Making “Things” Through Darkness: Black/White Binarism in Popular Culture
by Vanessa I. Corredera
I have a distinct recollection of sitting in my interdisciplinary science class in college, learning about Thomas Kuhn’s concept of the paradigm shift and wondering “What would it look and feel like to experience that kind of ground shifting transformation?” Kim F. Hall’s Things of Darkness ushered in precisely this type of paradigm shift in early modern studies — a response to the supposed “problem” of locating race in early modernity and a rigorous analysis of the textual and cultural “anomalies” challenging this erasure. The book therefore reconceptualized readers’ understanding of both early modernity and the literary field that studies it.
Though I entered graduate school too late to experience the first transformations in the field instantiated by Things of Darkness, I have still been profoundly influenced by the new questions, standards, and methods it introduced. In other words, I did get to experience a paradigm shift, with Hall’s framework infusing my scholarship on race and adaptation/appropriation. I worry, however, if others are missing this opportunity.
As a new historicist monograph, on the surface, Things of Darkness may not seem applicable to studying Shakespeare’s contemporary reimaginings. But if taken as a paradigm that speaks to issues of race and representation, Things of Darkness offers up vital frameworks, questions, and methodologies for scholars seeking to develop keen analyses of race in adaptations and appropriations of premodernity. Here, I trace one of the many frameworks Hall provides, namely, “the binarism of black and white [which] might be called the originary language of racial difference in English culture.” The dynamics and purpose of this originary language stretches to modernity both thematically and visually, with Shakespeare as a vehicle for delivering a binary racialized thinking that links the early modern and modern worlds.
These dualistic tropes often appear in easy-to-miss ways, such as in “Now in Color,” the third episode of the Disney+ series WandaVision. In the middle of the episode, Shakespeare makes a surprising appearance that carries the divisive binary construction of white and black Hall examines. But first, some background.
Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), a witch, lives in the town of Westview, NJ with her synthezoid (synthetic android) husband Vision (Paul Bettany). The only problem is that Marvel viewers know Vision was murdered by Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film Avengers: Infinity War (2018). How then, does he now seem alive and well, appearing with Wanda in situations literally out of a sitcom? This is one of the series’ central mysteries, and yet there are Wanda and Vision, debating what to call their impending twins. Suddenly, Vision suggests “Billy…named after William Shakespeare.” That this line does more ideological work than simply referencing the Bard becomes clearer as the episode progresses.
What is important to recognize is that Vision invokes Shakespeare in a moment that stresses the white nuclear family newly unfolding against all odds. Such an association is apt, following the filial reconciliations occurring in As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale, and Pericles. Certainly, not all white-divided families in Shakespeare’s plays reconcile. But importantly, none of the families of his non-white/non-English racialized characters reunite after being split asunder. As such, Wanda and Vision’s impending (white) family mirrors the insular, stabilizing dynamics Hall identifies as associated with the Elizabethan family.
In fact, as Hall argues “it is England’s sense of losing its traditional insularity that provokes the development of ‘racialism,’” so too does Blackness challenge the insular white family in WandaVision, which likewise results in racialism within the series. Wanda’s friend, the African American Geraldine disrupts this familial joy when she “breaks” from an unknown spell and reminds Wanda of her dead brother, Pietro.
In doing so, she sets off a through line where Blackness comes to stand for the incomplete family. The distinction between the white family unit and the incomplete Black family expressly arises when Vision, who is beginning to grasp that things are not as they seem, is warned off of by Geraldine. His nosey white neighbor, Agnes, cautions that Geraldine has “No family,” “No husband,” and “No home,” contrasting her with the other Westview residents in a way that pathologizes her identity in order to justify her exclusion. And excluded she is, for in response to the undesired memory Geraldine invokes, Wanda exiles her from Westview and its mysteriously constructed reality.
Thus, just as with English identity, Wanda’s identity also “comes to rely on both the appropriation and the denial of differences troped through blackness” in order to “preserve a sense of self” in Megan McDonnell’s script. This recent narrative example demonstrates how scholars and pop culture consumers must confront the ways in which twenty-first-century culture still circulates “The language of dark and light” (and invokes the Renaissance when doing so). As Hall reminds us, such moves are grounded in white supremacy and therefore persist in reiterating Black people’s inferiority.
