Othello’s Testicles, Sybil’s Womb: The Interracial Child in Harlem Duet and its Progenitor

Abstract

Othello’s Testicles, Sybil’s Womb: The Interracial Child in Harlem Duet and its Progenitor David Huebert (bio) What is a penis without testicles? It is something severed, detached, incomplete—a hand without a thumb. It is unmistakably queer. I mean the word “queer” both in the quotidian sense offered by the oed—“strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric” (def. 1a)—and in the way Lee Edelman defines it: “queers—by which I mean all so stigmatized for failing to comply with heteronormative mandates—are not themselves also psychically invested in preserving the familiar familial narrativity of reproductive futurism” (No Future 17). The queer subject, in this line of thinking, is that which does not conform to the heterocentric injunction to procreate. The penis, thought without the testicles, likewise stands apart from the symbolic landscape of reproduction. Like Edelman’s “future-negating queer,” the unhinged penis exists outside the order of “pro-procreative ideology” (No Future 26, 12). The testicles themselves, unlike their isolated counterpart, are the primordial locus of futurity. The testicles in this sense have more in common with womb than penis. This article will examine testicles and wombs and, more specifically, the forms of futurity lurking within them, in Djanet Sears’s 1997 play Harlem Duet and its primary progenitor, William Shakespeare’s Othello. While Edelman is concerned with a “figural Child” who “affirms the absolute logic of reproduction itself” and “seems [End Page 23] to shimmer with the iridescent promise of Noah’s rainbow” (No Future 11, 18), I want to consider the representative of a different kind of future: the interracial child. Harlem Duet, like Othello, imagines an interracial child who is only ever hypothetical but who takes on all the more phobic resonance in its absence. In both cases, a child threatens to emerge from the union of a white woman and a black man and violate communal purity (Shakespeare 1.3.393). Complicating Edelman’s claim that the child is “the obligatory token of futurity” (No Future 12), I would like to draw on José Esteban Muñoz’s critique of the racial homogeneity at work in Edelman’s analysis in order to suggest that the interracial child in Harlem Duet is by no means the radiant signifier of the heteronormative order. This paper argues that Harlem Duet, in spite of Sears’s largely radical and productive feminist adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, retains a certain conservativism insofar as Billie expresses an inverted version of the interracial phobia of Othello—she, like Shakespeare’s Venice, fears that the uniracial community will be contaminated by the hypothetical interracial child.1 Harlem Duet, like its Shakespearian predecessor, presents interracial coupling, and by extension the hypothetical/symbolic interracial child, primarily as a menace, a threat to the future of community. Reading Harlem Duet alongside Othello in the context of the work of queer theorists Lee Edelman and José Esteban Muñoz raises pertinent questions for the potentially troublesome join of queer and racially motivated methodologies and the possibility of subversive Shakespearian adaptation.2 Can this would-be reparative [End Page 24] adaptation of a racially phobic play do more than recast Othello’s trajectory toward an ethnically pure Christian Venice as Billie’s desire for a racially pure black community in Harlem? How do Othello and Harlem Duet’s paranoid anxieties about the menacing interracial child trouble Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurism, wherein the child is the telos of a hegemonic white heterotopia? Can a queer politics that opposes the normativities of reproductive futurism still find a place for the interracial child? Ultimately, I show that Sears’s larger project in Harlem Duet transcends and casts doubt on Billie’s homoracialism and suggest that the play refuses to recapitulate Othello’s interracial phobia by leaving Mona, Othello, and their hypothetical child to enter an ambiguous future together. A central element of Edelman’s refusal of reproductive futurism is his radical claim that “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (No Future 17). Queerness, rather than a purveyor of any kind of production, is for Edelman a chaotic force aligned with a Lacanian death drive. In the context of this view, the...