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In the personal statement, Kingsley elegantly sentimentalizes his own ethnicity, usefully pointing at the racial reverberations the play produces in his personal odyssey; but at the same time, he evinces little awareness of or interest in the politics of race in contemporary Britain and the place of (his) race in the RSC production. While this is not an attempt to second-guess Kingsley, one could still pose a conjecture: does Kingsley think he is accounting for race and ethnicity by sentimentalizing Othello via his father? He may well be doing the very thing we are attempting to interrogate here: account personally and reductively for a question (signified by the text of play itself) that relates to much larger racial and political constituencies of imperial history. Curiously, in a sampling of reviews and interviews about the production, there were no explicit references to be found about the politics of race or the place of Ben Kingsley’s ethnicity in the RSC version of Othello. Ira Aldridge had left America and transcended race by physically embodying the Other for the imperial continent, while Addy disappeared after the crash of his second run at the Sans Souci. But what does Ben Kingsley’s implicit refusal to place race at the heart of Othello tell us? By displacing racial divisions and inequities with personal history and thereby denying it political significance, this refusal to confront racial histories de-politicizes Othello in the postcolonial landscape. Is imperial surveillance thus perpetuated with the hapless knowledge that we have perhaps only relocated from colonial to neo-colonial, that postcolonial is still a shimmering frontier? But, then, perhaps there are other Othellos taking center-stage around the world, producing a more viable postcolonial subject.

Notes

1  

For a full account of these appropriations of Othello, see Neill 1989, Newman 1987, and Singh 1994.

2  

Quotes from Coleridge and Lamb are from Sylvan Barnet’s “Othello on the Stage and Screen” (1986:273).

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