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.

Table of Contents:
IntroductionReanimating Othello in Post-racial America Post-racial and Colourblind The Post-racial and the Colourblind in Cultural Works Shakespeare and America’s Racecraft Chapter Overviews Conclusion: Shakespeare, Race, and Habitus Chapter 1. Images of Objectification: Othello as Prop in Kill ShakespeareDepicting Othello: Visual and Ideological Distortions Controlling Images and the Stereotyping of Black Men Representing Blackness in Comic Book History Kill Shakespeare’s Othello and the Complexities of the Black Superhero Othello: The White Protagonists’ Foil On the Story’s Margins: Othello’s Narrative Limitations Othello as Prop Conclusion: Audience, Othello, and the Limits of Re-presentation Chapter 2. Colourblindness on the Post-racial Stage: Hip Hop, Comedy, and Cultural Appropriation in Othello the Remix ‘I know what you’re thinkin’" Hip Hop, Shakespeare, and Audience Expectations Reconsidering Colourblind Shakespeare Cultural Appropriation, Colourblindness, and Hip-Hop History Racial Erasure: Othello: The Remix and the Flattening of Racial Identity Comedy and Colourblindness ‘But there’s comedy in it’: Comedy as Racial Balm Racial Stereotypes and their Aftereffects Colourblindness and Cultural Appropriation Revisited Othello: The Remix, a Post-Racial Product Chapter 3. Othello, Race, and Serial: The Ethics of a Shakespearean Cameo The White Racial Frame Othello Makes a Cameo Devaluing the Racial Other: Koenig and the White Racial Frame Narrative Authority and the Centering of Whiteness: Koenig as Serial’s Iago The Stranger from ‘over there’: Constructions of Race in Serial Shakespearean Implications: Reconsidering Premodern Critical Race Studies Chapter 4. ‘no tools with which to hear’: Adaptive Re-vision, Audience Education, and American Moor Whiteness and the American Theatre American Moor and Racism Across (Crumpled) Time Black Masculinity and Misrepresentation American Moor and Education Theater and Adaptive Re-vision The Hope of Audience Education Conclusion: The Time for Theatre’s Reckoning Chapter 5. At the Intersection of gender, Race, and White Privilege: A Case of Three Desdemona Plays Desdemona Plays and Feminism Intersectionality and Feminist Racial Erasure Desdemona’s Imperfection: Confronting Class and White Privilege Desdemona and Othello: Competing Forms of Oppression Epilogue: The Accessibility Problem Chapter 6. Resisting Lobotomized Shakespeare: Whiteness and Universality in Key & Peele and Get Out The Allure of Universal Shakespeare Whiteness, Narratives, and the Universal ‘We’ ‘How dey goin to kill Othello?!’: Questioning Shakespearean Universality ‘I told you not to go in…’:Horror and the Framing of Blackness in Get Out and Othello Get Out and the Necropolitics of White Supremacy A New Perspective: Reconsidering Othello via Get Out Microagressions and Black Paranoia Conclusion: Othello and the Sunken Place Epilogue Bibliography