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Epilogue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2023

Vanessa I. Corredera
Affiliation:
Andrews University, Michigan
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Summary

“Come Desdemona, Othello and tragedies/Shakespearean sorrows, where do I begin/(Where do we begin?)”

—“Child’s Play,” SZA

While this book takes up some of the most prominent Othellos in post-racial America, other Othello-esque works remain to be considered both within and outside of the post-racial American context through which I frame my analysis. Given that the white/black moral binary extends into the post-racial world, often in association with gender, what resonances exist when Frank Ocean raps in his 2016 song “Nikes,” “Said she need a ring like Carmelo/Must be on that white like Othello/All you want is Nikes”? Might Othello be as equally compelling an intertext for the 2016 FX series The People v. OJ Simpson: An American Crime Story as the media made it for the original 1995 trial? How might the consideration in Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello in Post-Racial America of stereotypes, Black masculinity, and Othello inform an analysis of the BBC series Luther’s (2010) first season, where Idris Elba plays a brilliant Afro-British detective with a volatile personality accused of murdering his not-white-yet-still-lighter-skinned wife, Zoe (Indira Varma)? Can the relationship between Othello, prestige, authority, whiteness, and American theatre help one make meaning of the otherwise nonsensical 2013 indie film OJ: The Musical, where the white artist Eugene Olivier (Jordan Kenneth Kamp) leaves NYC and his Broadway success to return to his hometown in Ohio to stage an OJ Simpson musical based on Othello? What to make of British band Bastille’s single “Send Them Off!” (2016), which white lead singer Dan Smith tweeted “is Othello meets the Exorcist” (Topham) and has him lamenting, “Desdemona, won’t you liberate me/When I’m haunted by your ancient history”? And what might we learn from cultural artifacts that, following Kristin N. Denslow’s theorization, meme-ify Othello, “not—for whatever reason—mak[ing] explicit (or perhaps recogniz[ing] at all) the associations” with the play by “refrain[ing], nearly studiously, from citing the play itself” (98)? I raise these questions because they gesture toward the way Othello’s presence lingers across Western culture with a ubiquity that dramas like King John or A Comedy of Errors do not.

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Epilogue
  • Vanessa I. Corredera, Andrews University, Michigan
  • Book: Reanimating Shakespeare's <i>Othello</i> in Post-Racial America
  • Online publication: 25 October 2023
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  • Epilogue
  • Vanessa I. Corredera, Andrews University, Michigan
  • Book: Reanimating Shakespeare's <i>Othello</i> in Post-Racial America
  • Online publication: 25 October 2023
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Epilogue
  • Vanessa I. Corredera, Andrews University, Michigan
  • Book: Reanimating Shakespeare's <i>Othello</i> in Post-Racial America
  • Online publication: 25 October 2023
Available formats
×