{"id":2212,"date":"2021-03-12T16:30:23","date_gmt":"2021-03-12T16:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/?p=2212"},"modified":"2021-03-12T22:22:50","modified_gmt":"2021-03-12T22:22:50","slug":"arise-black-vengeance-from-the-hollow-hell-race-in-othello-and-its-recasting-in-indian-and-south-african-adaptations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/2021\/03\/12\/arise-black-vengeance-from-the-hollow-hell-race-in-othello-and-its-recasting-in-indian-and-south-african-adaptations\/","title":{"rendered":"(Project proposal) Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell!: Race in Othello, and its recasting in Indian and South African adaptations."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Race. Shakespeare\u2019s Othello <\/em>offers an insight into its nature in early modern Europe. My project will investigate how adaptations of Othello<\/em> exhibit race, re-claiming Shakespeare in the context of racial oppression. My focus is on the post-colonial Indian Bollywood adaptation, Omkara,<\/em>[1]<\/a> <\/em>and Janet Suzman\u2019s 1987 production of Othello<\/em> in apartheid South Africa.[2]<\/a> But why did directors and writers choose Othello<\/em> to adapt? How did they use the play to \u2018write back\u2019 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To distance my work from the \u2018west vs. the rest\u2019 framework, my project will view Shakespeare not, as often is the obvious choice when concerning \u2018global Shakespeares\u2019, 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\u2019. Othello <\/em>is a vehicle for ideas. Said\u2019s recognition of colonial domination being just as much a cultural process as a political process allows me to understand Shakespeare\u2019s role in asserting power.[3]<\/a> From this Shakespearean assertion of English superiority in India and South Africa, I argue that adaptations allowed the colonised people to \u2018write back\u2019 to their oppressors. I present Shakespeare as a \u2018rhizomatic\u2019 figure, who\u2019s legacy is one of a series of de-centred eruptions across the globe. These performances create their own \u201ccultural coordinates\u201d, from which we can map similarities and differences.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taking Othello<\/em> 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\u2019s \u2018hegemonic\u2019 status. He points out that historians must fight to balance the familiar elements of the \u2018Western pantheon\u2019, and the unfamiliar, more obscure works which western historians have often denied interest in due to their very local context.[5]<\/a> By focusing on these local adaptations, my work hopes to shift the vision of Othello<\/em> from a play about race in the context of oppression, to a medium used to combat oppressors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By choosing certain adaptations of Othello, <\/em>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<\/em> Shakespeare\u2019s dramatic plots are used and altered to entice viewers. Contrastingly, in Janet Suzman\u2019s Othello<\/em>, while the text goes almost entirely unaltered, the performance\u2019s motivations are political. While to Shakespeare\u2019s audience Othello <\/em>was about a racial \u2018other\u2019, a \u2018moor\u2019, in Europe, separated from others like him, when staged during the Apartheid regime, the play presented an African marginalised in Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Othello\u2019s race has been disputed, with most asserting that he was black, given the use of \u2018blackness\u2019 and its analogies with \u2018evil\u2019 in the text.[6]<\/a> However, the meaning of \u2018Race\u2019 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\u2019s text is read, portrayed, and interpreted.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though I focus on the post-oppression adaptation, I will provide an insight into how Othello\u2019s <\/em>meaning changes depending on context. I agree with Kein\u00e4nen\u2019s conclusion that our global Shakespeares are so widely dispersed that many of them, \u201cmake 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\u201d.[8]<\/a> However, by contributing to the historical analysis of these adaptations, placing them in more local contexts, I hope to show that Shakespeare\u2019s survival owes as much to this continual reinvention as it does to the \u2018universal bard\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> Vishal Bhardwaj, Director. Omkara. Eros Entertainment, 2006. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

 [2]<\/a> Janet Suzman, Director. Othello,<\/em> 1987.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 [3]<\/a> Edward Said, Orientalism,<\/em> (New York, 1979), p. 11.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4]<\/a> Alexander Huang, \u2018Global Shakespeare as Methodology\u2019, Shakespeare<\/em>, 2013, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 273-290, p. 282.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

 [5]<\/a> Sanjay Subrahmanyan, \u2018Beyond the Usual Suspects: On Intellectual Networks in the Early Modern World.\u2019 Global Intellectual History, <\/em>2017,vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 30-48.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 [6]<\/a>William Shakespeare, Othello, <\/em>(London, 2015). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

 [7]<\/a> Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds.), Post-Colonial Shakespeares, <\/em>(New York, 2008), p. 5.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 [8]<\/a> Nely Kein\u00e4nen, What’s global about global Shakespeare? The case of Perttu Lepp\u00e4’s 8 p\u00e4iv\u00e4\u00e4 ensi-iltaan (8 Days to the Premiere), Shakespeare<\/em>, 2013, vol. 9 no. 3, pp. 330-338, p. 331.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Race. Shakespeare\u2019s 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,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-zG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2212"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2219,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212\/revisions\/2219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}