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

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.