inStuart Hall’s essays “Negotiating Caribbean Identities,”New Left Review 209 (1995): 3–14 and “Thinking theDiaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad,” Small Axe 6(1999): 1–18, and summarized in the former: “Identityis not in the past to be found, but in the future to beconstructed” (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

184 Notes

Politics (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1991), 5–25;quotation from 19.

12. The Brixton riots and the official report on them are dis-cussed in Scarman and After: Essays Reflecting on LordScarman’s Report, the Riots and Their Aftermath, ed.John Benyon (Oxford: Pergamon, 1984) and in StuartHall’s “From Scarman to Stephen Lawrence,” HistoryWorkshop Journal 48 (1999): 187–97. In chapter 38 ofOmeros (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990),Walcott subsequently makes an unusually angry indict-ment in which “whitewashing the walls of Brixton” pointsto “Dark future down darker street” (5.38.3; 197).

13. In Walcott’s 1983 play A Branch of the Blue Nile, inThree Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986),the black actors rehearsing Antony and Cleopatra make abitter joke—“Can’t talk Shakespeare, though” (229)—that resonates with the blunt prejudice articulated inpoem 23: “‘But the blacks can’t do Shakespeare.’” Evenif the accusation is manifestly false, it nonethelessenforces its tragic cost, as Joyce Green MacDonald bril-liantly demonstrates in “Bodies, Race, and Performancein Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile,” TheatreJournal 57 (2005): 54–71. As in poem 23, the playplaces Walcott in an uncomfortable position between theShakespearean artistic ideal and the damaging reality ofblack exclusion, as experienced by the character Sheila inthe play or by Brixton rioters in the poem. The drama’s“if” in Phil’s wish—“if it was in my power to sprinklebenediction on your kind, to ask heaven to drizzle thelight of grace on the work you trying to do here”(300)—seems to express both Walcott’s desire and hisinability to fulfill it.

14. “On Hemingway” (113) and “The Road Taken: RobertFrost” (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 thefollowing gloss on the phrase “No language is neutral”from poem 52: “So language is not a place of retreat,

Notes 185

it’s not a place of escape, it’s not even a place of resolu-tion. It’s a place of struggle” (Points of Departure, 86).The uncertainty about the Shakespearean proliferationthat ends poem 52 is how it bears on this question ofstruggle: Does the multiple and confused recourse toShakespeare mean that Walcott in effect capitulates andloses 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 DerekWalcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound,” Callaloo 28, no. 1 (Winter2005): 224–35.

18. My citations to Tiepolo’s Hound have a double formatreferring to book, section, and stanza and to page num-ber. Walcott confirms the medium of his father’s self-por-trait as “a self-portrait in water colour” (28) in theaccount 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 thispainting, exhibited in 1839, to Turner’s Slave Ship of1840 described in John McCoubrey, “Turner’s SlaveShip: Abolition, Ruskin, and Reception,” Word & Image14 (1998): 319–53. The principle of paired paintings—indicated in James Hamilton’s linking of Slave Ship withRockets and Blue Lights in Turner: The Late Seascapes(New Haven: Yale UP, 2003), 43–49—might be usefullyexpanded beyond those pairings expressly designated byTurner himself.

20. Bruce King provides evidence that Walcott shares hisfather’s devotion to Turner: “The Turners upstairs at theTate were Walcott’s main interest” (Derek Walcott, 586).

21. The ways in which Turner’s paintings produce an idea ofthe British empire are shown in the complementaryessays by Elizabeth Helsinger, “Turner and theRepresentation of England,” in Landscape and Power, ed.W. J. T. Mitchell, 2nd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P,

186 Notes

2002), 103–25, and K. Dian Kriz, “Dido versus thePirates: Turner’s Carthaginian Paintings and theSublimation of Colonial Desire,” Oxford Art Journal 18,no. 1 (1995): 116–32, with their respective emphases onnational and international contexts.

22. King, Derek Walcott, 10, 20.23. Sharon L. Ciccarelli, “Reflections before and after

Carnival: An Interview with Derek Walcott,” in Chantof 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; quo-tations from 302–03.

24. Walcott, “Magic Industry: Joseph Brodsky,” in What theTwilight Says, 134–52, quotations from 140–41, and“The Muse of History,” 36–64, quotations from36–37.

Chapter 41. In chronological order, the novels are: There Is a Tree

More Ancient than Eden (New York: Random House,1973), The Bloodworth Orphans (New York: RandomHouse, 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 bookof fiction is the posthumous collection of novellas,Meteor in the Madhouse, ed. John G. Cawelti and MerleDrown (Evanston: Triquarterly Books/NorthwesternUP, 2001). Dana A. Williams’s “In the Light ofLikeness—Transformed”: The Literary Art of Leon Forrest(Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2005) provides a biograph-ical summary (1–6); Forrest’s obituary appears in theNew York Times, November 10, 1997, A35.

2. Stanley Crouch, The All-American Skin Game, or, TheDecoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It, 1990–1994(New York: Pantheon, 1995), 24. Crouch’s reviews ofDivine Days and Meteor in the Madhouse both take noteof Forrest’s use of Shakespeare: “Beyond AmericanTribalism,” in All-American Skin Game, 113–18, and

Notes 187

“A Moral History of Chicago,” New York Times BookReview, September 9, 2001, 34.

3. On the distinction between access as an initial step andcritical response as the end goal, see my discussion ofAnthony Appiah in “The Moment of Race inRenaissance 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 aNative Son (New York: Dial, 1955), 148.

6. Leon Forrest, “Evidences of Jimmy Baldwin,” inRelocations 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 seeDavid W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War inAmerican Memory (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001),362–64.

9. Keith Byerman, “Angularity: An Interview with LeonForrest,” African American Review 33 (1999): 439–50;quotation from 446.

