Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice. By Arthur L. Little, Jr

Through incisive close analysis, Little illuminates the complex ways that Shakespeare constructs race discursively and theatrically, concluding that Shakespeare is "one of early modern England's most careful and provocative readers of alterity, of early modern England's evocations and chastisements of it" (10). Fundamental to Little's argument is his analysis of the Lucretia myth, which functioned as "one of early modern England's most imaginative models for defining and negotiating its national and imperial self" (1–2). Othello, in Little's analysis, more literally embodies the role of the Black rapist, as his interracial relationship with Desdemona is imbricated in discourses of rape. Shakespeare Jungle Fever is central to the genealogy of premodern critical race studies scholarship not only for its trenchant analysis of race in Shakespeare's plays but also for its critique of the whiteness that infuses early modern studies and for its insistence that our positionalities as critics matter. In their own ways, scholars such as Abdulhamit Arvas, David Sterling Brown, and Kyle Grady have taken up Little's efforts to examine sexuality and race together, addressing these intertwined dynamics in subjects such as empire, masculinity, and mixedness.1 Others such as Ambereen Dadabhoy and Ruben Espinosa have emphasized the importance of embodiment and positionality in disrupting the white frames that shape scholarly critique and that artificially divorce the past from the present.2 More work remains to be done, however, and the scholars interested in gender, sexuality, race, and the development of white epistemologies will benefit greatly from Shakespeare Jungle Fever.