The Politics of Location in Othello, Djanet Sears's Harlem Duet, and Ong Keng Sen's Desdemona

Abstract

This article begins with Ania Loomba's well-known position that analysing intercultural Shakespeare requires an understanding that ‘Shakespeare’ becomes ‘local’ in some new contexts and rendered ‘foreign’ in others. From Loomba's argument, we can suggest that just as ‘Shakespeare’ continues to be altered, so should the concept of ‘location’ (whether ‘foreign’ or ‘local’) be seen to transform and even to multiply. In attempting to pinpoint the significance of ‘location’ in this context, the author addresses the relationship between local and foreign in two plays that are loosely based on Shakespeare's Othello: Ong Keng Sen's Desdemona (2000) and Djanet Sears's Harlem Duet (1997). These two plays explore the meaning of ‘local’ and even of location itself; while Harlem Duet constructs a poetics of displacement in the context of a politics of location, Desdemona's focus on the poetics of displacement to the virtual exclusion of a politics of location reduces its potential to achieve its cultural and political goals.

Notes

1. Rustom Bharucha, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (London: Athlone, 2000), p. 160.

2. Ania Loomba, ‘“Local-Manufacture Made-in-India Othello Fellows”: Issues of Race, Hybridity and Location in Post-colonial Shakespeares’, in Post-colonial Shakespeares, ed. by Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 143–63 (p. 163).

3. Caren Kaplan, ‘Reconfigurations of Geography and Historical Narrative’, Public Culture, 3.1 (1990), 25–32 (pp. 26–27).

4. Desdemona, by Rio Kishida, dir. Ong Keng Sen. TheatreWorks, Singapore. Video production, 2000.

5. Djanet Sears, Harlem Duet (Toronto: Scirocco, 1997).

6. John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 123–25.

11. Joughin, ‘Introduction’, p. 9.

7. For a discussion of ‘the civilized, super-subtle environment of Venice’, see Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 91.

8. See Sandra Logan, ‘Domestic Disturbance and the Disordered State in Shakespeare's Othello’, Textual Practice, 18.3 (Fall 2004), 351–75 (pp. 355–56). See also Mark Matheson, ‘Venetian Culture and the Politics of Othello’, in Shakespeare and Politics, ed. by Catherine M. S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 169–84 (p. 182).

9. The performance of the interiority of subjectivity also comes into play, as Dawson argues: Anthony B. Dawson, ‘Performance and Participation: Desdemona, Foucault, and the Actor's Body’, in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. by James C. Bulman (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 29–45 (p. 35). See also Joughin's description of Desdemona's ability to negotiate public and private spheres: John Joughin, ‘Introduction’, in Shakespeare and Politics, ed. by Catherine M. S. Alexander, pp. 1–21 (p. 9).

10. Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography, p. 69.

12. Matheson, ‘Venetian Culture’, p. 169.

13. For an examination of Harlem Duet in the context of settler culture, see Joanne Tompkins, ‘Performing History's Unsettlement’, in Critical Theory and Performance, rev. ed., ed. by Janelle Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 71–84.

14. William Shakespeare, Othello[1603–4], ed. by Alvin Kernan (New York: Signet, 1986).

15. Margaret Jane Kidnie, ‘“There's Magic in the Web of it”: Seeing Beyond Tragedy in Harlem Duet’, in African-Canadian Theatre: Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English, vol. 2, ed. by Maureen Moynagh (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2005), pp. 41–55 (p. 44).

16. Peter Dickinson, ‘Duets, Duologues, and Black Diasporic Theatre: Djanet Sears, William Shakespeare, and Others’, Modern Drama, 45.2 (Summer 2002), 188–208 (p. 190).

17. Emily C. Bartels, ‘Othello on Trial’, in Othello: A Casebook, ed. by Lena Cowen Orlin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 148–70 (p. 152; original emphasis).

18. Sears, Harlem Duet, p. 73.

19. Ric Knowles, ‘Othello in Three Times’, in Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere?, ed. by Diana Brydon and Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 370–94 (p. 389). For a detailed analysis of music in the play, see John Thieme, ‘A Different “Othello Music”: Djanet Sears's Harlem Duet,’ in Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre, ed. by Sherrill Grace and Albert-Reiner Glaap (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003), pp. 81–91 (p. 86). See also Kidnie's exploration of the play's ‘polyphonic fragments’ (Kidnie, ‘“There's Magic”’, p. 43).

20. Dickinson, ‘Duets’, p. 191.

21. Emily C. Bartels, ‘Improvisation and Othello: The Play of Race and Gender’, in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's Othello, ed. by Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt (New York: MLA Association, 2005), pp. 72–79 (p. 78).

22. See Rustom Bharucha, ‘Foreign Asia/Foreign Shakespeare: Dissenting Notes on New Asian Interculturality, Postcoloniality, and Recolonization’, Theatre Journal, 56.2 (2004), 1–28; Yong Li Lan, ‘Ong Keng Sen's Desdemona, Ugliness, and the Intercultural Performative’, Theatre Journal, 56.2 (2004), 251–73; Yong Li Lan, ‘Shakespeare and the Fiction of the Intercultural’, in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. by Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 527–49.

25. Peterson, ‘Consuming the Asian Other’, p. 82.

23. See William Peterson, ‘Consuming the Asian Other in Singapore: Interculturalism in TheatreWorks’Desdemona', Theatre Research International, 28.1 (2003), 79–95 (p. 81); see also Yong, ‘Shakespeare and the Fiction’, p. 534.

24. See Sonia Massai, ‘Defining Local Shakespeares’, in World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, ed. by Sonia Massai (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 3–11 (p. 10).

26. Peterson, ‘Consuming the Asian Other’, p. 88; original emphasis.

27. Helena Grehan, ‘TheatreWorks’Desdemona: Fusing Technology and Tradition’, The Drama Review, 45.3 (Fall 2001), 113–25 (p. 122).

28. Quoted in ibid, p. 118.

29. Ong Keng Sen, ‘Encounters’, The Drama Review, 45.3 (Fall 2001), 126–33 (p. 132).

30. Loomba, ‘“Local-Manufacture”’, p. 161.

31. Peterson, ‘Consuming the Asian Other’, p. 89.

32. Yong, ‘Shakespeare and the Fiction’, p. 536.

33. Bharucha, ‘Foreign Asia’, p. 5. His criticism extends beyond this to the practice of intercultural work as well: ‘Instead of allowing a narrative to unfold out of the splits and shared vulnerabilities of the actual process in the workshop, the parameters of a deconstructive Shakespearean mise en scène were already being set, even though they were not shared with the rest of the company. I would regard this as a fundamental breach of faith in the very ethics of doing intercultural theatre, where it is assumed that the inputs of performers from diverse cultures can be catalyzed through a dialogic framework out of which a grammar of performance can emerge’ (Bharucha, ‘Foreign Asia’, p. 13).

34. Yong, ‘Ong Keng Sen's Desdemona’, p. 268.

35. Bharucha, ‘Foreign Asia’, p. 27.