Abstract
Beginning with an account of how love and sex are devalued within the violent social order of Shakespeare’s Verona, this chapter reads Indian director Mira Nair’s 1991 film about a love affair between the daughter of Indian immigrants and a black man in modern-day Greenwood, Mississippi as a response to the Renaissance love tragedy. Reading the languages of blackness and sexual desire that mark the Shakespeare play, the sonnets that are contemporary with it, and Othello, the chapter discusses how theatrical and film directors have attempted to use racial difference as a way of explaining why Romeo and Juliet’s love is wrong and dangerous, while continuing to naturalize the family feud at the heart of the play. In contrast, Nair asks us to think more seriously about what the racial history of love might be.
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Notes
- 1.
On blackness and beauty in Romeo and Juliet see Nicholas Radel, “The Ethiop’s Ear: Race, Sexuality, and Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,” The Upstart Crow 28 (2008): 17–34.
- 2.
Kim Hall, “‘These Bastard Signs of Fair’: Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Postcolonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 64–83.
- 3.
Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet , Hamlet, Othello , and King Lear (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979, rpt. 2019), 56–70.
- 4.
Margreta De Grazia, “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York Garland, 2000), 105–106. Also see Scott Oldenburg, “The Riddle of Blackness in England’s National Family Romance,” JEMCS 1, no. 1 (2001): 46–62.
- 5.
Starring Denzel Washington (Demetrius) and Sarita Choudhury (Meena); produced by Black River Productions and Channel Four Films.
- 6.
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 120; Jinga Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (New York: Routledge, 2004), 75.
- 7.
Deleuze and Félix Guattari introduce their notion of these objects, which they call “concepts,” but for my purposes especially mean Shakespeare plays and the responses they elicit, in What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 15–60.
- 8.
See, for example, Robert N. Watson and Stephen Dickey, “Wherefore Art Thou Tereu? Juliet and the Legacy of Rape,” RenQ 58.1 (2005): 127–156; Clayton MacKenzie, “Love, Sex and Death in Romeo and Juliet ,” English Studies 88.1 (2007): 22–42; William Carroll, “‘We Were Born to Die’: Romeo and Juliet,” CompD 15.1 (1981): 54–71, and Lloyd Davis, “‘Death-Marked Love’: Desire and Presence in Romeo and Juliet,” ShS 49 (1996): 57–67.
- 9.
This is an argument made by Coppélia Kahn, “Coming of Age in Verona,” MLS 8.1 (1977): 5–22. Also see Robert Appelbaum, “‘Standing to the Wall’: The Pressures of Masculinity in Romeo and Juliet ,” SQ 48.3 (1997): 251–272.
- 10.
Ramie Targoff, “Mortal Love: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and the Practice of Joint Burial,” Representations 120 (2012), discusses the links between love and mortality in the play, 28–33.
- 11.
In Tales of Love, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 210. My discussion here uses some of the same examples as Catherine Belsey, ‘Romeo and Juliet ’: Language and Writing (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), which discusses Kristeva 59–62.
- 12.
Dympna Callaghan, “The Ideology of Romantic Love: the Case of Romeo and Juliet ,” in Callaghan, Lorraine Helms, and Jyotsna Singh, The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 59–101.
- 13.
Julie Hankey, ed., Othello , Plays in Performance Series (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987), cites this anecdote from Westland Marston’s 1888 theatrical memoir on her p. 64.
- 14.
Tilden G. Edelstein, “Othello in America: The Drama of Racial Intermarriage,” in Werner Sollors, ed., Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 359, 358. The role of white visual horror in these anecdotes supports Ian Smith’s argument in “White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage,” RenD 32 (2003): 33–67 about the degree to which race was experienced as a “visual transaction” (37) between spedtsyor and blacked-up actor.
- 15.
In his edition of Romeo and Juliet in the Shakespeare in Production series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 79–80.
- 16.
