Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America

Traces the history of Othello's contemporary citations, adaptations, and appropriations across genres Othello famously supplicates, 'Speak of me as I am', pleading for the Venetians to 'nothing extenuate', leave out, or make thin (5.2.352). Othello's anxiety about narrative accuracy exposes his fear over his story's potential misrepresentation. As the first monograph to examine Othello's history of contemporary reanimation, Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America takes up this question of retelling Othello's story, turning to the play as re-crafted in a time and place imagined as having overcome racial injustice: post-racial America (2008-2016). This book analyses representations of Othello across genres and media, including a podcast, television, film, a comic series and performances, and argues that these representational choices perpetuate varying racial frameworks that advance antiblack or antiracist versions of the play. By elucidating the presence and function of these competing frameworks, it illuminates how to wrestle with the intersections between Shakespeare, Othello and the American racial imaginary in appropriations, scholarship, the classroom and beyond. Vanessa I. Corredera is Associate Professor in and Chair of the Department of English at Andrews University.