Beyond Othello: Performing stages of resistance to racial surveillance in Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet

Abstract

This article analyses Caribbean Canadian playwright and director Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet (1997), a black feminist adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello, as a textual and performative ground on which long-standing racial and gender stereotypes that have fostered white privilege and black exclusion in North America are resisted and overthrown. From settler colonialism to the so-called post-racial era, black people have been subjected to physical and symbolic violence, and to covert and overt surveillance practices. Concomitantly, different strategies of resistance have emerged over time as African Americans have struggled against white hegemonic power within the economic, political and artistic domains. In Harlem Duet (1997), Sears devises a fragmented dramaturgical and performative space in which four stages of resistance to racial surveillance are juxtaposed: mobility, black minstrelsy, mimicry and miscegenation. Within the counter-discourse of Sears’ play, they are experienced as sites of insubordination and emancipation where black men can attempt to defy white surveillance to start claiming an autonomous identity, whereas black women, due to the gender-specific implications of their oppression, have to resort to alternative strategies. By resisting received representations of race and gender embedded in Shakespeare’s Othello and in North American society, Sears puts black women and their side of the story centre stage, thus countering their double invisibility through the highly visible vehicle of theatrical performance.