Echoes of Harlem: Women’s Memories in Othello and Harlem Duet

Although Othello has appeared in earlier chapters, Djanet Sears’ 1997 play Harlem Duet is the book’s first full-scale reorientation of the play that is so central to formulations of race in the Renaissance, and afterwards. Sears’ play directly addresses black women’s absence from Othello, as it tells the story of Billie, a woman in the process of breaking up with her lover, Othe, who has left her for his white colleague Mona. Dramatizing Billie’s attempt to grapple with the historical void that has absorbed so much of the history of black women in the Atlantic world, Sears’ play uses Othello’s handkerchief as a recurring marker of romantic loss, a vagrant symbol of what Billie wanted, and what she cannot achieve.