Shakespeare and Race & "The Tempest" and Its Travels and Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice. (Reviews).

Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells, eds., Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 233 pp. $54.95 (cl), $19.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-521-77046-7 (cl), 0-521-77938-3 (pbk).

Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, eds., "The Tempest" and Its Travels. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. xvi + 319 pp. $26.50. ISBN: 0-8122-3582-7.

Arthur L. Little, Jr., Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 261 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-8047-4024-0.

The three works under review -- two collections and one monograph -- document the depth of engagement with issues of race, colonialism, gender, and sexuality in Shakespeare studies throughout the twentieth century and signal new directions for this field as it moves into the twenty-first century. Indeed, the combination of works under review suggests the analogy drawn from feminist studies of "first-wave," "second-wave," and "third-wave," with the collection Shakespeare and Race documenting the foundational archival and historiographical efforts of the mid- to late-twentieth century, "The Tempest" and Its Travels signaling the newer historical emphasis on the resonance between colonial and postcolonial concerns, and Shakespeare Jungle Fever inaugurating a new cultural philology at the intersection of race, gender, and queer studies. Though the three "waves" of archival studies, Postcolonial challenges, and the turn to a historicized and politicized philology inform all three works to varying degrees, Shakespe are and Race's presentation of primarily reprinted essays from over four decades of Shakespeare Survey; "The Tempest" and Its Travels's initial location as a recent international conference on "The Tempest in the Old World and the New"; and Shakespeare Jungle Fever's positioning of its title trope as a "'camp' gesture" (13) resonating most saliently with Spike Lee's film of approximately the same name, together constitute a history of criticism that may guide us in evaluating each work's distinctive contribution.

Shakespeare and Race begins with Margo Hendricks "Surveying 'Race in Shakespeare" from a productive fin-de-siecle perspective that returns to archival studies such as Bernard Harris's "A Portrait of a Moor" (1958) and literary histories such as G. K. Hunter's "Elizabethans and foreigners" (1964) -- both reprinted in this collection -- even as it presses forward by theorizing "the epistemology of race" for the early modern period (1). The work of Barbara Everett and Wole Soyinka in the 1980s -- "'Spanish Othello': the Making of Shakespeare's Moor" (1982) and "Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist" (1983) -- presages this interrogation of race as a node of power and knowledge linked to the histories of early modern colonialism and the subsequent postcolonial challenge. Using the tools of source study and genre theory, Everett locates a Spanish genealogy for the play Othello (one Eric Griffin has recently extended). Soyinka, more radically, offers a genealogy from Arab-speaking authors that refigures Shakespeare as "Shayk al-Subair" (86). Though the essays in this collection are generally arranged chronologically, Martin Orkin's 1988 study of "Cruelty, King Lear and the South African Land Act 1913" is moved forward into a cluster of essays from the 1990s that self-consciously use the tools of cultural materialism and new historicism. Orkin's essay, one might say in this context, launched the politically committed analysis of the multivalent histories informing Shakespeare's plays and thus provides a counterpoint to the less obvious political investments of Greenblattian New Historicism. Essays from Balz Engler, Michael Dobson, James Shapiro, Laurence Lerner, Jonathan Bate, and Ania Loomba exemplify the sustained and varied interest in race as a category of analysis in Shakespeare studies during the 1990s. These essays involve comparative studies of Shakespeare's deployment in settings as varied as England and Germany during World War I (Engler, 1992) and World War II (Lerner, 1995); the developing "Shakespeare indust ry" (Dobson, 1994); and the debate over the "Jew Bill" (Shapiro, 1995) of the eighteenth century; and Edward Kamau Brathwaite's sustained engagement with The Tempest in his "New World Trilogy" of the 1960s (Bate, 1995).

