Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America - by Vanessa I Corredera

About the Book

Traces the history of Othello's contemporary citations, adaptations, and appropriations across genres

Book Synopsis

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 reanimations, 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 podcasts, television, film, graphic novels and performance, and argues that these representational choices of Othellos 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 and explains how to wrestle with the intersections between Shakespeare, Othello and the American racial imaginary in appropriations, scholarship, the classroom and beyond.

From the Back Cover

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.

Review Quotes

Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America delves into two seeming paradoxes in popular and performance cultures. [Corredera] notes both the proliferation of references to Othello and the peculiar erasure of Blackness in adaptations and appropriations of Othello in a unique period (2008-16) that coincided with Barack Obama's presidency. [...] By attending to artists' paradoxically racist post-racial claims during the Obama years as well as Othello's marginalized role in these rewritings, Corredera models best practices in ethical engagement with adaptations and in empowering productive interactions with popular culture.--Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University "Early Theatre"

Brilliant, stunning and illuminating, Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America provides vital interventions in Shakespeare studies and adaptation studies. Corredera's argumentation and prose are clear, compelling and very convincing. You will never read or see Othello in the same way again. A must read for all scholars and students of Shakespeare!

--Ayanna Thompson, Arizona State University

About the Author

Vanessa I. Corredera is Associate Professor in and Chair of the Department of English at Andrews University. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections between Shakespeare, race and representation in contemporary popular culture, adaptations/appropriations and performance. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and collections, including Literature Compass, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, and Shakespeare Quarterly. Along with L. Monique Pittman and Geoffrey Way, she is co-editing the forthcoming collection Rethinking Shakespeare and Appropriation for the Twenty-First Century.