Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice (review)

In Shakespeare Jungle Fever, Arthur L. Little Jr. analyzes the relationship among sexual violence, the ostensibly redemptive violence of sacrifice, and representations of race. Taking up narratives that locate the rape and subsequent suicide of Lucrece as the founding moment of Rome, Little links sexual to racial violation and argues that self-sacrifice, as a response to such violation, both enables women to recuperate their own virginity and whiteness and "imbue[s] that same virginity and whiteness with national and imperial definition, significance, and purpose" (2). Little draws on Stephanie H Jed's paradigm of "chaste thinking" to posit a process that constructs cultural identity through the histories and bodies it erases or forgets. Positioning Shakespeare as an "'alternative'" reader of such processes, "one of early modern England's most careful and provocative readers of alterity, of early modern England's evocations and chastisements of it" (10), this study deploys the idea of "jungle fever" against a sanitized, universalized, canonical vision of "Shakespeare" and "the Renaissance." Little commits himself to illuminating the "sites where early modern processes of racializing, racial othering, and finally racial exorcisings inform the aesthetic suppositions of the Renaissance" (18).

Shakespeare Jungle Fever focuses on three plays that stage representations of black bodies: Titus Andronicus, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra. The plays are linked not only by their concern with race but by a recurring set of preoccupations catalyzed by that concern: the fear of racial mixing, with its contamination of whiteness; the conviction that a female body must be sacrificed in order to resist or undo that contamination and the threat it poses to the political state; and the lurking possibility that such sacrifices might not work, that the individual white body and the collective white state might be cultural fantasies that are always in the process of unraveling. The persistent but often indirect or tenuous linkings of black male bodies to rape, and of white female bodies to political integrity, intersect to produce a narrative that is both relentlessly causal—"the previously chaste white woman kills herself in the name of national and imperial purity after she has been tainted by a rape that violates her not only sexually but racially" (2)—and endlessly subject to its own complexities and self-interrogations.

Chapter 1, "Picturing the Hand of White Women," takes up Titus Andronicus in the context of other early modern texts "in which staging the black rapist and the raped white sacrificial woman becomes an expedient and conspicuous way for England to prove and picture its national and imperial character" (25). Connecting Lavinia to Lucrece, the chapter describes the usefulness of the rape/sacrifice narrative, which registers the presence of alterity and, at the same time, exorcises that presence through a recuperative, "chastising" act. Little's reading balances Lavinia's white hand against Aaron's black one, arguing that her hand, as an instrument of self-sacrifice, has the power to restore sexual and racial purity to Rome. Because Titus Andronicus establishes an uneasy link between licit and illicit sexuality, between rape and marriage, the sacrifice of Lavinia is necessary to demarcate the boundaries of Romanness: "Barbarians rape; Rome chastises. This is Rome's other story of chaste thinking, or at least its chaste thinking about Others" (57). Rape and sacrifice are at once continuous, part of the same story, and severed from one another by aggressive assertions of cultural difference. Aaron, who does not literally violate Lavinia but who catalyzes the possibility of her violation—"Blackness makes rape happen" (60)—distinguishes rape from sacrifice and from the quotidian operations of patriarchal domination. At the same time, he troubles such distinctions by playing a role in the processes that restore Romanness to Rome.

Chapter 2, "Witnessing Whiteness," turns to Othello. Suggesting that the play is concerned less with the presence of Othello...