Chapter 3 - The Black-White Gentleman

Summary

Leslie Arliss’s The Man in Grey features a Regency-period staging of Othello’s murder of Desdemona, with a white Jamaican named Swinton Rokeby (played by Stewart Granger) blacked up for the title role. Partly through Othello, the film suggests a racial fantasy in which Rokeby reaffirms his whiteness by violently reclaiming his island home from emancipated black slaves. In this way, the film captures anxieties about race, sexuality and colonial participation that are activated by the migration to Britain of black West Indians to aid in the war effort; to put it differently, The Man in Grey appropriates Othello in order to explore how racial difference reveals the limits of a coherent British identity. The film also collapses the distinction between Shakespearean tragedy and costume melodrama, thereby mocking the canons of taste (and the view of the Bard) generally shared by film companies, period critics and government propagandists