10. Leon Forrest: Introductions and Interpretations (BowlingGreen, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1997),13, 282.

11. Charles H. Rowell, “‘Beyond the Hard Work andDiscipline’: An Interview with Leon Forrest,” Callaloo 20(1997): 342–56.

12. James A. Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of BlackCulture,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed.Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Methuen, 1984),59–79; quotation from 68.

Chapter 51. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), ed.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver

188 Notes

(New York: Norton, 1999), 74. In RepositioningShakespeare: National Formations, PostcolonialAppropriations (London: Routledge, 1999), ThomasCartelli links Robeson to Du Bois through the namingof Du Bois’s grandfather after Othello (147–48).

2. Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York:Knopf, 1988), 137; Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: AContextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994),192; Michael Neill, “Othello and Race,” in Approaches toTeaching Shakespeare’s Othello, ed. Peter Erickson andMaurice Hunt (New York: Modern Language Association,2005), 37–52; quotation on 40.

3. Coppélia Kahn, “Caliban at the Stadium: Shakespeareand the Making of Americans,” Massachusetts Review 41(2000): 256–84.

4. Comprehensive performance histories, including blackactors in the role of Othello, are Errol Hill, Shakespearein 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 AmericanTheatre (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). The latter’semphasis on progress is epitomized by the summarystatement: “It would be another fifty years before thepowerful interpretations of Paul Robeson, GordonHeath, James Earl Jones, and Earle Hyman would forceWhites to relinquish Othello. Blacks were able to cap-ture these roles because their portrayals were equal orsuperior” (229).

5. Earle Hyman, “Othello: Or Ego in Love, Sex, andWar,” in Othello: New Essays by Black Writers, ed.Mythili Kaul (Washington, D.C.: Howard UP, 1997),23–28; quotation from 23. Bill Schwartz’s “BlackMetropolis, White England” (in Modern Times:Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, ed. MicaNava 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’sanxiety about relations with white women. Describinghis physical discomfort about onstage proximity to a

Notes 189

white woman in Othello, Robeson himself testified tothe ingrained fear about the danger of cross-racial sex-ual expression (Duberman 135, 138). Robeson’s off-stage affairs with Peggy Ashcroft during the 1930performance in London and with Uta Hagen at thetime of the subsequent New York performance have adirect parallel with the Othello–Desdemona relationshipthat adds to the sense of sexual liberation acted out onstage.

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 Jonesin the narrative of potential black advancement, whosetriumph is confirmed within the review.

8. Marlies K. Danziger, “Shakespeare in New York, 1964,”Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 419–22; quotation from421.

9. Lois Potter’s Othello (Manchester: Manchester UP,2002) puts the best face on the Robeson model byobserving that the “Robeson influence may at timesseem oppressive, but it has given black actors the senseof professional continuity that white Shakespeareanactors have taken for granted” (158). But this state-ment, while true, avoids the deeper question about thenegative repercussions of Robeson’s influence: if nosignificant innovation can occur beyond Robeson’s ini-tial breakthrough, substantial further progress isblocked. In “Slammin’ Shakespeare In Accidents YetUnknown: Liveness, Cinem(edi)a, and Racial Dis-integration,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53 (2003): 201–26,Richard Burt’s formulation of the network of relationsamong Robeson as precursor and Earle Hyman andJames Earl Jones as successors provides a necessary cor-rective to Potter’s point of view: “A black actor play-ing Othello participates in a tradition of black actorsthat, when pressed, is seen to have its own (derivative)inauthenticity” (220).

190 Notes

10. Edith Oliver, “The Moor Indoors,” New Yorker, October24, 1964, 93–95; quotation from 95. It is worth notingthat an iconic SNCC (Student Nonviolent CoordinatingCommittee) button in this period showed an image oftwo 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 andJones’s primary Verizon identity is humorously crystal-lized in a recent cartoon in which the ubiquity of Jones’scommercial voice is played off against the dilemma ofhis diminished theatrical career: Carolita Johnson,New Yorker, June 27, 2005, 52.

13. My source for the Bell Atlantic advertisement is RichardBurt’s section on “Black Stars and Authenticity inShakespeare 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 thesubstitution of J. J. Walker for Jones in the part ofOthello in the advertisement and the similar motif in the1991 film True Identity, in which Lenny Henry’s charac-ter 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 Jokeand 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 ShakespeareAdvertising,” 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 thefilm in “Remembering the American Self: Hamlet, Africa,and Disney’s The Lion King ” for Francesca Royster’sseminar on “Apocalyptic Shakespeares: Shakespeare, Film,

Notes 191

and Cultural Change in the New Millennium” at theShakespeare Association of America meeting in April2004.

18. The cast list for Fences appears in August Wilson, ThreePlays (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1991), 98–99.

19. Steichen’s Legacy: Photographs, 1895–1973, ed. JoannaSteichen (New York: Knopf, 2000), Plate 276, [327].On Robeson as Emperor Jones, see Charles Musser,“Troubled Relations: Paul Robeson, Eugene O’Neill, andOscar 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 KirkVarnedoe and Adam Gopnick, High & Low: Modern Artand Popular Culture (New York: Museum of ModernArt, 1991), 78. It is important to note Fred Wilson’sopposition to the deployment of the concepts of “highand low” and “primitivism” in this and the related exhi-bition in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinityof the Tribal and the Modern, ed. William Rubin(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). As the titleof his 1991 alternative exhibition Primitivism: High andLow indicates, Wilson challenges these terms as used inthe MoMA exhibitions. However, a link betweenDuchamp and Wilson is made by Martha Buskirk in TheDuchamp Effect, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 187; and Wilsonacknowledges his own connection to Duchamp in theinterview with Maurice Berger in Fred Wilson: Objectsand Installations, 1979–2000 (Baltimore, MD: Center forArt and Visual Culture, 2001), 38.