As perhaps the most significant essay in the collection, Celia R. Daileader's "Casting Black Actors: Beyond Othellophilia" (like Hendricks's introduction, a commissioned piece) offers a new turn in studies of Shakespeare and race with its emphasis on ideology and performance. Focusing on the Royal Shakespeare Company's currently vaunted policy of color-blind casting, Daileader counters that male African-descent actors remain bound by a dynamic she labels "Othellophilia," a telos that propels the black male body into a form of "biracial porn" (179). Dai-leader highlights the feminist implications of this racialist rhetoric in RSC productions from 1996 to 1999 featuring Ray Fearon (who also appears in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet as the sentinel Francisco) and earlier productions showcasing Hugh Quarshie. Nominally "color-blind" casting, she demonstrates through precise analysis and provocative illustrations, continues to restrict black men and white women to "misogynist Figurations of a woman's sexual besmirching or 'blackening', with all the voyeuristic (and potentially racist) titillation such a spectacle provides" (178). Tellingly, the absent presence of the black woman on the Shakespearean stage becomes marginalized in the essay itself (199, n7), though with the promise of future directions for research. Aptly positioned as the closing statement in this collection, Loomba's essay, "'Delicious traffik': Racial and Religious Difference on Early Modern Stages," implicitly responds to such lacunae by positing "[t]he convertible body of women" as the prototype for the intersections of color prejudice, colonial relations, racial ideologies, and gender difference that the other two studies under review address (219).

"The Tempest" and Its Travels ranges widely between scholarly, creative, and visual treatments of The Tempest in its local, Mediterranean, and trans-Atlantic contexts. The range of this volume, as might be expected, conditions both its strengths and its weaknesses. On the one hand, the quality of contributions remains uneven, with many of the scholarly essays functioning as simple glosses rather than as sustained analyses. The editors nonetheless compensate for an injudicious policy of inclusion more characteristic of conference proceedings through astute introductions to each major section. More significantly, they challenge the disciplinary divisions of conventional collections by establishing creative responses to The Tempest as integral to their scholarly project. For instance, the collection begins with a "Prologue" by Robin Kirkpatrick -- the poem "After Prospero" -- whose concerns with role-playing, pedagogy, and power are subsequently reprised in his essay "The Italy of The Tempest." Poems also conclu de the volume as an "Envoy." Not simply enacting The Tempest's theme that "the past is prologue," the editors cohere the collection with a visual history of the play, including textual apparatus, early modern maps and portraits, photographs of contemporary performances, and artistic responses to The Tempest such as Jimmie Durham's Untitled (Caliban's Mask). In addition to these poetic and visual intertexts, the section "On the World Stage" provides excerpts (many of them first translated for this collection) of frequently cited contemporary theatrical responses to The Tempest. Though not billed as such, this collection could certainly serve as a sourcebook for classes on The Tempest, particularly from a postcolonial perspective.

The introduction to the opening section on "Local Knowledge" challenges the literalism characteristic of the initial "backlash" against new historicist and postcolonial readings of The Tempest (4). Readings attending to Shakespeare's immediate contexts, that is, need not remain within the circular logic of a clef interpretations: Prospero = "playwright/ director"; Miranda = "idealized spectatorship"; Ariel = "boy actor"; Caliban = Will Kemp (Hulme and Sherman hold up Douglas Bruster as the epitome of reductive reader [4]). Rather, as the essays in this section amply demonstrate, local readings encompass "court politics" and "metropolitan anxieties," along with the related "domestic colonization" of the British Isles (4). Crystal Bartolovich's essay, "'Baseless Fabric': London as a 'World City,'" exemplifies this expansive sense of the "local," which she establishes through impressive archival documentation, precise textual readings, and sophisticated theoretical conclusions. "Globalization," she demonstrates, was among the most local concerns of Shakespeare's era (15, 22). The concluding essay of this section, Joseph Roach's "The Enchanted Island: Vicarious Tourism in Restoration Adaptations of The Tempest," pairs productively with Bartolovich's in its emphasis on the Restoration Shakespeare as "an early modern version of the commodification of experience itself' (64). The section on "European and Mediterranean Crossroads" begins by proposing (not entirely tongue-in-cheek) that The Tempest might be productively grouped with Shakespeare's history plays, particularly as a dramatization of Machiavellian real-politik. Donna B. Hamilton's "Re-Engineering Virgil: The Tempest and the Printed Aeneid" pursues this line of analysis by situating The Tempest within the historical project of recuperating the Aeneid as a primer for early modern imperialism. Andrew C. Hess's "The Mediterranean and Shakespeare's Geopolitical Imagination" complements Hamilton's attention to the classical discourse of empire by focusing on the Ott oman Empire's salience for early moderns, including the boundary-marking Shakespeare. The final section, "Transatlantic Routes," returns to the contested site of New Historicism by invoking the "American" readings of the play that this approach has substantially erased: 1) the nineteenth-century South American "creole" tradition and 2) the mid-twentieth century Caribbean "mestizo" tradition. From John Gillies's exemplary "archeological" reading of the occultations structuring the early modern discourse of empire in "The Figure of the New World in The Tempest" to Peter Hulme's "close" reading of the surprisingly neglected response to The Tempest elaborated by anglophone (though not English) Caribbean intellectuals in "Reading from Elsewhere: George Lamming and the Paradox of Exile," this section underlines the fundamental assertion of the collection that the trans-Atlantic treatment of The Tempest has exhausted neither its textual base nor its theoretical purchase.

