James McKinnon: Djanet
Sears Dramaturgy of Appropriation in Harlem Duet
Djanet
Sears' Harlem Duet illustrates what might be called a
dramaturgy of
appropriation. Shakespeare's Othello,
in presenting the marriage of Othello and Desdemona as an unacceptable,
miscegenative union of opposites, and in its imagery, is encoded in a
binary
either/or logic. Since Othello
was written for and has mainly been performed in front of White
audiences, and
has only one Black character, it invites the spectators to identify
with White
society to view Othello as the Other.
Sears retains the trope of miscegenation, depicting the coupling
of a
Black man and a White woman as a potential threat to the community, but
in Harlem
Duet the community is Black, and so it is assumed, is the spectator. Sears both speaks from and addresses an
African-Canadian, female experience, inverting the Self/Other coding of
Othello,
representing Otherness as White, and constructing a Black, female,
Canadian
spectator. My objective is to identify
and discuss the strategies Sears uses in her appropriation of
Shakespeare,
focusing in particular on her manipulation of time and space, and her
inversion
of the binary overcoding of the Shakespearean original, with the hope
of
pointing toward a general dramaturgy of appropriation.