Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Permissions
- Introduction
- 1 Images of Objectification: Othello as Prop in Kill Shakespeare
- 2 Colorblindness on the Post-Racial Stage: Hip Hop, Comedy, and Cultural Appropriation in Othello: The Remix
- 3 Othello, Race, and Serial: The Ethics of a Shakespearean Cameo
- 4 “No tools with which to hear”: Adaptive Re-Vision, Audience Education, and American Moor
- 5 At the Intersection of Gender, Race, and White Privilege: A Case of Three Desdemona Plays
- 6 Resisting Lobotomized Shakespeare: Whiteness and Universality in Key & Peele and Get Out
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Epilogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Permissions
- Introduction
- 1 Images of Objectification: Othello as Prop in Kill Shakespeare
- 2 Colorblindness on the Post-Racial Stage: Hip Hop, Comedy, and Cultural Appropriation in Othello: The Remix
- 3 Othello, Race, and Serial: The Ethics of a Shakespearean Cameo
- 4 “No tools with which to hear”: Adaptive Re-Vision, Audience Education, and American Moor
- 5 At the Intersection of Gender, Race, and White Privilege: A Case of Three Desdemona Plays
- 6 Resisting Lobotomized Shakespeare: Whiteness and Universality in Key & Peele and Get Out
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
“Come Desdemona, Othello and tragedies/Shakespearean sorrows, where do I begin/(Where do we begin?)”
—“Child’s Play,” SZAWhile this book takes up some of the most prominent Othellos in post-racial America, other Othello-esque works remain to be considered both within and outside of the post-racial American context through which I frame my analysis. Given that the white/black moral binary extends into the post-racial world, often in association with gender, what resonances exist when Frank Ocean raps in his 2016 song “Nikes,” “Said she need a ring like Carmelo/Must be on that white like Othello/All you want is Nikes”? Might Othello be as equally compelling an intertext for the 2016 FX series The People v. OJ Simpson: An American Crime Story as the media made it for the original 1995 trial? How might the consideration in Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello in Post-Racial America of stereotypes, Black masculinity, and Othello inform an analysis of the BBC series Luther’s (2010) first season, where Idris Elba plays a brilliant Afro-British detective with a volatile personality accused of murdering his not-white-yet-still-lighter-skinned wife, Zoe (Indira Varma)? Can the relationship between Othello, prestige, authority, whiteness, and American theatre help one make meaning of the otherwise nonsensical 2013 indie film OJ: The Musical, where the white artist Eugene Olivier (Jordan Kenneth Kamp) leaves NYC and his Broadway success to return to his hometown in Ohio to stage an OJ Simpson musical based on Othello? What to make of British band Bastille’s single “Send Them Off!” (2016), which white lead singer Dan Smith tweeted “is Othello meets the Exorcist” (Topham) and has him lamenting, “Desdemona, won’t you liberate me/When I’m haunted by your ancient history”? And what might we learn from cultural artifacts that, following Kristin N. Denslow’s theorization, meme-ify Othello, “not—for whatever reason—mak[ing] explicit (or perhaps recogniz[ing] at all) the associations” with the play by “refrain[ing], nearly studiously, from citing the play itself” (98)? I raise these questions because they gesture toward the way Othello’s presence lingers across Western culture with a ubiquity that dramas like King John or A Comedy of Errors do not.
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- Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America , pp. 299 - 319Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022