"The Other Interracial Marriage in Othello," Shakespeare
Abstract: This paper argues that the character of Emilia might be both read and cast as a black woman, and considers the interpretive and performative possibilities in such a move. First it considers the present-day uses of such a reading and discusses the ways that modern theatre practitioners have experimented with race in casting Othello. Then it suggests a sort of thought experiment: imagining a Jacobean performance tailored to the interests of the new royal family—specifically Anne’s interest in black entertainers—a performance that in Emilia gives us one of the first depictions of an African woman on the English stage and an exploration of the racial and gender dynamics in not one, but two interracial marriages.
Abstract: This paper argues that the character of Emilia might be both read and cast as a black woman, and considers the interpretive and performative possibilities in such a move. First it considers the present-day uses of such a reading and discusses the ways that modern theatre practitioners have experimented with race in casting Othello. Then it suggests a sort of thought experiment: imagining a Jacobean performance tailored to the interests of the new royal family—specifically Anne’s interest in black entertainers—a performance that in Emilia gives us one of the first depictions of an African woman on the English stage and an exploration of the racial and gender dynamics in not one, but two interracial marriages.
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“Virginia Woolf once searched for Shakespeare's sister,” Celia Caputi Daileader writes (13). “I would like to ask, where is Othello's sister?” The answer that she and several other critics arrive at is that Othello’s sisters have been “pointedly erased” (Smith, “White Skin,” 52) from history, and that their erasure has everything to do with sex. Playthell Benjamin may say that “Shakespeare shows a definite interest in the exotic charms of interracial sex” (97) but in his examples he cites only one particular type of interracial sex: the black male/white female pairing. While this pairing seemingly represented “the epitome of the romantically transgressive story,” the other possibility, the white male/black female union, is “conspicuously absent” (Boose 42).
Absent on the surface, yes, but perhaps hidden, and critics have been busily recovering various Dark Ladies, with all their sexual implications, within both the Shakespeare canon and early modern history. T.S. Eliot wrote, “[About] anyone as great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right….[but] if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong” (qtd. in Ogude 151). In that vein, I would like to suggest another potential Dark Lady of Shakespeare, this one hidden in plain sight in a play that is all about race. I propose that “Othello’s sister” is present in Othello’s very own play—not Bianca, the character sometimes cast with a woman of color playing her, but Emilia. Was Emilia black?
My book! It grew out of a guest commentary I recorded for NPR (which you can listen to here). Joe Price, an editor with Mercer University Press's series on sports and religion, happened to hear my commentary when it aired on February 18, 2007. He tracked me down and asked if I could expand the commentary into a book. With his able help as editor, I did, and Buddha on the Backstretch was published in October 2009 by Mercer University Press.
Why NASCAR? Why Buddhism? Here's an excerpt that explains:
Why NASCAR? Why Buddhism? Here's an excerpt that explains:
When you come upon a book about the intersection of NASCAR and Buddhism, one question leaps to mind: why? The 13th-Century Zen master Dogen provides as good a short answer as any: “If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?” The longer answer is that I grew up in the South, a lifelong NASCAR fan. When I was no more than four or five, I remember my father watching Wide World of Sports to see the brief highlights of each race, and remember him pulling for Richard Petty. Later, he liked Harry Gant, a driver beloved of older fans because his greatest success came well after he was forty. Gant taught fans to never give up, and it was then that I had my first stirrings of realization that, with all the victory and defeat and struggle and risk and goals, NASCAR was a pretty good way to learn about life.
As for me, from my very first race in Bristol, Tennessee, I decided that I loved Dale Earnhardt, a fiercely competitive then-newcomer who wouldn’t take no for an answer and would as soon wreck as finish second. He was tearing up the sport, loved and hated by equal numbers of fans. No one was indifferent to Dale Earnhardt, and in that unbridled passion I found my hero. He turned out to be a pretty good way to learn about life – and death – too.
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I became a Buddhist about ten years ago, and gradually it dawned on me that the practice’s dedicated teachers, its monks and nuns deep in intense training, with their laser focus on enlightenment, their serene acceptance of death, and their infectious joy, reminded me of someone. They reminded me of race car drivers. While Buddhists talk of one-pointed concentration, drivers talk of going into a corner three-wide at nearly two hundred miles an hour, and how effectively that tends to focus the mind. Where Buddhist teachers speak of developing equanimity, an ability to be at ease with whatever arises, drivers go from the lead to last place with a blown engine, then climb out of the car, shrug, and say, “That’s racin’.” Just as the Buddha told his first followers to meditate in cemeteries in order to deeply realize impermanence, Dale Earnhardt told a reporter, “You can’t worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow may never come.”