Uncrossed Lovers: Remembering Race in Romeo and Juliet and Mississippi Masala

Joyce Green MacDonald

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3_3

Uncrossed Lovers: Remembering Race in Romeo and Juliet and Mississippi Masala

Joyce Green MacDonald

English

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review

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.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Palgrave Shakespeare Studies
Pages	47-75
Number of pages	29
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3_3
State	Published - 2020

Publication series

Name	Palgrave Shakespeare Studies
ISSN (Print)	2731-3204
ISSN (Electronic)	2731-3212

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s).

Keywords

Colorblind casting
Migration
Miscegenation
Performance

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Literature and Literary Theory

Access to Document

10.1007/978-3-030-50680-3_3

Cite this

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Uncrossed Lovers: Remembering Race in Romeo and Juliet and Mississippi Masala

Abstract

Publication series

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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