Resisting Lobotomized Shakespeare: Whiteness and Universality in Key & Peele and Get Out

This concluding chapter demonstrates how disrupting white audience expectations depends on approaching narratives through an interpretive perspective contesting the idea of universal storytelling, which is very often, as Richard Dyer argues, de facto white storytelling. Though an analysis situated within discussions about universality as whiteness across storytelling modes, the chapter demonstrates how comedy show Key & Peele’s sketch “Othello ’Tis My Shite” (2013) and horror-thriller Get Out (2017) defy whiteness’s perspectival dominance. The sketch upends the myth of Shakespearean universality through two “Moors” who watch Othello at the Globe, their reactions indicting Shakespeare’s representation of Blackness. The sketch’s twist ending, however, imagines appropriations that take a Black perspective seriously as potentially rehabilitating this caricaturing. Jordan Peele makes real the challenge posed by the sketch in his film Get Out, a direct response to America’s post-racial fantasy. In its reimagining of both the horror genre and Othello’s basic narrative structure, Get Out literalizes the “necropolitics” (Achille Mbembe)—the physical and psychological violence and threat of literal and metaphorical death—enacted on Othello. Specifically, the film confronts America’s necropolitics through its emphasis on microaggressions, the concept of the coagula, and the idea of the sunken place. These two examples thus provide powerful frameworks for transforming Othello into a story about white supremacy’s alienation and appropriation of Blackness, a gesture that resists the universal white perspective in favor of a particular Black one.