Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World

Joyce Green MacDonald is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, USA, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. She is the author of Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (2002) and has published widely on Renaissance racial formations, Shakespearean adaptation, and performance.

• 1. ​Introduction: “A cemetery inhabited by highly vocal ghosts”.- 2. Chapter One: Rereading Othello in Gayl Jones’ Mosquito: Claiming Wisdom.- 3. Chapter Two: Remembering Race in Romeo and Juliet and Mississippi Masala: Uncrossed Lovers.- 4. Chapter Three: Bodies, Race, and Performance in Antony and Cleopatra and Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile: Memory’s Signatures.- 5. Chapter Four: Women’s Memories in Othello and Harlem Duet: Echoes of Harlem.- 6. Chapter Five: Re-racing Romance from The Taming of the Shrew to Deliver Us from Eva: ‘The Right Foundation’.- 7. Afterword: Adapting Shakespeare, Forgetting Race in King Charles III: Future History?

“MacDonald … offers up a monograph that aptly demonstrates how adaptations fill in the representational gap of Shakespeare’s missing black women even as she undertakes the same gap-filling work herself by spotlighting the endeavors of creators of color all-too-often overlooked in Shakespearean adaptation studies, as well as in contemporary culture.” (Vanessa I. Corredera, Early Modern Women Journal, Vol. 16 (2), 2022)