21. Kathleen Goncharov and Fred Wilson, “Interview,” inFred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am (Cambridge: ListVisual Arts Center, 2003), 20–25; references to Peru on21–22. Maurice Berger’s catalog essay in Fred Wilson:Objects and Installations, 1979–2000 notes as one ofWilson’s “earliest artistic projects, a series of black-and-white photographs that meticulously documentedarcheological sites in Egypt and Peru” (16).

192 Notes

22. Robert Morris, “Aligned with Nazca,” Artforum 14, no.2 (October 1975): 26–39. In his e-mail to me onSeptember 10, 2005, Wilson comments: “Though I wasinterested in Nazca as early as 1975, I believe I only metMorris in 1979 when I was studying with him atHunter. However, I didn’t know that he wrote aboutthe Nazca lines.” Of his later contact with Morris duringthis period, Wilson comments: “I liked how Morristhought 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 ofthe entry on Portrait of Audubon in 1988 (153). Theemphasis on the face is noted in the Goncharov inter-view (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 andAgnes 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 ofeither set of images. Edward Steichen, “PhotographingPaul Robeson as Emperor Jones,” U.S. CameraMagazine 1, no. 6 (October 1939), shows all twenty-sixshots. There are twenty-nine different Van Vechtenphotographs of Robeson as Othello in the BeineckeLibrary at Yale University.

28. Critical reservations about Suzman’s production are reg-istered by Ania Loomba (148) and Michael Neill (175)in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba andMartin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998).

29. Gordon Heath, “The Othello Syndrome,” in Deep Arethe Roots: Memoirs of a Black Expatriate (Amherst: U ofMassachusetts P, 1992), 134–48; quotation from 148.

30. Ben Okri, “Leaping out of Shakespeare’s Terror: FiveMeditations on Othello,” in A Way of Being Free(London: Phoenix House, 1997), 71–87; quotationfrom 86.

Notes 193

31. Hugh Quarshie, Second Thoughts about Othello,International Shakespeare Association Occasional Paperno. 7 (Chipping Camden: Clouds Hill Printers, 1999);quotations from 3, 21. The original title when given asa 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: BeyondOthellophilia,” in Shakespeare and Race, ed. CatherineM. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 2000), 177–202; quotation from 185.For a detailed case study consistent with Daileader’sapproach, see Lisa S. Starks’s “The Veiled (Hot) Bed ofRace and Desire: Parker’s Othello and the Stereotype asScreen Fetish,” Post Script: Essays in Film and theHumanities 17, no. 1 (1998): 64–78. The theatricalstaging of the black male body in Shakespearean con-texts is a specific instance of the more general phe-nomenon that Stuart Hall describes as “excessivevisuality” (41) in “Aspiration and Attitude: Reflectionson Black Britain in the Nineties,” New Formations 33(Spring 1998): 38–46. Daileader greatly expands herargument 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 ofWhite Identity in Othello,” in Othello: New CriticalEssays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Routledge, 2002),133–45.

34. Susan Spector, “Margaret Webster’s Othello: ThePrincipal Players Versus the Director,” Theatre HistoryStudies 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: Uof 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.

194 Notes

37. “At the time of the show’s closing, it was still playing tostandees, had taken in nearly a million dollars at the boxoffice, and had set an all-time Broadway record for aShakespearean production with 296 performances”(Duberman 286); also, Spector 107 and Barranger 150.

38. Further discussion of Muray’s photographs of Robeson isavailable in Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1998), 45–83, and Jeffrey C. Stewart, “TheBlack Body: Paul Robeson as a Work of Art andPolitics,” in Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen, ed. JeffreyC. Stewart (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1998),134–63. So far as I am aware, a complete inventory ofMuray’s photographic record of Robeson is lacking.Stewart’s essay contains four (nos. 88, 101–03), whileadditional images include: two in Susan Robeson, TheWhole World in his Hands: A Pictorial Biography of PaulRobeson (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1981), 43–44; two inPaul Robeson, Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: AnArtist’s Journey, 1898–1939 (New York: John Wiley,2001), 121; and two in Sheila Tully Boyle and AndrewBunie, Paul Robeson: The Years of Promise andAchievement (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2001), fac-ing 119.

39. James Smalls, “Public Face, Private Thoughts: Fetish,Interracialism, and the Homoerotic in Some Photographsby Carl Van Vechten,” Genders 25 (1997): 144–93.Related images in Van Vechten’s scrapbooks are discussedin Jonathan Weinberg, “Boy Crazy: Carl Van Vechten’sQueer 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’sOthello.

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 Photographsonline catalog: www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html.

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43. On good characters’ cooperation in their own demise,see the theory of complicity in Harry Berger, Jr., MakingTrifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities inShakespeare (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997).

44. Paul Robeson, “Some Reflections on Othello and theNature of Our Time,” American Scholar 14 (1945):391–92. As Christy Desmet points out, Robeson’srecourse 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 intofocus. While this neutralization of race may be congenialfor Robeson’s involvement with the play, it is a nonstarterfor his political plea for the recognition of nonwhite pop-ulations. See Desmet’s introduction to Shakespeare andAppropriation, 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 TheDevil Finds Work, I want to acknowledge Baldwin’s ear-lier tribute to Robeson at the end of part 1: “Canada Leewas Bigger Thomas, but he was also Canada Lee: hisphysical presence, like the physical presence of PaulRobeson, gave me the right to live” (33). The immediatecontext is the theater production of Native Son directedby Orson Welles, but the larger context is Welles’ all-black Macbeth, which frames the story (28–34), andhence the reference to Robeson is placed in proximity toShakespeare. But Robeson’s connection to Shakespeare’sOthello does not arise. In the time frame of the story,Shakespeare has not registered for Baldwin at age 12 or13: “I don’t think that the name, Shakespeare, meant verymuch to me in those years. I was not yet intimidated bythe name—that was to come later” (28).