The admittedly anachronistic coupling of Shakespeare Jungle Fever challenges the persistence of Shakespearean "chaste thinking," which Arthur Little (following Stephanie Jed's "feminist philology" [9] in Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism) summarizes as "a too-easy cutting off of one's own discourses from the complexities and messiness of the discourses one seeks to investigate and clarify" (8-9). Crucially, this chastising project depends on "the textualizing, and, indeed, the fleshly -- fetishistic, scopic, imaginary -- incorporation of blackness into the white rape narrative" (5). Such a turn to "an emerging cultural philology" (8) clearly proves salutary for a historically grounded understanding of "race" in the early modern period, though the straw man attack on New Historicism's inattention to "extended close readings of its literary examples" (7) seems a belated and inflated means to establish the credibility of Shakespeare Jungle Fever's approach. Indeed, it is in readings of Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, Titus Andronicus, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra that this study best theorizes its innovative method, which incorporates explication of literary and cultural texts with astute readings of the racialized visual culture of Shakespeare's era.

The first chapter, "Picturing the Hand of the White Woman," establishes the hypervisualization of Aaron and the undervisualization of Lavinia in Henry Peacham's contemporaneous drawing of Titus Andronicus as the touchstone for a capacious survey of "[t]he semiotics of Lucrece" (29) in Renaissance drama, portraiture, historiography, and criticism. The logic underlying this semiotics runs: "[w]ithout the woman's self-slaughter there is no rape" (28) and without "the racializing of Lucrece's rape" (45) there is no redemption for the white(ned) woman. Applied to the gaps and displacements in Titus Andronicus, this cultural logic foregrounds Aaron as instrumental to the play's "miscegenational rape narrative" (63) and Lavinia as symptomatic in her role as "a white woman who is made functionally and temporarily to pass as a black woman" (65). The next chapter, "Witnessing Whiteness," extends this rigorous cultural philology into the Shakespearean myth of Venice as "the colonial / imperial nightmare of hybridization " (70) and the related thematics of deportation in Elizabethan England, with Othello's deportation to Venice (and thence, perhaps, to Africa) epitomizing "this narrative of racial chastisement" (72). Tracing contested etiologies of blackness in the early modern period alongside consolidated racist caricatures of Othello from the late eighteenth-to the early twentieth-century, this chapter confirms the theatricality of blackness as "a kind of racial testing ground for whiteness" ultimately demarcating Desdemona as a Lucrece-figure and Othello as a black(ened) rapist (78). The final two chapters address the triad of race, rape, and sacrifice at the base of Shakespeare's most ambivalent Roman play, Antony and Cleopatra. The chapter "Framing Antony's Anatomy" focuses on the unstable identity of Antony's white, male, heterosexual Roman virtus. Antony's gender, racial, and sexual queering in Egypt accordingly positions him in the place of woman and not simply as "an effeminate or feminine man" (108). As such, he mu st be sacrificed not only to the foundational rape narrative of Augustus Caesar's Roman Empire, but simultaneously to the parallel discourse of empire that determined Elizabethan England's denigration of the "wild Irish." "(Re)Posing with Cleopatra," the final chapter, establishes the resistance of Shakespeare's Cleopatra to the imperial rape narrative, which is partly achieved through her insistence on her "blackness" against the Renaissance tradition of assimilating Cleopatra to chastising discourses of "whiteness." By further layering her resistance with the metatheatrical insistence on the boy actor beneath the stage queen, Shakespeare may be seen as challenging systems of exchange in "the bodies...of white boys" (173), along with the more generally recognized traffic in women and slaves. This conclusion in Shakespeare's camp -- suggesting both its military-imperial and performative-subversive senses -- confirms Shakespeare Jungle Fever's new cultural philology as the wave of the future for complexly hist oricized interrogations of "race" in the early modern period and of the era's connections to our own messy semiotics of race.