Angela C. Pao, “Recasting Race: Casting Practices and Racial Formations,” Theatre Survey 41.2 (2000), 15–17.
- 17.
The Nontraditional Casting Project (NTCP), a US-based group advocating for inclusive casting in theatrical productions, developed these terms in the late 1980s. It defined “conceptual casting” as the choice of an “ethnic, female, or disabled actor” in order to give a play greater resonance for modern audiences, and “cross-cultural casting” as setting “the entire world of a play” in “a different cultural setting” than the one its original script lay it in. Angela C. Pao, note 16 above, expands her discussion of the NTCP in No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 4–15.
- 18.
While fornication was legally frowned upon for all in colonial Virginia, in 1662, the colony’s House of Burgesses mandated that interracial couples found guilty of the crime would be fined double the amount levied against couples of the same race.
- 19.
Miranda Kaufmann, “‘Making the Beast With Two Backs’: Interracial Relationships in Early Modern England,” Literature Compass 12, no.1 (2015): 22–37.
- 20.
Two examples of criticism that read Renaissance racial moments’ implication in modern formulations are Robert Hornback, Racism and Early Blackface Comic Traditions: From the Old World to the New (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and Ayanna Thompson, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2013).
- 21.
Nicola Hyland, “‘Young Hearts’/White Masks: Leading the (Color)blind at Shakespeare’s Globe,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 9.2 (2015).
- 22.
Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, “My Own Private Shakespeare; or, Am I Deluding Myself?,” in Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, ed. Ayanna Thompson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 125–136.
- 23.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), 167.
- 24.
She is not concerned with interracial relationships; for further discussion of the implications of colorblind productions, see Christy Burns, “Suturing Over Racial Difference: Problems for a Colorblind Approach in a Visual Culture,” Discourse 22, no. 1 (2002): 70–91.
- 25.
Alfredo Modenessi, “(Un)Doing the Book ‘without Verona walls’: A View from the Receiving End of Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,” in Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical theory and Popular Cinema, ed. Courtney Lehmann and Lisa Starks (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 62–85. W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) argues that the film’s constantly iterated but disconnected markers of an undetailed latinidad point to its marketing to “the white norteamericano imaginary,” rather than to a more truly international and multiracial imagined audience (140).
- 26.
Edward A. Alpers, “Gujarat and the Trade of East Africa, c. 1500–1800,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 9.1 (1986): 22–44.
- 27.
This massive undertaking began at Mombasa in British East Africa (now Kenya) and extended almost 700 miles northwest across the country to Kisumu, on the east coast of Lake Victoria. Ferries travelled from Kisumu to other ports on the lake and a short spur line was built to extend the rail line to Kampala, capital of the Uganda Protectorate, thus connecting the east African interior to the Indian Ocean.
- 28.
Vali Jamal, “Asians in Uganda, 1880–1972: Inequality and Expulsion,” EHR 29.4 (1976): 602–616.
- 29.
For this history, I recommend the rich SNCC Digital Gateway, https://snccdigital.org.
- 30.
A Theory of Adaptation, 9.
- 31.
bell hooks and Anuradha Dingwaney, “Mississippi Masala ,” Z Magazine, July–August 1992, argue that the film “erases” (42) the colonially generated hierarchical relationship between Asians and Africans in Uganda. Desai, Beyond Bollywood, believes that the film “does little to portray [the] racial hierarchy and economic disparity or the failure of the multiracial nation-state as a legacy of colonialism,” instead leading viewers to believe that its Ugandan scenes are the result of “an essentialized and ahistorical antiblack racism” (81). I will include subsequent references to hooks and Dingwaney parenthetically in my text.
- 32.
Purnima Bose and Linta Varghese, “Mississippi Masala , South Asian Activism, and Agency,” in Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the ‘Real,’ ed. Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), also believe that hooks and Dingwaney underestimate the film’s awareness of the colonial contexts for Jay’s response to his daughter’s affair, 143–144.
- 33.