47. Desmet, introduction to Shakespeare and Appropriation, 9.

196 Notes

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 JonEwing, “The Great Tenure Battle of 1977,” inConversations with Ishmael Reed, ed. Bruce Dick andAmritjit Singh (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995),111–27.

3. Reed’s commitment to this level of argument is indicatedby the defense of his record in his own voice earlierin the novel: “Ringleader Ishmael Reed has nevercalled anybody a traitor to anybody’s race and not onlyhasn’t opposed black women writing about black malemisogyny but published some of it” (24).

4. Full citations are: MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Warsand Cultural Peace, ed. Ishmael Reed (New York:Viking, 1997), and Ishmael Reed, “Bigger and O.J.,” inBirth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in theO.J. Simpson Case, ed. Toni Morrison and ClaudiaBrodsky 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 insiststhat “Britain has been forged in the crucible of fusion—of hybridity” and that “English literature has, for at least200 years, been shaped and influenced by outsiders,” thereclaimed strangers of his title (x).

6. These two passages in the novel are consonant withPhillips’s statement in The European Tribe (London:Faber and Faber, 1987): “There is no evidence ofOthello having any black friends, eating any Africanfoods, speaking any language other than theirs. Hemakes no reference to any family. From what we aregiven it is clear that he denied, or at least did not cul-tivate his past” (51). In an interview in Frontiers ofCaribbean Literature in English, ed. Frank Birbalsingh(New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), Phillips describesOthello as “a man who, whether he liked to or not,

Notes 197

continually made references to his origins through theimagery of his speeches” (191). At the same time,Phillips adds the complicating note in the final para-graph of The European Tribe that his own origins as ablack raised virtually from birth in England are differentfrom those of Othello: “Unlike Othello, I am culturallyof the West” (128).

7. This conjunction of Othello and The Merchant of Veniceis present in the two successive chapters, “A BlackEuropean Success” and “In the Ghetto,” in TheEuropean Tribe (45–51 and 52–55). In an interviewwith 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,” inHarlem Duet (Winnipeg: Scirocco, 1997), 11–15; quota-tion from 14. It is worth noting that Sears’s introductioninvokes Derek Walcott as a positive influence.

9. Citations of Harlem Duet are from the text convenientlyavailable in Adaptations of Shakespeare: A CriticalAnthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to thePresent, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (London:Routledge, 2000). References are given in two forms: theact and scene followed by the page number in thisanthology. 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, andJoyce Green MacDonald, “Finding Othello’s AfricanRoots through Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet,” inApproaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello, ed. PeterErickson and Maurice Hunt (New York: ModernLanguage Association, 2005), 202–08.

10. Sears’s comment is drawn from Ric Knowles, “The NikeMethod: A Wide-Ranging Conversation between DjanetSears and Alison Sealy Smith,” Canadian Theatre Review97 (Winter 1998): 24–30; quotation from 29.

198 Notes

Chapter 7

1. The show was organized by the List Visual Arts Centerat the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whichpublished the exhibition catalog, Fred Wilson: Speak ofMe as I Am, The United States Pavilion, 50thInternational Exhibition of Art, The Venice Biennale(Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2003).

2. Kathleen Goncharov and Fred Wilson, “Interview,” inFred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am, 20–25; quotationfrom 24. Hereafter cited as Goncharov interview.Goncharov selected Wilson’s exhibition to represent theUnited States at the 2003 Venice Biennale. I amindebted to her for many details that emerged in theextremely helpful and informative conversation duringour meeting in New York on February 11, 2004.

3. In addition to Paul H. D. Kaplan’s catalog essay “LocalColor: The Black Presence in Venetian Art and History,”in Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am, 8–19, relevant mate-rial on the international context of early modern Veniceincludes Patricia Fortini Brown, “Venezianità: TheOtherness of the Venetians,” in Art and Life inRenaissance Venice (New York: Abrams, 1997), 9–37;Deborah Howard, Venice and the East: The Impact ofthe Islamic World on Venetian Architecture, 1100–1500(New Haven: Yale UP, 2000); Venice Reconsidered: TheHistory and Civilization of an Italian City-State,1297–1797, ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000); and RosamondE. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art,1300–1600 (Berkeley: U of California P, 2002). Particularlyrelevant for the present chapter is Kaplan’s work, becauseit not only traverses Southern and Northern Renaissancesbut 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 newemphasis on European Renaissance economic, cultural,

Notes 199

and ethnic interactions with Muslim countries of theeastern Mediterranean. Daniel J. Vitkus’s “Turning Turkin Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of theMoor,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 145–76, maybe taken as the landmark moment when attention toOttoman Turkey and the Levant as crucial interpretivecontexts emerged as a highly visible trend. Nevertheless,it is important to underscore Othello’s African dimensionas well. We need to take seriously the idea that Othellois from “everywhere” (1.1.138). As Ania Loomba pointsout in Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford:Oxford UP, 2002), Othello is a “composite figure” whoencompasses multiple geographical locations: “It isimpossible, but also unnecessary, to decide whetherOthello is more or less ‘African’/‘black’ than‘Turkish’/Muslim” (92). From the different vantagepoint of The Tempest, Jonathan Goldberg has noted howthe new emphasis on the Mediterranean has led to anoverreaction skewed toward the other extreme inneglecting 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 betweenVenetian and Turk can be related to Bronwen Wilson’sanalysis 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 concludesthat “portraits of Turks held up a mirror to Venetians”(52); when applied to Othello, this formulation suggeststhat because of his double identity, he contains the mir-ror within himself.

