Author(s): Oumeima Mouelhi

Abstract: Djanet Sears’ blues version of Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello turned into Harlem Duet, situates its plot in a new radical setting. The bard’s original play set historically between the venetian military citadel and the island of Cyprus, finds modern Othello living in Harlem, New York. Sears’s Harlem Duet revolves around the corner of Twentieth Century black militants Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Boulevards, not with Desdemona, but with his first “black” wife, Billie. Focusing on the African-Canadian playwright Djanet Sears Harlem Duet, the play highlights the political aspect through its double resistances against patriarchy and racism in Shakespeare’s Othello. Sears’s work imagines a prelude to Shakespeare’s Othello in a way that transgresses, and revisions the Shakespearean source material via issues of racism (both inter-and-intra-community).

Keywords: African heritage, exclusion, Harlem Duet, miscegenation, Othello, racism

Article Info: Received: 28 Apr 2026; Received in revised form: 26 May 2026; Accepted: 29 May 2026; Available online: 03 Jun 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.113.48