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Page 67 foray into a forbidden domain of interracial sexuality, the cumulative shock experienced by European viewers for several centuries cannot be forgotten. One has only to recall Coleridge in the nineteenth century, who questioned the tragic stature of the play since, according to him, “it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable Negro,” or Charles Lamb, who felt “something extremely revolting in the courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona.”2 Their horror would no doubt be intensified if the nineteenth-century stage had actually accommodated actors of color. Although today one assumes that only a non-white actor will play the part of Othello, mediating, as in the Market Theatre production in South Africa, in contemporary racial conflicts, most will also feel that the cultural and racial surveillance instigated by Othello in earlier, colonial, or racially segregated times is now more muted—so much so, that white actors have started playing the role again, albeit under unusual circumstances. The venerable British actor Patrick Stewart (of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame) played the Moor in a 1997 version at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., but only in an atypical situation, where the rest of the cast was made up of non-white actors. In 1985, Ben Kingsley (of Gandhi and Schindler’s List fame) played the role in a Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production in England. But Kingsley is part-Indian by descent, his real name being Krishna Bhanji, and thus he is “colored’’ enough to play the Moor. Othello has also been played by Hispanic actors in North America, as in the case of Raul Julia in the Public Theater’s 1989 Central Park production in New York. So can one assume, then, that in the late twentieth century we no longer need to recuperate appropriations of Othello to do the cultural work of understanding and mediating racial divisions? This premise would imply that we have reached an endpoint in our “progress” toward interracial tolerance. Such perspectives within and outside the academy typify cultural attitudes about the “end of racism,” so much so that race in Othello seems to have become a trope: a marker of difference that is safely distanced in time, yet able to encompass all of the long history of racial struggle. To counter this trend, in this essay we want to stress both the discontinuity and persistence of racial struggles and to focus on the nuanced specificity of a seemingly benign instance of nineteenth-century English colonial racial codification, an instance in which the body of an Indian actor both demarcates and destabilizes |
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