6. Reproductions of the Pesaro tomb are available inGiuseppe Cristinelli, Baldassare Longhena, Architetto del’600 a Venezia (Padua: Marsilio, 1972), 139; andChristian Theuerkauff, “Anmerkungen zu MelchiorBarthel,” in Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für

200 Notes

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 atthe Hood Museum of Art, So Much Trouble in theWorld—Believe It or Not! (2005), where looking at theimages of war in the final room requires lifting the blackveils that cover them.

9. Fred Wilson, Fred Wilson: A Conversation withK. Anthony Appiah (New York: PaceWildenstein, 2006),14, 16.

10. The pervasive holding motif in this exhibition looks backto the vivid earlier examples of Wilson’s play with theAtlas myth—Untitled (1992) and Atlas (1995)—shownon 30–31 of Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am.

11. Wilson’s quotation of the Shakespeare passage in relationto Drip Drop Plop occurred in his talk on Speak of Me asI 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,” inShakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender andRace on the Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge,2000), 73–96; quotation from 92. I explore the visualproblematic of racial whiteness in “‘God for Harry,England, and Saint George’: British National Identityand the Emergence of White Self-Fashioning,” in EarlyModern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empirein Renaissance England, ed. Peter Erickson and ClarkHulse (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000),315–45.

13. This passage comes from Wilson’s e-mail to me datedApril 7, 2004.

14. Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Teaching Richard Burbage’sOthello,” in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello,ed. Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt (New York:Modern Language Association, 2005), 148–55.

Notes 201

15. Maurice Berger and Fred Wilson, “Collaboration,Museums, and the Politics of Display: A Conversationwith Fred Wilson,” in Fred Wilson: Objects andInstallations, 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’sas 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 directedby Orson Welles in 1952 and Stuart Burge (withLaurence Olivier) in 1965, while the versions of Verdi’sOtello are those of Franco Enriquez from 1958 (lowerright) 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 TheWanderer and Faith’s Fate is subjected to the bodily dis-tortions of kneeling in Helping Hands, in which theblack figure holds up white hands, and in Love’sBlindness, in which the two black figures balance withone knee and one hand on the floor to support whitebusts. The holding motif is thus reiterated and furtheraccentuated.

20. The displaced pillow here unsettles two previous uses ofpillows: the pillows lodged on the heads of the black fig-ures to cushion the weight of the Pesaro tomb they holdup, and the pillowlike tray resting on the arms held outin right-angle position by the globe-headed servant inthe atrium. The pillow soon reappears as the means bywhich Othello smothers Desdemona in the video sceneof 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 exhibitioncatalog.

202 Notes

22. Safe House II conveys the same connotation of refuge asthe 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-AmericanModernism (London: Routledge, 2000), 130–35,Kimberly W. Benston discusses Coltrane’s 1960 “revi-sion” of Richard Rodgers as a “modernist intervention”exemplifying “the principles of citation, displacement,and reinvention” (130). In turn, Benston’s subsequentchapter on the Coltrane poem places the AfricanAmerican poet Michael S. Harper in reinventive relationto 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,” NewYork Times, Arts and Leisure section, June 1, 2003, 35.

26. In “Othello’s African American Progeny,” South AtlanticReview 57, no. 4 (1992): 39–57, James R. Andreasdescribes 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 annualmeeting in February 2004 entitled “Using History: TheRole of an Art Historian in Fred Wilson’s ‘Speak of Meas I Am.’” See Abstracts 2004 (New York: College ArtAssociation, 2004), 74–75.

28. Salah Hassan refers to “grouting that is punctuated withmessages of confinement and freedom” in his catalogessay for Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am (40).According to Wilson’s New York Academy of Arts talkon April 1, 2004, the words in the grout between thetiles express feelings of “hope, safety, fear, escape.”

29. For purposes of this discussion, I consider Brown’s pri-mary work to consist of three books published over theroughly thirty-year span from 1959 to 1991: Life Against

Notes 203

Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown:Wesleyan UP, 1959), Love’s Body (New York: RandomHouse, 1966), and Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis(Berkeley: U of California P, 1991). From my standpoint,this last book, a collection whose two final essays Browndescribes as “the end of an era” (ix), is richer and moreimportant than Closing Time (New York: Random House,1973), whose title announces the official end of Brown’smonographic career. Brown’s obituary notice appeared inthe New York Times, October 4, 2002, C20.

30. In the opening paragraph of Life Against Death, Browncites “the superannuation of the political categorieswhich informed liberal thought and action in the1930’s” (ix), while part 6, entitled “The Way Out,”insists on the need for “utopian” exploration (305). In“Revisioning Historical Identities” (1990), in Apocalypseand/or Metamorphosis, 158–78, Brown specifies thedefeat of Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1948as the indication that a new approach to politics was nec-essary (158, 171).

31. Brown subsequently notes the centrality for Love’s Bodyof Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle” in“Revisioning Historical Identities,” 171. The essays“Metamorphoses II: Actaeon,” “The PropheticTradition,” and “The Apocalypse of Islam” are all col-lected in Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis.

32. Fred Wilson, “When Europe Slept, It Dreamt of theWorld,” in Unpacking Europe: Towards a CriticalReading, ed. Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi (Rotterdam:Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2001), 426–31; quo-tation from 427.

33. The six etchings, and the texts for each of the three etch-ings that contain quotations, can be seen online athttp://www.crownpoint.com/artists/wilson/index.html. Iam grateful to Barbara Thompson, the curator of African,Oceanic and Native American Collections at HoodMuseum of Art, for bringing this new work to my atten-tion. Thompson traced Wilson’s current use of ink spotsto the inkwells in the floor of Turbulence II in the Venice

204 Notes

Biennale exhibition; visitors touching the ink trackedblotches in the exhibition area.

