* No Safe Spaces: Recasting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the American Theater * Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (original) (raw)
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Early Theatre, 2024
This book delves into two seeming paradoxes in popular and performance cultures: the proliferation of references to Othello and the peculiar erasure of Blackness in adaptations. This occurred between 2008 and 2016, which coincided with Barack Obama’s presidency. As much as the book critiques the hypocrisy of the Shakespeare industry, it also encourages artistic investment in antiracist work in post-post-racial America. Instead of attempting to speak of Othello as he is perceived in the play we should speak out against trans-historical racial tensions so as to reanimate both Othello and our collective future.
Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance, 2020
This paper discusses how Japanese theatres have handled race in a country where hiring black actors to perform Shakespeare’s plays is not an option. In English-speaking regions, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, it is common to hire a black actor for Othello’s title role. Blackface is increasingly unacceptable because it reminds viewers of derogatory stereotypes in minstrel shows, and it deprives black actors of employment opportunities. However, the situation is different in regions where viewers are unfamiliar with this Anglo-US trend. In Japan, a country regarded as so homogeneous that its census does not have any questions about ethnicity, it is almost impossible to hire a skilled black actor to play a title role in a Shakespearean play, and few theatre companies would consider such an idea. In this cultural context, there is an underlying question of how Japanese-speaking theatre should present plays dealing with racial or cultural differences. This paper seeks ...