Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World by Joyce Green MacDonald

Author:Joyce Green MacDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030506803
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Gavin wants to act, to achieve what he imagines as an actor’s protean freedom to assume and exchange roles at will, but he is not recognized by theatrical culture as possessing that capacity because of the single set of meanings socially attached to his black skin. His experience looking for acting jobs suggests the degree to which race’s stubborn lodgment in the body concomitantly structures cultural identity. No actor—and certainly not one in this troupe—is ever just a neutral bodily instrument.32

Gavin’s looks at himself—looks in which his own reflection curiously vanishes and is replaced by what (white) others see in him—reiterate Frantz Fanon’s identification of blackness as social spectacle.33 As he repeats the phrase “Look! A Negro!,” in Black Skins, White Masks, Fanon asserts that black subjects experience their social identities as the imposition of a white racial gaze: “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.”34 With his emphasis on how white looks at black subjects violently fracture and deny the possibility of a black-authored subjectivity—“I am being dissected by white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed” (116)—Fanon makes looking relations material and transactional, identifying the emergence into racial subjectivity as prior to and entangled with the emergence into gender or into language. Fanon’s ideas about racial looks and racially charged looked-at-ness suggest that theatre and performance function as what Jane Gaines calls “an ‘othering machine’”: “Othering calls attention to the ways identities are formed across and through others, in relation to those who are like and not like us.”35 In this case, “us” is the audience for Antony and Cleopatra in Port of Spain, an audience which remains—despite Chris’ best efforts at soliciting spectators who speak and feel as he does—full of “white eyes.” The whiteness from whose vantage point black actors can only appear as objects out of place in Shakespeare leads the local theatre critic to tell Gavin—much less pompously than he wrote for publication—that the production “was like pissing in church” (267).

In Walcott, however, black female bodies are not entirely submerged within the general nullity still reserved for black subjects in the island’s postcolonial order and under the dictates of Shakespearean performance. Sheila believes that Marylin’s lighter skin color gives her the option of working abroad; when Gavin feels that Marylin has let the reviewer’s approval of her work go to her head, he rages at her as a “dumb, fat, redskin bitch,” a “tangerine bitch” (274, 275). His anger at the relative success of someone who has worked less on her craft than he has might be justified, but he couches it in colorism and misogynist contempt. If Sheila feels cut off from Shakespeare because she is black, the fact that she has darker skin than Marylin inflicts an extra set of obligations on her to

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