34. Glen Helfand, “Six New Etchings by Fred Wilson,” Arton Paper 8, no. 6 (July/August 2004): 24. KathanBrown uses the same terms in “Fred Wilson,” CrownPoint 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” (TheAesthetics of Comics [University Park: Pennsylvania StateUP, 2000], 44).

37. On Wilson’s references to The Boys in the Band, see GlenHelfand’s “Six New Etchings”. On male homoeroticismin Othello, see Nicholas F. Radel, “‘Your Own For Ever’:Revealing Masculine Desire in Othello,” in Approaches toTeaching Shakespeare’s Othello, 62–71.

38. Kathan Brown, “Fred Wilson,” 5.

Chapter 81. J. M. Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (New

York: Viking, 1997) and Youth: Scenes from ProvincialLife II (New York: Viking, 2002).

2. Coetzee, “Remembering Texas (1984),” in Doubling thePoint: 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,

Notes 205

2004), 95n4. Though ambiguous, the blurry photographon Vercueil’s identity card might also indicate an imageryof color: “He looks like a prisoner torn from the dark-ness of a cell,” “vague forms disappearing into theundergrowth that could be man or beast or merely a badspot 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 Survey13 (1960): 58–68, and in the penultimate chapter onthe 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 telltaleadjectives near the end of Coetzee’s subsequent novelSlow 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 ofJohn Keats (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983) reads “ToAutumn” 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 andCleopatra.

15. “Interview” and “Confession and Double Thoughts:Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky (1985),” in Attwell,Doubling the Point, 243–50 and 251–93.

Epilogue1. Charles H. Rowell, “‘Inscription at the City of Brass’: An

Interview with Romare Bearden,” Callaloo 36 (Summer1988): 428–46; quotation from 434. Another example ofmaking changes—apt here because Adrienne Rich’s fore-word to Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of JuneJordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2005)links Jordan to Romare Bearden (xxii)—is June Jordan’salterations to Sonnet 116 in the trajectory from the early

206 Notes

“Let Me Live with Marriage” (41) from Some Changes tothe late “Shakespeare’s 116th Sonnet in Black EnglishTranslation” (587–88).

2. Glenn Ligon lecture, “Meet the Artist” series, HirshhornMuseum, April 14, 2005. For an overview of Ligon’swork, see the catalog Glenn Ligon: Some Changes accom-panying the 2005 exhibition at the Power Plant,Toronto.

3. Kathan Brown, “Fred Wilson,” Crown Point PressNewsletter, May 2004; quotation from 5.

4. Derek Walcott, “Reflections on Omeros,” South AtlanticQuarterly 96, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 229–46; “referentiality”appears on 230. Subsequent quotations are from this text.

Notes 207

INDEX

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(Twain), 39, 183–84

Age of Iron (Coetzee)Disgrace and, 160Elizabeth Costello and, 162Othello and, 10, 159Shakespearean allusions in,

155–56Aldridge, Ira, 78, 113Alexander, Elizabeth, 139Arise! (Wilson), 147, 148–49“As a Woman Grows Older”

(Coetzee), 162As You Like It (Shakespeare), 11,

13–14, 16–17

Baldwin, JamesDove and, 21–24, 29–33Du Bois and, 32–33, 63–64Forrest and, 63–64, 66–68Shakespeare and, 21–23,

63–64, 181Bearden, Romare, 167Berger, Harry, 3Berger, Maurice, 133–34, 146Bhabha, Homi, 12“Bigger and O. J.” (Reed), 105,

106Black Aesthetic, 28, 182blackface, 38–39, 79, 112, 114,

182–83Bloom, Harold, 2–3Boyhood (Coetzee), 151–52Brixton riots, 47, 49, 56Brodsky, Joseph, 48, 59–60Brown, Norman O., 6, 144–46,

176

Burbage, Richard, 79“Burbank with a Baedeker”

(Eliot), 6Byerman, Keith, 68, 72

Callaghan, Dympna, 131Chandelier Mori (Wilson), 124,

126, 128Civil Rights Movement, 81Clingman, Stephen, 18, 179Coetzee, J. M., 4, 5–6, 10,

151–65canonical inheritance, 152–53Defoe and, 153Dostoevsky and, 153Kafka and, 153Keats and, 162–63microallusion in early and later

works, 155–59Othello and, 158–59rejection of Shakespeare,

151–52See also Age of Iron; “As a

Woman Grows Older”;Boyhood; “Confession and Double Thoughts”;Disgrace; Elizabeth Costello;Foe; Life and Times ofMichael K; Master ofPetersburg, The; Waitingfor the Barbarians; “WhatIs a Classic?”; Youth

Collected Poems 1948–1984(Walcott), 43

Coltrane, John, 139“Confession and Double

Thoughts” (Coetzee), 164–65

(Please note that page numbers in italics indicate an endnote.)