Yet the binarism of Black and white does not simply occur on the narrative level. Instead, as Hall exposes in her tour de force reading of 17th-century portraiture, it also manifests visually. By carefully examining the positioning of white aristocrats and their Black servants, the signification of their respective skin colors, and the symbolic accouterments on display, Hall shows how Blackness visually reinforced white identity’s “power and superiority.” As such, Hall’s keen attention to the racialized nature of material culture models how to address the racial formation undertaken by details both big and small in our hypervisual culture.
Take, for instance, one of several promotional posters for Oliver Parker’s 1995 adaptation of Othello. Hall’s work provides conceptual tools for grasping how in the poster, Othello serves as Iago’s visual foil, thereby signaling precisely Iago’s “power and superiority” in the film. Performances of Othello often face the challenge posed by Iago, who speaks more lines than Othello and often does so directly to the audience. Iago also benefits from his whiteness, which he often shares with the audience, but Othello does not.
What this poster reveals is how paratextual promotional material employs visuals that uphold this racialized power imbalance. The poster places Iago in the upper left-hand corner, his entire face, and only his face, illuminated against a black background that offsets his visage, itself the same size as Othello and Desdemona’s half-body figures embracing in the lower-right corner. Like the Black attendants who “[inhabit] edges, corners, and shadows,” the smaller Othello is positioned to the side. Othello thus serves as a visual counterpoint to Iago that mirrors how in the portraits “black people literally become a shadow.” The overall effect is a visual emphasis on Iago’s whiteness, as well as the articulation of his primacy in the film.
Moreover, just like mistresses or masters and their servants, both Iago and Othello meet the viewer’s gaze, but the poster affords very different characterizations of them. Othello and Desdemona appear to be nude, in the midst of a sexual encounter, while Iago is alone and staring forward, no body, just a head. In the portraits, the attendants always signify the exotic and foreign, and in this spectacular association of Othello with sexuality, the poster achieves the same characterization by making Othello look more atavistic than the calculating Iago.
Iago after all is Kenneth Branagh, by 1995 already a renowned figure in the world of Shakespearean adaptation. Thus, the intelligent Iago appears to be of an even higher status through the association with the actor embodying him, while the less established Laurence Fishburne’s Othello seems to confirm stereotypes about Black male rapacity.
Hall argues that “the visible exercise of power is a crucial element of the male portrait,” a power derived for the attendant’s subjugation. Read via Hall, Othello/Fishburne is similarly commodified, put to “use” through the visual and ideological subjugation in order to shore up Iago’s/Branagh’s status, a dynamic only further developed through the film’s caricatures of Black otherness. Thus, even today, the black/white binary functions across the narrative and the visual, reminding us of the way modern racial formation is rooted in the methods and ideas of the past.
Things of Darkness makes clear that the racialized tropes employed across culture matter, for they shape the ideology of and possibilities for day-to-day life. Some may wonder: “haven’t we exhausted discussions about the black/white binary?” As these examples illustrate, the unequivocal answer is no. Discourses of civility, beauty, religion, and class still obfuscate the ways that, as Hall asserts, “blackness is…an infinitely malleable presence that has been used, mostly negatively, to define white subjectivity.”
Are such depictions really about race? As Hall cautions, “aesthetic concerns easily become a semiotics of race.” Alongside such obfuscations sit blatant examples of Blackness reifying whiteness’s positive associations, such as the Black/white moral logic pervasive across pop culture. Clearly, the problem of Black/white racialization has not been solved; American culture, not just early modern studies, needs Hall’s paradigmatic intervention. It is thus an antiracist imperative to employ the vital paradigm Hall offers. Doing so allows us to recognize how today’s cultural objects still reiterate these dualistic, racialized tropes. And by identifying them, we can take a key first step in dismantling their longstanding ideological hold.
Vanessa I. Corredera is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Andrews University. Her recent articles (Borrowers and Lenders, The Journal of American Studies, Shakespeare Quarterly, Literature/Film Quarterly), collection contributions (Variable Objects: Shakespeare and Speculative Appropriation, The Routledge Handbook of Global Appropriation), and public humanities work (The Sundial, Shakespeare’s Globe) explore race, gender, and representation in both early modern literature and in modern re-imaginings of the premodern across adaptations/appropriations, performance, and popular culture. Her forthcoming monograph, Speak of Me As I Am: Othello in Postracial America (Edinburgh UP), examines how anti-Black and antiracist appropriations of Othello advance or challenge America’s (post)racial imaginary. You can find her on Twitter @vicorredera.
