Race. Shakespeare’s Othello offers an insight into its nature in early modern Europe. My project will investigate how adaptations of Othello exhibit race, re-claiming Shakespeare in the context of racial oppression. My focus is on the post-colonial Indian Bollywood adaptation, Omkara,[1] and Janet Suzman’s 1987 production of Othello in apartheid South Africa.[2] But why did directors and writers choose Othello to adapt? How did they use the play to ‘write back’ to their oppressors? When Shakespeare played such a dominant role in disseminating English superiority in oppressive regimes, how were their adaptations received? These are the questions I will answer.
To distance my work from the ‘west vs. the rest’ framework, my project will view Shakespeare not, as often is the obvious choice when concerning ‘global Shakespeares’, as a Bard influencing the world as his work is disseminated. Instead, the focus will be on how Shakespeare has been adapted and interpreted, influencing local audiences independently of his influence as the ‘universal bard’. Othello is a vehicle for ideas. Said’s recognition of colonial domination being just as much a cultural process as a political process allows me to understand Shakespeare’s role in asserting power.[3] From this Shakespearean assertion of English superiority in India and South Africa, I argue that adaptations allowed the colonised people to ‘write back’ to their oppressors. I present Shakespeare as a ‘rhizomatic’ figure, who’s legacy is one of a series of de-centred eruptions across the globe. These performances create their own “cultural coordinates”, from which we can map similarities and differences.[4]
Taking Othello as an idea and commodity to be moulded, I will adopt a global intellectual historical approach. Subrahmanyam has emphasised the importance of avoiding Eurocentrism in global intellectual history, and this fear is evident in my project given Shakespeare’s ‘hegemonic’ status. He points out that historians must fight to balance the familiar elements of the ‘Western pantheon’, and the unfamiliar, more obscure works which western historians have often denied interest in due to their very local context.[5] By focusing on these local adaptations, my work hopes to shift the vision of Othello from a play about race in the context of oppression, to a medium used to combat oppressors.
By choosing certain adaptations of Othello, the problem of anachronism when drawing comparisons is evident. However, both adaptations come from the environment of a prolonged period of racial oppression. The extent to which Othello is adapted differs, however, in each. In Omkara Shakespeare’s dramatic plots are used and altered to entice viewers. Contrastingly, in Janet Suzman’s Othello, while the text goes almost entirely unaltered, the performance’s motivations are political. While to Shakespeare’s audience Othello was about a racial ‘other’, a ‘moor’, in Europe, separated from others like him, when staged during the Apartheid regime, the play presented an African marginalised in Africa.
Othello’s race has been disputed, with most asserting that he was black, given the use of ‘blackness’ and its analogies with ‘evil’ in the text.[6] However, the meaning of ‘Race’ today differs from when Shakespeare wrote, when it referred to a mix of clan, lineage, and class. Moving away from binary colonial models of cultural identity, Loomba and Orkin call for a more interconnected study of colonial and post-colonial Shakespeares, factoring in the fact that the racial ideologies within a historical context shape the way Shakespeare’s text is read, portrayed, and interpreted.[7]
Though I focus on the post-oppression adaptation, I will provide an insight into how Othello’s meaning changes depending on context. I agree with Keinänen’s conclusion that our global Shakespeares are so widely dispersed that many of them, “make cultural references which no amount of clever subtitling will ever open up to a foreign audience, and are unlikely to be distributed widely outside of the initial target culture”.[8] However, by contributing to the historical analysis of these adaptations, placing them in more local contexts, I hope to show that Shakespeare’s survival owes as much to this continual reinvention as it does to the ‘universal bard’.
[1] Vishal Bhardwaj, Director. Omkara. Eros Entertainment, 2006.
[2] Janet Suzman, Director. Othello, 1987.
[3] Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York, 1979), p. 11.
[4] Alexander Huang, ‘Global Shakespeare as Methodology’, Shakespeare, 2013, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 273-290, p. 282.
[5] Sanjay Subrahmanyan, ‘Beyond the Usual Suspects: On Intellectual Networks in the Early Modern World.’ Global Intellectual History, 2017,vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 30-48.
[6]William Shakespeare, Othello, (London, 2015).
[7] Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds.), Post-Colonial Shakespeares, (New York, 2008), p. 5.
[8] Nely Keinänen, What’s global about global Shakespeare? The case of Perttu Leppä’s 8 päivää ensi-iltaan (8 Days to the Premiere), Shakespeare, 2013, vol. 9 no. 3, pp. 330-338, p. 331.