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Representatives in 1836, John Quincy Adams characterized the moral of Othello as follows: “the intermarriage of black and white blood is a violation of the law of nature. That is the lesson to be learned from the play” (cited in Levine 1988:39). The explosive paradigm of miscegenation delineated in Othello becomes the target for three great male African American re-visions of the biracial sexual myth: Native Son by Richard Wright (1940), Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952), and Dutchman by Amiri Baraka (1964). Wright restages and reinterprets the problematic relationship of Othello and Desdemona in his novel about the murderous encounter between Bigger Thomas and Mary Dalton; Ellison represents that relationship comically in the farcical date of the hero of Invisible Man and the White woman named Sibyl; and Baraka reverses or inverts the play’s outcome in the murder of the Black man named Clay by a White woman, Lula, in Dutchman (Andreas 1992).

With its frequent references to Africa and Africans (Caliban, Sycorax, Setebos, Tunis) and its interrogation of the notions of forced servitude and chattel slavery, The Tempest has provoked its share of recent African European and African American responses, including Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1974; English trans. 1985) and John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire (1990). But we must turn to African American women writers to find the most thoroughgoing interrogations of Shakespeare’s highly patriarchal text, which sets his Western magus squarely at the center of the familial, political, dramatic, geographical, and even the metaphysical universe. One of the more creative re-visionings of The Tempest is Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981), which places Shakespeare alongside the African American folk tales of Uncle Remus. The most celebrated recent appropriation of The Tempest, however, is Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. Without running the risk of satire, parody, or comedy, Mama Day systematically turns The Tempest upside down, putting women on top and immigrant Natives fully in charge of the island. It displaces Prospero with the character of Miranda, a Black “witch” who converts patriarchy to matriarchy in the domination of a South Carolina sea island not so far from Bermuda, one of the presumed locales for Prospero’s island. The novel both feminizes and “negrifies” the patriarchal story line of the play, replacing European characters with an entirely African American cast and restoring the power over reproduction usurped by Prospero to its proper source, women. Miranda oversees pregnancies on the island and manipulates the marriage of Ophelia and George, just as Prospero arranges the union of Miranda and Ferdinand to heal the political rift between

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