Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello in Post-Racial America

Traces the history of Othello's contemporary citations, adaptations, and appropriations across genresCreates an archive of twenty-first century appropriations of Othello, many primary works not yet addressed by scholarship or considered in regards to Othello, such as Get Out, Kill Shakespeare, Serial, and Othello: The RemixConsiders appropriations across genres and media: podcasts, television, film, graphic novels, and performancePlaces in dialog premodern critical race studies, media studies, and critical race theory to analyze these appropriationsContextualizes these appropriations through media studies and popular culture contexts pressuring and pressured by OthelloDemonstrates the wide-ranging applicability of Othello's narrative through its breadthProvides a method for ethical engagement with and judicious consumption of popular cultureOthello 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.