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mission. Harold Bloom’s (1973) quasi-Freudian account of the “anxiety of influence,” although by now venerable and even hoary, still influences our understanding of literary relations of the personal kind. According to Bloom, authors, or more specifically poets, ward off death by writing against a powerful precursor. Weak poets idolize, strong poets contest the precursor. Adrienne Rich offers a feminist rethinking of Bloom’s agonistic model for authorship. In Rich’s polemic, women writers and critics alike must not only combat death, but also awaken their dead or sleeping consciousness to face with fortitude and rage the victimization of women by centuries of an oppressive gender-class system. For Rich, “re-vision” —looking at old texts with fresh eyes, entering them from a new direction, and therefore rewriting the history of oppression—is for women, at least, a political act of survival.

Acts of appropriation, although they articulate where the author ‘‘stands” in relation to the object of appropriation, can be intensely personal as well as political. Such is the case for Paul Robeson, the African American singer, actor, and political activist, who played Othello in London during the 1930s opposite Peggy Ashcroft and on Broadway during the 1940s with Ute Hagen. In a well-known essay published in 1945 in the American Scholar (Foner 1978:163– 64), Robeson uses Theodore Spencer’s universalizing Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (1949) to characterize Othello as the Renaissance man, denied the security of identity that was enjoyed by his medieval forebears. But even as he distances himself from Othello historically, Robeson identifies with his Shakespearean counterpart, telling concert audiences that Othello’s position is much like that of the twentieth-century African American, himself the descendant of slaves. Robeson describes his identification with Shakespeare’s character in terms of a dialectic between performance and intimacy, or between front- and back-stage. Discussing his London performance from the distance of 1944, Robeson speaks ironically about the self-consciousness that he felt about playing a character who makes love to, then kills, a white woman: “For the first two weeks I played with Desdemona that girl couldn’t get near me, I was backin’ away from her all the time. I was like a plantation hand in the parlor, that clumsy” (Foner 1978:152).

What is Othello to Paul Robeson, or he to Othello? Robeson’s identification with Othello, at once political and intensely emotional, reminds us of a lesson that African American, multi-cultural, and feminist literature and theory have taught us: the literary is

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