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Page 66 IIn following historically the representation and appropriation of Shakespeare, one can note how repeatedly the issue of surveillance takes center-stage: namely, how the works of the Bard are used in attempts to set boundaries between elite and popular culture, between colonizer and colonized, between “civilization” and “barbarism,” or as in actor Ben Kingsley’s reflections above, between “exile’’ and “home.” In this process, however, we can also note how cultural surveillance of and through Shakespeare frequently breaks down. The contingent dynamic of the relation between texts and bodies—between the Shakespearean corpus of works and the performative bodies on stage (and now on film) —is inevitably complicated by the ways in which “Shakespeare,” as Michel Foucault’s “author-function,” performs the cultural work of frequently competing constituencies. In considering stage and critical interpretations of Shakespeare’s Othello, it is evident that the play has participated in the complex history of Western/white encounters with non-European races. It is commonplace today to discuss Othello in relationship to discourses of race at specific moments in colonial and postcolonial history. For instance, Othello may be considered in the context of early Renaissance anxieties about “heathens” and “Moors,” or in the context of Victorian celebrations of a civilizing mission premised on the “barbarism” of non-Europeans; more recently, within postcolonial liberationist struggles, the Moor’s race has served as a marker for continuing racial oppression and a rallying cry for resistance.1 Most notably, Othello has performed important, though often problematic, cultural work in mediating the codes and conventions that have forbidden or disapproved of miscegenation, or racial mixing— perhaps the most sensitive issue of the play and the basis of all racial surveillance. When we consider the corporeal, now dead bodies of Othello and Desdemona on stage at the end of the play—the scene of miscegenation that Lodovico feels should “be hid” (Othello 5.2.375) from the sight of his Venetian spectators—we cannot extricate the tragic resonance of the moment from the racialized body of the Shakespearean actor, black, or white-in-black face, who must confront and play the European stereotypes of the “base Indian” and “malignant” Turk at the moment of his horrific suicide. When one considers how this scene marks the culmination of Othello’s and Desdemona’s |
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