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Page 105 jazz musician never directly acknowledges his or her debt to tradition, or to a specific song or riff, but proceeds to appropriate given musical materials and refashion them as he or she sees fit. Gloria Naylor is neither the first Black author to fall under the spell of the Bard nor the first to interrogate the racist implications of his plays. In an early allusion to Shakespeare well before the turn of the century, the Black novelist and poet Charles Chesnutt dubbed Shakespeare “The Homer of the Saxon race.” To early African American writers, Shakespeare is an icon of Nordic peoples whose pen not only “paints the minds and hearts of men” —White, no doubt—but whose “lines shall future ages trace” (Chesnutt 1993: 163). “Race’’ and “trace” are auspicious rhymes for Chesnutt, whose own literary progeny were often interested in erasing the trace of race, or of inverting its influence, in their appropriations and adaptations of the plays. Shakespeare has been conceived of by African American writers as both progenitor and propagator of British canons of taste, culture, class, caste, and foremost, race, a voice of White authority to be reckoned with in a uniquely African way—through the tradition of literary re-creation that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has identified as “signifying,” particularly in reaction to those plays that are hostile to African or Native characters. Since that anxious celebration of Shakespeare was first recorded in Chesnutt’s journals, the relationship between the Bard and African American writers has remained seminal but testy, and can best be characterized as a love-hate affair, with control over literary “progeny” as the driving concern. Of the five “African” plays of Shakespeare, those that feature Africans or Moors in prominent roles—The Merchant of Venice (Morocco), Titus Andronicus (Aaron), Othello: The Moor of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest (Caliban, whose mother, Sycorax, is from “Argiers”) —Othello has inspired re-visions chiefly by African American male writers, while The Tempest has generally inspired adaptations by women. Othello ritualizes the racist’s nightmare of the biracial sexual relationship between a White woman and a Black male, which according to Gunnar Myrdal, has suffered “the full fury of anti-amalgamation sanctions” in American history (1944:56). Early African American writers might well have been incensed by the characterization of Othello articulated by one of the Republic’s earliest and most respected presidents, indeed a politician liberal on racial matters, if Stephen Spielberg’s Amistad is correct. Even as he advocated the abolition of slavery in the House of |
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