“Crazy Jane Talks to theBishop” (Yeats), 5

Crouch, Stanley, 62Crowley, Mart, 149Cullen, Countee, 38, 43

Daileader, Celia, 89Danziger, Marlies, 81Defoe, Daniel, 153Desmet, Christy, 100, 196Disgrace (Coetzee), 160–62Divine Days (Forrest), 28–29,

61–75African-American access to

Shakespeare and, 62–63Shakespearean allusions, 61–62

Donne, John, 11, 16, 176Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 153, 164,

165double consciousness, theory of,

9, 65–66Dove, Rita, 1, 3–4, 8–9, 21–39

Black Aesthetic and, 28, 182on Du Bois, 23–24on Dupree, 24–25on early reading of

Shakespeare, 26Forrest and, 29on “In the Old

Neighborhood,” 27–28poetic transformations, 29–37on Rich, 25Walcott and, 8, 43See also “In the Old

Neighborhood”; Museum;“Shakespeare Say”

Drip Drop Plop (Wilson), 126,128–31, 147

grieving motif, 121teardrops, 130

Du Bois, W. E. B.Baldwin and, 32–33, 63–64“double consciousness” and, 9,

65–66Forrest and, 63–66, 68“In the Old Neighborhood”

and, 29–30

Othello and, 77Shakespeare and, 21–23,

63–64Duberman, Martin, 86, 91–92,

96, 100Duchamp, Marcel, 84, 192Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 37Dupree, Champion Jack, 24,

29Dyer, Richard, 92–96, 100

Eliot, T. S., 6–8, 59–60Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee)

absolution and, 164–65allusion and, 4–5, 154,

159–60, 164Keats and, 162–63“Sailing to Byzantium” and,

160Ellington, Duke, 167Ellison, Ralph, 31, 61, 143Emperor Jones, The (O’Neill)

Exchange and, 86reaction to, 88

“Essential Gesture, The”(Gordimer), 13

Exchange (Wilson), 147–50Extravagant Strangers (Phillips),

107

“Far Cry from Africa, A”(Walcott), 41–44

Fences (A. Wilson), 84Fishburne, Laurence, 132Foe (Coetzee), 153For Lives and Cultures Lost

(Wilson), 124For Pawns in a Larger Game

(Wilson), 124, 125, 138Forrest, Leon, 9, 61–75

anti-Shakespeare phenomenon,68–70

Baldwin and, 63–64, 66–68

Dove and, 28–29Du Bois and, 63–66, 68reinvention, 71–75

210 Index

Robeson and, 89–90, 97Shakespearean allusion, 70–71Walcott and, 43

Gilroy, Paul, 79“Goats and Monkeys” (Walcott),

6–7Goncharov, Kathleen, 85“Good Morrow, The” (Donne),

11, 16Gordimer, Nadine, 9, 11–19

African literary tradition and, 19Donne and, 11, 16Luxemburg and, 11, 15–16, 19Shakespeare and, 11, 13–14,

16–17

Hagen, Uta, 78Hamlet (Shakespeare)

Coetzee and, 156–57, 165Forrest and, 61, 70, 72–74Gordimer and, 17–18Walcott and, 46, 57–58

Harlem Duet (Sears), 90, 111,115–16

Harper, Michael S., 139Heath, Gordon, 88Helfand, Glen, 148Henry V (Shakespeare), 44, 47, 54“Heritage” (Cullen), 43Hyman, Earle, 78, 87

“In the Old Neighborhood”(Dove), 21, 22

color imagery, 35–36parenthetical stanzas, 26–27Rich and, 25“Shakespeare Say” and, 29–30,

32, 33

James, C. L. R., 189Japanese by Spring (Reed), 103,

105–6, 108Jones, James Earl, 80–84, 132,

190as Darth Vader, 83–84Fences and, 84

The Lion King and, 84Othello and, 80–84Verizon and, 83–84, 191

Jordan, June, 31Joyce, James, 154Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 26

Kafka, Franz, 153Kahn, Coppelia, 78Kaplan, Paul, 121Keats, John, 2, 3, 159–65King, Bruce, 186King Lear (Shakespeare),

4, 26Coetzee and, 159, 163Elizabeth Costello and, 4Walcott and, 49, 58–59

Levine, Lawrence W., 183Life and Times of Michael K

(Coetzee), 3Ligon, Glenn, 167–68Love’s Body (Brown), 6Luxemburg, Rosa, 11,

15–16, 19Lying Days, The (Gordimer), 18

Macbeth (Shakespeare), 26, 62,152–53

MacDonald, Joyce Green, 185Mandela, Nelson, 88Master of Petersburg, The

(Coetzee), 152, 153Merchant of Venice, The

(Shakespeare), 106, 109Merry Wives of Windsor, The

(Shakespeare), 51Meteor in the Madhouse (Forrest),

61, 71–72, 74Midsummer (Walcott), 42, 44

Shakespeare and, 45, 48,53–54, 59–60

Tiepolo’s Hound and, 54–58Walcott’s dissatisfaction with,

45Midsummer Night’s Dream, A

(Shakespeare), 26, 48

Index 211

Mine/Yours (Wilson), 134Mirsky, Marvin, 70Morris, Robert, 85, 193Morrison, Toni, 105MultiAmerica (Reed), 105multiculturalism, Shakespeare

and, 99–101Muray, Nickolas, 93–94Museum (Dove), 22, 180My Son’s Story (Gordimer)

As You Like It and, 11,13–14, 16–17

Donne and, 11, 16Luxemburg and, 11, 15–16, 19quotations, use of, 11

Nature of Blood, The (Phillips),103, 106–7, 108

Neill, Michael, 12, 178Nigger Heaven (Van Vechten), 97No Name in the Street (Baldwin),

63–64, 66–67None to Accompany Me

(Gordimer), 14Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin),

23

Okri, Ben, 88Oliver, Edith, 81–82, 87Olivier, Laurence

Crouch and, 62Othello and, 111–12, 114Robeson and, 112, 114September Dream and, 131,

133, 140O’Neill, Eugene, 84, 86, 88, 93,

97Othello (Shakespeare), 6–7, 9–10,

77–101apocalyptic criticism and,

144–47breaking and, 133–42Coetzee and, 158–59Dove and, 25–26, 34, 36, 39Exchange and, 147–50“Goats and Monkeys” and,

6–7

grieving with/for, 119–31Japanese by Spring and, 103,

105–6, 108queer identity and, 149Venice Biennale and, 119–20,

134, 147Walcott and, 46, 49–50whiteness and, 131–33See also Olivier, Laurence;

