1. Introduction: “A cemetery inhabited by highly vocal ghosts” -- 2. Chapter One: Rereading Othello in Gayl Jones’ Mosquito: Claiming Wisdom -- 3. Chapter Two: Remembering Race in Romeo and Juliet and Mississippi Masala: Uncrossed Lovers -- 4. Chapter Three: Bodies, Race, and Performance in Antony and Cleopatra and Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile: Memory’s Signatures -- 5. Chapter Four: Women’s Memories in Othello and Harlem Duet: Echoes of Harlem -- 6. Chapter Five: Re-racing Romance from The Taming of the Shrew to Deliver Us from Eva: ‘The Right Foundation’ -- 7. Afterword: Adapting Shakespeare, Forgetting Race in King Charles III: Future History? .

As readers head into the second fifty years of the modern critical study of blackness and black characters in Renaissance drama, it has become a critical commonplace to note black female characters’ almost complete absence from Shakespeare’s plays. Despite this physical absence, however, they still play central symbolic roles in articulating definitions of love, beauty, chastity, femininity, and civic and social standing, invoked as the opposite and foil of women who are “fair”. Beginning from this recognition of black women’s simultaneous physical absence and imaginative presence, this book argues that modern Shakespearean adaptation is a primary means for materializing black women’s often elusive presence in the plays, serving as a vital staging place for historical and political inquiry into racial formation in Shakespeare’s world, and our own. Ranging geographically across North America and the Caribbean, and including film and fiction as well as drama as it discusses remade versions of Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World will attract scholars of early modern race studies, gender and performance, and women in Renaissance drama. .