In an interview with Amina Meer, Bomb 36 (1991), 47.
- 34.
Peggy Orenstein, “Salaam America!,” Mother Jones 17.1 (Jan./Feb. 1992), 60. On color-consciousness among Indian-Americans, see Saeed Khan, “Let’s Talk About Racism: Why Indian-Americans Have a White Skin Fixation,” Hindustani Times 23 May 2017.
- 35.
Sayantani DasGupta, “Glass Shawls and Long Hair: A South Asian Woman talks Sexual Politics,” Ms. Magazine 3, no. 5 (1993), 76. I’ll include future references to DasGupta parenthetically in my text.
- 36.
R. Radhakrishnan, “Is the Ethnic ‘Authentic’ in the Diaspora?,” in The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, ed. Karin Aguiilar-San Juan (Boston: South End Press, 1994), 226. I’ll include future references to Radhakrishnan parenthetically in my text.
- 37.
On how American notions of race shape South Asian immigrants’ relations to whiteness and to white productions of African-American identity, see Amritjit Singh, “African Americans and the New Immigrants,” in Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva, eds., Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 93–110. On racial difference in the film, see Radharani Ray, “Interrogating Race in Mississippi Masala ,” Race, Gender, and Class 8, no. 4 (2001): 155–175.
- 38.
Anthropologist Agehananda Bharati noted the co-existence of South Asians’ strong antipathy toward intermarriage between South Asians and Africans in East Africa and the pervasiveness of skin-color prejudice among South Asians themselves in “Patterns of Identification Among the East African Asians,” Sociologus 15.2 (1965), 132.
- 39.
This kind of economic punishment of black people behaving in ways that broke rules of proper comportment toward principles of white supremacy also appeared in the historical Greenwood. When the area’s black citizens would not stop organizing to register and vote, in the winter of 1962–1963, the county’s board of supervisors ended its participation in the federal surplus commodities program, which fed up to 28,000 people annually—90% of them black. SNCC organized a national food drive for donations to Mississippi, and registration continued.
- 40.
“Mississippi Meena: A Critique of South-Asian Womanhood in Mississippi Masala .” Manavi Newsletter (1992), 1.
- 41.
Sonia Shah, “Presenting the Blue Goddess: Toward a National Pan-Asian Feminist Agenda,” in Aguilar-San Juan, 157.
- 42.
On the significance of the film’s predominantly nonwhite cast, see E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997), 173–177. Binta Mehta discusses its significance for nonwhite audiences in “Emigrants Twice Displaced: Race, Color, and Identity in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala ,” in Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, ed. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 153–169.
- 43.
It also opened a few months after Lee’s film Jungle Fever, which portrayed the course of another interracial affair, this one a conflicted relationship between a married black architect and his lover, an Italian-American secretary.
- 44.
Mississippi Masala was Nair’s second feature film. Her first, 1988’s Salaam Bombay!, won the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival and was named best first feature at Cannes. On her career and the significance of her films, see Urmila Seshagiri, “At the Crossroads of Two Empires: Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala and the Limits of Hybridity,” Journal of Asian American Studies 6, no. 2 (2003): 177–198.
- 45.
Mississippi Masala ’s screenplay is by Sooni Taraporevala, a Mumbai native who met Nair when they were students at Harvard University. She also wrote two other Nair films, Salaam Bombay! and The Namesake (2006).
- 46.
On spectatorship in Indian cinema, see Lakshmi Srinivas, “The Active Audience: Spectatorship, Social Relations, and the Experience of Cinema in India,” Media, Culture, and Society 24, no. 2 (2002): 155–173.
- 47.
Stephanie Jones, “The Politics of Love and History: Asian Women and African Men in East African Literature,” Research in African Literatures, 42.3 (2011), 171.
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Green MacDonald, J. (2020). Uncrossed Lovers: Remembering Race in Romeo and Juliet and Mississippi Masala. In: Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3_3
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