This chapter takes up the haunting of African American lives by examining the role of biomedicine in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American life writing. For Black people, American biomedicine has always been a haunted house, filled with the ghosts of Black lives lost in the name of racist science and scientific racism. The approach Bailey and Peoples take questions what is knowable under biomedical frameworks. What is prohibited from knowing? What kinds of biographical and historical identities are produced in biomedicine and biomedical narratives? How, if at all, can biomedicine and Black auto/biography produce just and ethical narratives of Black lives and Black futures?

Chapter 2 takes us through the dynamics of the interpellation of Othello’s blackness in the cosmopolitan contexts of Shakespeare’s Othello. The focus is on the effects of Iago’s modularity, that is to say, on his capacity to “make images” and to then use them as the means for eliciting strong emotional reactions from the other characters. I argue that Shakespeare’s inclusion in a book on postcolonial tragedy is guaranteed not because he is himself a postcolonial, but because his work has served to illuminate postcolonial conditions in different epochs and climes. One need only think of the impact The Tempest has had on arguments concerning the appropriation by the colonized of the colonial language itself as a tool to fight back, or the impact of The Merchant of Venice in illuminating the processes of endemic racism and anti-Semitism to be found in many societies today to see that Shakespeare is amenable to many postcolonial applications.