Abstract
Although Othello has appeared in earlier chapters, Djanet Sears’ 1997 play Harlem Duet is the book’s first full-scale reorientation of the play that is so central to formulations of race in the Renaissance, and afterwards. Sears’ play directly addresses black women’s absence from Othello, as it tells the story of Billie, a woman in the process of breaking up with her lover, Othe, who has left her for his white colleague Mona. Dramatizing Billie’s attempt to grapple with the historical void that has absorbed so much of the history of black women in the Atlantic world, Sears’ play uses Othello’s handkerchief as a recurring marker of romantic loss, a vagrant symbol of what Billie wanted, and what she cannot achieve.
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Notes
- 1.
Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2. I will provide future citations parenthetically in my text.
- 2.
Joyce Green MacDonald, “Black Ram, White Ewe: Shakespeare, Race and Women,” in The Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 194.
- 3.
This is the thesis of Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women.
- 4.
Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 3.
- 5.
Arthur Little, Jr., discusses the play’s racial displacements in Shakespeare Jungle Fever, 78–86.
- 6.
Othello : Plays in Production, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4.
- 7.
The anecdote appears in Stendahl’s 1823 pamphlet Racine and Shakespeare. Bate includes it in his edition of The Romantics on Shakespeare (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992), 222. For more accounts of wild audience reactions to Othello , see Edward Pechter, ‘Othello’ and Interpretive Traditions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 11–29.
- 8.
“Casting Black Actors: Beyond Othellophilia,” in Shakespeare and Race, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 177–202.
- 9.
C. Bernard Jackson, Iago, in Black Drama, 2nd ed., 7.
- 10.
On the play’s visual misapprehensions, see Jonathan Baldo, The Unmasking of Drama: Contested Representation in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 174–176.
- 11.
I cite Harlem Duet in Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (London: Routledge, 2000); here, 295. I will provide subsequent references parenthetically in my text.
- 12.
Quoted in David Smith, “Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s Marriage Ended, but the Bond Was Never Broken,” The Guardian.Com 6 December 2013.
- 13.
Time and Narrative, vol. 3, tr. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 227.
- 14.
In Memory, History, Forgetting tr. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), Ricouer compares the narrative process of emplotting history, of making sense out of an otherwise shapeless mass of events, to an architect’s plans for organizing the interior space of a house, or to urban planners’ giving shape to a city over space and across time: “A city brings together in the same space different ages, offering to our gaze a sedimented history of tastes and cultural forms. The city gives itself as both to be seen and to be read. In it, narrated time and inhabited space are more closely associated than they are in an isolated building” (151).
- 15.
“A vigilant epistemology will guard here against the illusion of believing that what we call a fact coincides with what really happened, or with the living memory of eyewitnesses, as if the facts lay sleeping in the documents until the historians extracted them” (Memory, History, Forgetting, 178).
- 16.
See, for example, Thomas P. Anderson, Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
- 17.
Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation, discusses the play’s timeline as evidence of the way in which it simultaneously declares its independence from Othello , and proceeds as though Shakespeare’s play is inextricably part of its own history and production, 70–79.
- 18.
Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made it (New York: Dover Books, 1966), 224–225.
- 19.
- 20.
Aeneid 1–6, tr. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. ed. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 543.
- 21.
The Cumaean sibyl who tells Aeneas how to cross into the underworld to find the shades of Anchises and Dido lived in one of the Euboean caves near Avernus.
- 22.
Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2012), 39–46. In this section, I also drew on Lina Perkins Wilder, “Shakespeare and Memory,” Literature Compass 9.8 (2012): 549–559.
- 23.
Here, I am thinking of Lauren Berlant, whose work often focuses on the ways in which we often draw on the structures of private, emotional life to structure public, civic engagements. As she writes in her essay “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998), the longing for personal connection works to build “a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way” (281). Billie’s problem is that after Othe leaves her they no longer have that sense of shared story, and—given Othe’s ambivalence about his blackness—they may never have had it.
- 24.
“Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989), 7. This essay is a much reduced version of the arguments in Nora’s monumental three-volume Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
- 25.
See Michael Rothberg, “Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de Mémoire to Nœuds de Mémoire,” YFS 118/119 (2010): 3–12.
- 26.
“The Black Writer’s Use of Memory,” in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 20. Fabre and O’Meally write in their introduction to the volume that the application of Nora’s work to African-American culture inspired the conference that produced the papers.
- 27.
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xiii. See her pp. 49–56 for a fuller discussion of reflective nostalgia, under whose terms “the past opens up a multitude of potentialities…reflective nostalgia has a capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness” (50).
- 28.
Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents,” Hedgehog Review 9.2 (2007), 9.
- 29.
See Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 36–43.
- 30.
On the handkerchief’s vagrancy, see Harry Berger, Jr., “Impertinent Trifling: Desdemona’s Handkerchief,” SQ 47, no. 3 (1996): 235–250; Lina Perkins Wilder, Shakespeare’s Memory Theatre: Recollection, Properties and Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 140–155; and Dympna Callaghan, “Beguiling Fictions,” in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception, and Performance, ed. Gordon McMullen, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 13–23.
- 31.
I mean my discussion here to augment Lynda Boose’s analysis of the sexual meanings attached to the handkerchief for Desdemona in “Othello’s Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love’,” ELR 5 (1975): 360–374.
- 32.
Sears herself was born in London to a Guyanese father and a Jamaican mother; her family emigrated to Saskatchewan when she was 15 and then eastward across Canada to Ontario.
- 33.
Dennis Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory (London: Routledge, 2011), 14.
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Green MacDonald, J. (2020). Echoes of Harlem: Women’s Memories in Othello and Harlem Duet. In: Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3_5
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