Robeson, Paul“Othello Syndrome, The”

(Heath), 88“Other World That Was the

World, The” (Gordimer), 13

Papp, Joseph, 82Parker, Oliver, 132“Paul Robeson: Crossing Over”

(Dyer), 92Pesaro tomb, 121–24, 128,

130–31Phillips, Caryl, 103, 106–7,

109–11, 117Othello and, 107The Merchant of Venice and,

109Sears and, 111, 117

Pissarro, Camille, 55–56Postcolonial Melancholia (Gilroy),

79Potter, Lois, 87, 190

Quarshie, Hugh, 89quotations, use of

Dove and, 35Forrest and, 62, 68, 70Gordimer and, 11, 13–14,

15–16as transformation, 167–68Walcott and, 46, 59Wilson and, 86, 121, 136,

142–43, 147–48

Reed, Ishmael, 104–6, 111, 117

Othello and, 104Schlesinger and, 106

212 Index

Sears and, 111, 117Rich, Adrienne, 3, 25, 35

Dove and, 25Walcott and, 47

Ricks, Christopher, 1–3Robeson, Paul, 9, 77–101,

189–90Baldwin and, 100blackface, 79critical reaction to, 90–91Emperor Jones and, 84, 86, 97Forrest and, 89–90, 97Fred Wilson and, 84–86interracial taboos, 78James Earl Jones compared to,

80–84“multicultural” image of

Shakespeare and, 79,100–1

politics and, 98–99Sears and, 89–90Van Vechten and, 93–97

Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare),26, 157

“Ruins of a Great House”(Walcott), 44

“Sailing to Byzantium” (Yeats),159–63

Schlesinger, Arthur, 106Sears, Djanet, 9, 90, 111–15,

117exorcism and, 112–13,

114–15Olivier and, 111–12performance history of Othello

and, 111–15, 117September 11, 2001, 120, 141September Dream (Wilson)

continuous video looping, 139four-part configuration, 131grid motif, 138Olivier and, 133Othello videos in, 120,

135–36September 11 and, 120, 141silence and, 135, 139, 141

Turbulence II and, 135, 136,138–39, 142

“Shakespeare Say” (Dove), 22,36

Champion Jack and, 29–30,32

“In the Old Neighborhood”and, 29–30, 33

origin of, 24Shatter (Wilson), 128Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois),

9, 21, 23, 63, 65–66South Africa, 87–88Speak of Me as I Am (Wilson)

apocalyptic criticism and, 144figure of artist in, 134identity and, 134, 142–44plea of Africans, as, 132Shakespeare’s role in, 148See also September Dream;

Turbulence IISport of Nature, A (Gordimer),

14Star Wars, 83Steichen, Edward, 84–86, 93Stewart, Jeffrey C., 94“Stranger in the Village”

(Baldwin)alienation and, 30Du Bois and, 21, 23legacy and, 24Shakespeare and, 32, 63“Shakespeare Say” and, 30

Suzman, Janet, 87–88

Taubman, Howard, 80Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 45,

49–50, 52There Is a Tree More Ancient

than Eden (Forrest), 61Tiepolo, Giambattista, 55Tiepolo’s Hound (Walcott), 42,

44, 54–60Tompkins, Joanne, 176transformation

Forrest and, 71Gordimer and, 13, 18

Index 213

transformation—continuedpoetic, 29–37Walcott and, 53Wilson and, 134

True Identity, 83Turbulence II (Wilson)

cacophony in, 136chessboard imagery, 138confinement vs. freedom in,

144inkwells, 131“pot with the bed in it,” 138September Dream and, 135,

136, 138–39, 142Turner, J. M. W., 49, 55–56“Turning the Page” (Gordimer),

19Twain, Mark, 39, 183–84

Ulysses (Joyce), 154Untitled (Wilson), 129

Van Vechten, Carl, 86, 93–95,96–97

Vendler, Helen, 38Venice Biennale, 119–20, 134,

147Verizon, 83–84, 191Very Rich Hours of Count von

Stauffenberg, The (West), 4

Waiting for the Barbarians(Coetzee), 155

Walcott, Derek, 6–9, 41–60,168–69

Brixton riots and, 47, 49, 56

Caribbean identity and, 42,52, 56, 58–59

Dove and, 8, 43Forrest and, 43Hamlet and, 46, 57–58King Lear and, 49, 58–59Othello and, 46, 49–50Shakespearean allusions, 45–54use of quotations, 46, 59

See also Collected Poems1948–1984; “Far Cry fromAfrica, A”; “Goats andMonkeys”; Midsummer;“Ruins of a GreatHouse”; Tiepolo’s Hound;What the Twilight Says

Wallace, Henry, 91Wanderer, The (Wilson), 126,

127, 129, 138Washington, Booker T., 64, 69“Waste Land, The” (Eliot), 6Way of Being Free, A (Okri), 88We Are All in the Gutter, But

Some of Us Are Looking atthe Stars (Wilson), 147

Webster, Margaret, 90–91Welles, Orson, 62West, Paul, 4, 5“What Is a Classic?” (Coetzee),

154–55What the Twilight Says (Walcott),

48“When We Dead Awaken”

(Rich), 3Will to Change, The (Rich), 25Wilson, August, 84–86, 88Wilson, Fred, 9–10, 80, 88, 99,

119–50, 168incorporation of Pesaro tomb

in works, 121–24, 128,130–31

Othello and, 120–21, 124,126, 130–31

queer identity and, 149September 11, and, 119–20,

141Venice Biennale and, 119–20,

134, 147

Yeats, William Butler, 5–6,159–65

Disgrace and, 160–61Elizabeth Costello and, 159–60,

163–64Youth (Coetzee), 151

214 Index